China Under Deng: A Great Leap Forward?

Recently, on the Bund in Shanghai, I gazed at a bronze statue of Mao Zedong’s foreign minister, Chen Yi, and thought of a courageous remark he uttered at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. "Marx came from Germany," Chen said as Mao-worshipping Red Guards assailed him at the foreign ministry. "A Kautsky and a Bernstein were produced there to modify him. Lenin came from the Soviet Union; a Khrushchev appeared there. Chairman Mao belongs to our country; there may also be someone to modify him, wait and see."

We waited, and we have seen. Mao has been modified by Deng Xiaoping. Shanghai in appearance has ceased to be a city of the Mao era (clothing of one style, political slogans on every wall) and become a city of the Deng era (advertisements everywhere, traffic jams, the dust and hammering of construction). Has Deng buried only Mao, or Marx and Lenin too?

CHINA ON OUR MINDS

New York Times reporters Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn spent 1988-1993 in Beijing, and for their coverage of the Tiananmen crisis became the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Now their book of reportage, memories, and reflections captures the late Deng era, in which Tiananmen was digested, by Chinese and foreigners alike, and "economic boom" became the new code word for China.

America’s scrutinizing of China during the century and a half since the Yankee clipper ships began calling at Canton has thrown to the fore few journalists as cool and professional as WuDunn and Kristof. Every page of China Wakes is trenchant, and I cannot think of a reportorial book on China so zealous in investigation and so painstaking in probing issues from every angle.

Reading this book reminds one of how China and the image of China in America have changed in one generation. In 1964, when I first visited Beijing, about 500 foreigners lived there and only one foreign airline, Aeroflot, flew into the capital. No American diplomat, businessman, student, or newspaperman resided in Beijing. Politics suffused every realm of life, and economic development was not seen as its own justification. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was still being celebrated with photos at bus stops of Chinese children cheering at the fall of an evil man. Kristof and WuDunn have no evident memory of this period when the United States and China often were on the brink of war. "Until the mid-1980s," Kristof writes, "China was no threat to anybody because its armed forces were so miserable." These are clearly not the words of someone who lived through the Korean War, the India-China fight of 1962, or the various Taiwan Straits clashes.

The 1970s were calmer than the 1960s, but four filters stood between China and the American public. Exoticism: we had not begun to see the universals that lie within Chinese particularities. Too many things in China were hailed as unique because we could not probe them from every angle. Ideology: the categories of discussion were shaped by Maoism. Many terms used by American journalists had little meaning apart from the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party: "Gang of Four," "three worlds," "serve the people," "capitalist roader." Propaganda: the voices of official China were the overwhelming source for reporting in the Mao years. The China reality was more or less what Mao and Zhou Enlai said it was. And finally, realpolitik: it was Washington’s cultivation of Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow, not the arguments of China watchers, that led to a favorable portrait of Mao’s China in the American press in the early 1970s.

This arms-length writing gave way by the late 1970s to books and reporting by resident correspondents that reflected a human engagement with the Chinese. Sports news from China began to appear on the sports page, health news from China in the medical journals. By the time of Fox Butterfield’s Alive in the Bitter Sea and Richard Bernstein’s From the Center of the Earth, both published in 1982, the abstractions of "threat" and "exotic" dissolved into an uneven array of specifics. China as what Mao and Zhou said it was gave way to China as a market for Boeing aircraft, a balance against Moscow, a laboratory of human stoicism and ingenuity, a represser of Tibet, and a tourist destination offering the electrifying terra cotta soldiers of Qin Shihuang’s tomb at Xian.

Kristof and WuDunn did not find China exotic in any way. Making Chinese friends, they bridged that gap between a self-conscious West and a self-conscious China that gave rise to the idea of exoticism. Ideology scarcely makes an appearance in their book. In China they "went native," helped by the fact that WuDunn is ethnically Chinese. They had contempt for the American embassy, found diplomatic parties fruitless, and nearly always had the option of unofficial sources. During their posting in Beijing, China was neither America’s adversary (as in the 1950s and 1960s) nor its quasi-ally (as in the 1970s). Only for a period after the Tiananmen disaster was their reporting affected by the flux of international affairs. Mostly they were free to look at Chinese society with a steady eye.

Candid and subjective, humanists in the style of their generation, Kristof and WuDunn struggle to be fair, worry about global warming, bring their baby son into the book, and care more for families and friendships than for politics and history. Here is no Agnes Smedley, pen in one hand and sulfur drugs for wounded Chinese soldiers in the other, or Edgar Snow, with his arm around Mao’s shoulder and his mind scarred by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.