Notes from China

A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Stilwell and the American Experience in China is a classic in its own right. During the summer of 1972--a few short months after Nixon’s legendary visit to China--master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read. Tuchman’s observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao’s techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman’s “fascinating” ( The New York Review of Books ) essay, “If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945”--a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that would have changed the course of postwar history. “Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.”-- The New York Times Book Review

ldquo;Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.”—The New York Times Book Review

Auteur

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August—a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute.

Échantillon de lecture
I

Standing Up

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance. The dominant fact is that for China’s working class, which is to say over 80 percent of the world’s most populous country, the lid of exploitation has been lifted. While visible betterment varies widely between the major cities and the provinces, it is probably true to say of all areas that the working class, in whose interest China is now governed, have found a sense of purpose, self-­confidence, and dignity in the knowledge that they are the object of the state’s concern, not, as in the past, society’s victims.

The most obvious negative in the process is the mental monotone imposed upon the country. All thought, all ideas past, present, and future, not to mention the historic record, are twisted, manipulated, rolled out, and flattened into one, expressed in half a dozen slogans dinned incessantly and insistently into the heads of the public. As far as the life of the mind in China is concerned, its scope has rigid limits and its sound is a blaring, endlessly repeated single note, with effect (at least upon a Westerner) like the drip, drip, drip on the victim’s head of the ancient Chinese water torture—­if it had made a loud noise. The message is that “the People” are the motive force; that Marxism-­Leninism is universal truth, and that propelled by its principles and Chairman Mao’s thought, China’s working class can ultimately build Socialism, meaning well-­being for everyone. The goal lies ahead and can only be reached by keeping the Revolution green, that is by continually renewed contact with the masses.

Domestically it seems to work. I say “seems” throughout these notes cautiously and advisedly because ignorance of the language is a barrier equal to being deaf. A six-­week visitor under this handicap can offer conclusions as impressions only.

Perhaps too the transfer to collectivism has been made easier because China’s life was in some ways collective to begin with. Consider the kang, the built-­in wall-­to-­wall bed of north China on which, in the poorer homes, the whole family sleeps. With that in their background, collective adjustment is natural, not to say imperative.

In any event, from what we could see through eleven cities (Peking, Taiyuan, Yenan, Sian, Loyang, Chengchow, Wuhan, Nanking, Suchow, Shanghai, and Canton) and a variety of rural settlements, collective effort has made up China’s oldest lack—­enough food. Our reception at an agricultural commune in central Shansi included three or four heaping platters each of sliced tomatoes, fresh peaches, and sweetened stuffed dumplings made of glutinous rice (a substance to make a Western stomach quail) in far greater abundance than was required by the company. Admittedly this was laid on to impress the visitors (as was everything else we met in China), but the availability of such abundance to agricultural workers and their un-­hungry attitude toward it were simply not possible in the past when, as one member of the commune said, “The lower peasants could not even have the chaff of the rice to eat.”

Increased production, materially speaking, is what China’s revolution is all about. It refutes all the firm statements of economists and agronomists in the past that China’s arable land could not be augmented, nor the yield per unit of land be raised sufficiently to feed the expanding population. Both have been done, not by magic but because the people have been mobilized and motivated to do it—­by expropriation and redistribution of land permitting communal farming in large tracts instead of fractional plots, and by the knowledge that everything they do to make improvements will now benefit themselves not the landlord.

I will cite no statistics on increased yield because I cannot judge their reliability, but in this summer’s drought in north China with day after relentless day of no rain and of temperatures over 100, when one sees fresh water being pumped in life-­giving gushes from irrigation channels, and sees surrounding fields green, vegetables ripening, and seedling crops sprouting instead of withering, one needs no statistics. In the old days this year’s drought would have been lethal. The great Miyun Dam and Reservoir northeast of Peking, the pumping stations and sedimentation plants along the Yellow River that have at last harnessed “China’s Sorrow,” and similar projects constructed elsewhere under the new regime, besides providing hydroelectric power, have brought drought, flood, and famine under control. The result provides the agricultural surplus which, paid in kind to the state as a form of tax, supplies the capital for expansion of industry—­the other of the two legs on which the new China walks.

In human terms the process has produced a new person—­the worker from the ranks who can become manager of the enterprise. It is true that such people do not bear sole responsibility. They function in committee in a three-­in-­one arrangement of workers, technicians, and “cadres” or representatives of the Government. Even so, in their straightforward look-­you-­in-­the-­eye greeting, their poise and self-­respect, th…