The New York Review of Books

Hong Kong

In China, the “Great Proletarian Revolution” is quite clearly a political event, and so in his essay “What Is Happening in China” [NYR, Oct. 20, 1966] Franz Schurman is right, I think, to see questions of war and peace bound up in it. There is Aesopian language, certainly; animadversions about western culture and traditional Chinese culture mask comments about political conditions. Nevertheless, cultural issues are really issues to the Mao behind the mask. “Cultural revolution” means something in its own right: it relates to politics, it is not merely another term for politics. Instead of saying, “for culture, read politics, we need to keep culture firmly in mind.

In other words, a little less gossip would do no harm. Hong Kong and all the other tracking stations are buzzing with old-fashioned Chinese speculation about “factions.” Who was the real, the political target behind the hapless “cultural” Wu Han, the author, historian and Deputy Mayor of Peking who was the object of an attack which now seems to have signalled the beginning of the “cultural revolution”? Why was Chou Yang, the leading party propagandist and cultural commissar, the object of a “cultural” attack? (It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, is the general preamble, but what friends of his are they really after, and who are they?) Still, there are other questions. Why should a Communist movement that once had cosmopolitan associations become so especially nativist now—not just politically prickly (no problem there), but culturally so anti-Western? And, why, just now, should a nationalist movement be so harsh with the national culture, the heritage of the past?

TO TAKE THE LAST QUESTION FIRST. Partly it is a matter of balance: The very intensity of the anti-Westernism compels a corresponding antagonism to traditional Chinese forms. Otherwise, it would be merely xenophobia, a throwback to the anti-foreign Boxer revolutionaries of 1900. And while the Communists grant an honorable place to the Boxers, it is a place in history only. The Boxers are harbingers, not prototypes, of the Communist fighters for Chinese independence. For Boxer xenophobia, while commendably anti-imperialist in political intent, was reactionary in its defense of “feudal” culture. Chinese Communists are Marxist enough to see history as a linear process—it is evolution through revolution, the past does not revolve.

Yet, the problem of today’s special iconoclasm remains. Early twentieth-century radicals, living in a world they never made, were generally hostile to the old values, and Chinese anti-Communists have always seen their enemies as destroyers of Chinese culture. But once in power, the Party seemed to confound them. Iconoclasm was not a prerequisite of Revolution. Restoration was not a counter-revolutionary prerogative. The Communists themselves were “restoring” (in a way), not scuttling the past. Their way was the museum way. The restoration—of imperial palaces or classical reputations—was not a restoration of authority but of a history which the Chinese people (under new authority) could claim as its national heritage. Their historicism enabled the Communists to keep the Chinese past as theirs, but to keep the past passé: the Communists owned the present, and would preside over the future.

Today, however, the museums, literal and metaphorical, are being ransacked. The old books, once assumed to have been sterilized by history of the power to do harm, are disappearing. All kinds of relics are being treated as ominously significant for the here and now; they seem no longer safely dead, or simply historically significant. Even as they threw off the hand of the past, the Communists for a time retained the priceless advantage of conserving traditional culture, to better effect than the modern conservatives did. Why has Peking now thrown the traditional game?

It is because the modern game is a tricky one to play, especially now. Especially in China, where the Confucian amateur-ideal was uncongenial to science, the advancement of science has had revolutionary implications. It has led to specialization, the cultivation of experts. But these are suspect in Communist China—which nevertheless, unlike Confucian China, is absolutely committed to the celebration of science.

It is not just that “scientific socialists” can hardly condescend to science as literary people do. Marxists trade on the prestige of science, and they know quite well that in everyone’s modern world (quite unlike Confucian China), in “bourgeois” countries and anti-bourgeois alike, science has prestige. When the Chinese Communists put scientists down they acknowledge that prestige, they do not impugn it; its very universality, its apparent transcendence of ideology, is a threat to the masters of ideology. Science must be mastered by the ideologues, or their own occupation would be gone. In a world where science cannot be gainsaid, mere experts, practitioners of science, have to be bent to Marxist authority, or Mao, the latest Marxist in line, would lack authority himself. Ideology, the correct ideology, must dominate the ostensibly non-ideological expert. Politics must take command. For, as Mao proclaimed in his Problems of Art and Literature, the very profession of ideological unconcern (“art for art’s sake”) is a classic product of bourgeois ideology.

IN SPITE of all the common “generalism” of the Communist cadre and the confusion official, the latter never believed what the former holds as an article of faith: that one of the reasons for demeaning expertise is the need to erase the distinction—a crucial Confucian distinction—between mental and physical labor. Just as the Confucianist, with his amateur ideal, had displaced the old aristocracy, and then taken on an aristocratic aura (with license to condescend to the technical professional), so the professional in the modern world, having broken the amateur ideal, has the status pride of the aristocrat today. Therefore, the Party must trim him down, to vindicate its won version of autocratic rule.

It is this that creates the impression of a willful cultural provincialism today. The experts are China’s “rootless cosmopolitians”—rootless, since the peasants are the roots (Whence the Red Guards, as a counterweight to the urban, university types); and cosmopolitan, since, with universal science, the experts may see their associations with professional colleagues on the other side of national and ideological walls. And so the climate becomes wintry for the cosmopolitan scientists. Yet the armies and industries need them, after all. The ones who are really blasted by the anti-cosmopolitanism are the expendables in the arts, dispensers of English literature, French music, Hong kong haircuts.

Yes, the armies and industries need the fruits of science, maybe to throw at the Americans. But the armies and industries might be hostages to science and technology, as well as beneficiaries. A war with America now would certainly ravage the scientific complex, and exclusively “expert” advisers would have to counsel peace. Does the deep freeze of the experts, the coldness toward western culture (which was the source of the expertise), mean that the risk of war is going to be accepted, that merely prudential, technical-expert arguments are going to be overruled? Then the old spirit of the Long March and the Yenan days, when the stronger battalions were on the other side, would naturally be invoked, as now they are. Not senile nostalgia, nor a general taste for spiritual athletics, but a conviction of present crisis may be driving the train of events. If the weight of weapons is against China, and yet the weapons may come into play, man’s spirit (a good Maoist anti-expert shibboleth), not weapons, will have to be decisive.

FOR SPIRIT, read ideology, the fantastic drenching in ideology that China is taking now. It comes from a sense of danger, the danger of a war that cannot be left to experts, because they would not choose it and could not win it with their expertise alone. And it is this danger that gives the “cultural revolution” its dual targets, the two cultures, western and traditional. The concurrent attack on the latter confirms danger as the source of attack on the former, on the cosmopolitan spirit which the experts represent. For the tendency to make a museum of the past, instead of rooting it out, belonged to the age of self-assurance. It had not been there in the early days of struggle, when the Communists had the passion of engagement; and it vanishes now in an embattled age of possible destruction. The god of history is a hidden god again. Relativistic historicism, coolly accounting for one-time foes by giving them their proper niches, is out of fashion. The dead are no longer monuments, but “ghosts and monsters” to be slain again.

When they had confidence in historical progress (confidence in their own success in moving from strength to strength), Communists could patronize their Chinese cultural past. But if the pastness of the past is not so certain, because the future is so uncertain, if regress seems possible, then the Communists will cease to be patrons, encouraging curators to restore the past; they will be at action stations instead, finished with contemplation for a while. And regress is the specter, regress seen as furthered by Russian actions (like the withdrawl of technicians) and dramatized by Russian example (“revisionism”). If the essential Marxist notion of progress is not to be abandoned in a general failure of nerve, revolutionary voluntarism, not evolutionary determinism, must be brought to the fore again, and the past be, not relativized, but seen as all too possibly present. Absolutes take command. Impending crisis puts the expert under the gun, with the foreign cultural borrowings that made him. And crisis, too, strips the native cultural heritage of its protective historical color. The Chinese are not listening much to ancestral voices now. But someone in China is prophesying war.

Franz Schurmann replies:

Professor Levenson brings a needed corrective to my article “What Is Happening in China.” He is right in saying that the “cultural revolution” has a specifically cultural aspect. But Levenson’s conception of culture seems to me too abstract. When the Chinese speak of “culture” they mean the spirit of man, the psychological makeup of the people of China. To the Chinese the revolution will not be complete until every part of the structure of Chinese culture has been replaced and until its motivating force—its core—is entirely new. Khrushchev saw the “new Soviet man” coming into being as a consequence of the technological progress leading to Communism. Mao sees no hope for China unless a “new Chinese man” is created now through a cultural revolution.

Who is this new Chinese man? Like everyone else in China, he appears in two forms. He is a poor peasant soldier, like Lei Feng who died young in the service of the people; and he is the foreign doctor, Norman Bethune, who died saving the lives of Red Army soldiers. These legendary figures are the herces of the short essays by Mao that are now being circulated and committed to memory all over China. They symbolize the two great social divisions of China—the cities and the villages. The cities of China are Western, and the spirit that pervades them is bourgeois and not proletarian. It is the educated professional, the “expert,” who creates the modern character of the Chinese city. His roots lie in a cosmopolitan scientific-technological and business-industrial tradition which came in from the West, first directly from Britain and America, and later indirectly through Japan and Russia. But the villages of China are still deeply Chinese, and the spirit that pervades them has roots in a past which may not in fact be really past. It is the peasant who makes the village, and he too appears in two forms: the rich peasant who wants once again to settle into traditional patterns, and the poor peasant who is the carrier of the revolution against the past.