Little red book for sale - social change in China

National Review, May 1, 1995 by Radek Sikorski

``ALL reactionaries are paper tigers,'' I read in the small brochure an elderly woman surreptitiously handed to me at a bazaar behind Peking's International Club, about a mile from Tiananmen Square. ``We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong.'' These were, of course, the pearls of wisdom of Chairman Mao Tse-tung; the brochure was his infamous Little Red Book, which used to induce millions into intellectual levitation. Now, it was for sale.

``How much?'' I asked the woman, portly and in worn clothes. ``Eighty yuan,'' she said -- ten dollars.

``Eighty yuan, for this nonsense?'' I exclaimed. ``You must be joking. I'll give you twenty.''

``Sixty.''

``Twenty-five.''

We settled at forty yuan -- five dollars. It was, after all, the original 1966 English edition in immaculate condition. I could have had a much thumbed copy in Chinese for less than half that. I shook my new acquisition in the air in the manner that the hysterical crowds used to do. People in a little cluster that had gathered to witness our haggling instinctively looked around, but then laughed together with me. My guardian angel from the Foreign Ministry later told me that I could have had a copy from him for a few cents. People may laugh at the Little Red Book, but less than a mile away a portrait of its author still hangs from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Post-Tiananmen China is a schizophrenic country. The ideology is dead -- top government leaders have said they would rather the Mao mausoleum had never been built -- and yet they cannot let go of it; they are still mumbling incoherently about ``socialism with Chinese characteristics.'' How, then, should we categorize China? Is it a totalitarian country, whose every failure we should applaud? Or does China pose a new kind of authoritarian threat? Soon after I arrived in Peking I concluded that present-day China could not be described as totalitarian. By definition, a totalitarian society is atomized, perfectly brainwashed, and incapable of so much as thinking outside the boundaries set by the powers that be. In the strict sense, China was already not totalitarian in June 1989, when the army crushed the students' rebellion. The fact that the authorities had to use violence meant that the straightjacket of totalitarian control had already loosened up. Today, the loosening has gone much further.

One of the defining characteristics of a totalitarian society is that the regime controls access to information. In this respect, the authorities seemed to want to do things by the totalitarian book when they recently banned satellite dishes. In theory dishes may now only be owned by those with proper authorization -- presumably only trusted comrades who would not be contaminated by bourgeois ideas emanating from MTV. But dozens of satellite dishes can still be seen on apartment houses all over Peking. It's hard to believe that so many people need to be exposed to Western temptations in the course of their duties. In fact, local authorities have sabotaged the ban because it would harm the cable networks, in which they have commercial stakes. Chinese students are still restricted in their use of fax machines, but soon Chinese universities will be connected to the Internet. It's hard to imagine how censorship or even eavesdropping might work, given the volume of data that is likely to circulate.

A totalitarian regime also has to control most of the economy. If the state is the main employer, landlord, and food distributor, then rebellion against those in power risks not just imprisonment but starvation. Today China fails this criterion. The economy in most provinces is largely private. As a result, the state has lost a potent lever of economic control over its citizens, leading, for example, to a reduction in daughter killing -- the habit of killing girls, in order to have sons while staying within draconian laws that punish the rearing of more than one or two children. Reportedly, many of the girls who disappear shortly after birth do not get dumped in the river but are brought up by their parents in secrecy, in a sort of population grey economy. This would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago -- where would the parents have got ration cards to feed the extra mouth?

The current spirit of China reveals itself in a little compound in the old part of Peking, where I was taken by Zdzislaw Goralczyk, the Polish ambassador. An entrance gate with red pillars and a traditional roof leads to several courtyards formed by low wooden outbuildings connected by shaded arcades. The flora is now neglected, but a pagoda stands on top of a stone garden. A small door in its base leads to a nuclear shelter several stories deep. This was once the home of K'ang Sheng, Mao's Beria, the man who made it possible for the tyrant to carry out such bold schemes as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Today, you can sleep in his bed for a few hundred dollars, and the ambassador, who was a student in Peking when the ogre was still rampant, treated me to a delicious supper in a restaurant in one of the outbuildings.