Wild Swans by Jung Chang

It is twenty years old now but it’s back in the news, this time as a theatre production. I’m rather keen to see the thing but I thought I ought to read the book first, especially since it’s been collecting dust, unread, at the bottom of the book case for far too many years. But, in fact it was not Wild Swans the play that prompted me to get reading, but rather the purchase of Martin Jacques, When China Rules The World. In order to get into Jacques book I needed to get into the whole China mood. Set the scene so to speak. Relive those old monumental battles. Rethink the meaning of the Cultural Revolution. Place the modern, dynamic, absurdly contradictory China in its historical setting.

Well, Jung Chang’s three generational epic certainly succeeded in that respect. One woman’s sweeping historical account of China’s turbulent twentieth century, complete with heroic and world shattering international and intra-class warfare interwoven with personal dreams and desperate tragedies. Anyone not moved by this historical novel-come-documentary must have a heart of stone and a head full of concrete. And now I’m ready for anything Martin Jacques cares to throw at me. I’m eating, thinking, sleeping China with Mao’s little red book in one hand and Jacques China thesis in the other.

In some respects this was an uncomfortable read for me. It brought back in vivid technicolor, my youthful, naive I say, infantile devotion to all things Maoist. There I was, a well fed, pampered western kid growing up in a very affluent Australia, professing to know everything there was to know about Chinese politics. In fact I knew virtually nothing. I knew I didn’t want to fight for Uncle Sam in Vietnam. I knew that that war was essentially an imperialist war against an anti-colonialist movement that Mao’s China gave legitimate assistance to. That much I knew. But as for Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his subsequent bloody and seemingly mindless Cultural Revolution, I merely parroted what the Chinese Communist Party pumped out. When the party line changed in Peking so it did in the fledging Maoist movement in Australia. And for my part, I blindly went along with every shift of line. As I read Chung’s account of Mao’s China I cringed not a little at my own childish gullibility. Yes, I did start to question things sooner than many, but still my own years of blind loyalty to things I knew nothing about, makes me feel embarrassed to this day. My motives were admirable enough, it was my intellect that failed me.

Well, life moves on. Chung raises many questions about that period but opts not to pursue those questions into a contemporary setting. That is not a criticism her chosen task was more than adequately completed. But those questions linger on. It is not about debating ad-infinitum whether Mao or Stalin operated from genuine if misguided socialist impulses, or rather from some sort of pathological, dictatorial, megalomaniacal individualism. There are no real definitive answers to those sort of questions, just half-baked opinions about leaders long deceased. No, the real question, which maybe Chung does raise implicitly in her work, is what a communist revolution might look like in our shiny new century.

For me, that answer is glaringly obvious, and in many ways antithetical to those views I once held. With the wonderful benefit of hindsight I might hint at four inviolable, non-negotiable principles; firstly any communist movement must be an essentially humanistic project that rejects the slaughter of millions as merely an historical blip on the way to some future utopia. History has grimly proved far too often through the centuries that the maxim; that the end justifies the means is fundamentally flawed. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that as the corpses pile higher communist society gets one inch closer. On the contrary, the sort of class war propagated by Mao merely serves to brutalise, confuse and depoliticise all protagonists victims and perpetrators alike. And in Mao’s revolution, today’s perpetrator was just as likely to become tomorrow’s victim and visa versa. As for a universal communist consciousness, this is developed not one iota.

Interesting to note on that point that some of the worst incidences of racism in Europe today are coming not from the capitalist west but from the former socialist states. So much for Soviet socialist ideology developing a higher class consciousness. Similarly, Chinese attitudes to their fellow citizens who happen to have black skin is equally depressing. Blame that on the capitalist-roaders I hear some say. No, that will not do. These prejudices were never tackled by either Stalin or Mao and in many instances were exacerbated and exploited under the guise of conducting class warfare.

Secondly, a most basic principle of a communist movement, and of course a communist society, must be the international essence of humanity. To divide people by nation, colour, clan or ethnicity reflects the very worst of prejudices propagated by slave, feudal and bourgeois society. Communism must imbue always and everywhere an international humanism or it is nothing.

Along with humanism and internationalism, which cannot of course be separated, must come the principle of rational thought and a respect and belief in the value of scientific understanding. According to Chung’s experience these characteristics were totally abused by Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution. No matter what ones political direction and aspirations, if you came from a professional, middle class or educated background you were likely to be deemed the class enemy. Pol Pot tried this self same philosophy in Cambodia with his Year Zero insanity. In both cases, Mao and Pol Pot, these death cults merely released a feudal irrationality that was a million miles away from Marx’s vision of a rational communist collective that would allow each individual to flourish and reach their full potential.

Much of the barbarism that was carried out in the name of Mao’s communism can, of course, only be understood in the context of what came before. Nothing happens in an historical vacuum. The stultifying feudal backwardness of both Russia and China along with the viciousness of foreign capitalist interventions, go along way in helping to grasp the ensuing brutality of their respective revolutions To Chung’s credit she is most thorough in painting pictures of this feudal brutality which preceded Mao’s brief but bloody epoch. One such passage describes the barbaric Chinese practice of feet binding. Chung writes:

My grandmother’s feet had been bound when she was two years old. Her mother, who herself had bound feet, first wound a piece of white cloth about twenty feet long round her feet, bending all the toes except the big toe inwards and under the sole. Then she placed a large stone on top to crush the arch. My grandmother screamed in agony and begged her to stop. Her mother had to stick a cloth into her mouth to gag her. Mt grandmother passed out repeatedly from the pain. The process lasted several years. Even after the bones had been broken, the feet had to be bound day and night in thick cloth because the moment they were released they would try to recover. For years my grandmother lived in relentless, excruciating pain. When she pleaded with her mother to untie the bindings, her mother would weep and tell her that unbound feet would ruin her entire life, and she was doing it for her own future happiness. P31

The communist revolution was meant to do away with that sort of barbaric feudal inhumanity but instead, according to Chung, it merely replaced it with a barbarism of its own. Chung writes:

The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernise the medieval elements in China’s culture, it actually gave them political respectability. Modern dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Anyone who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitudes could now become a political victim. P551

In addition to the powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age old customs, clocked in tradition and even morality the Chinese had to endure the horrific bestiality of the Japanese invading forces. Here Chung is equally graphic in her written testimony:

As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan’s progress in the war. Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs. There were lingering close-ups of the victims terror stricken eyes as their attackers came at them. The Japanese watched the eleven and twelve year old schoolgirls to make sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams. P93

All this seems ancient history as China steams ahead with its strange amalgam of central state planning and individual capitalist accumulation. Yet the questions raised by Chung’s book have not disappeared, just put on the back burner for a few years. A socialist humanism, a profound internationalism and a respect for scientific advancement: all three components essential if humanity is to move beyond its current stage of stunted capitalist democracy, much of which was inherited from the European Enlightenment centuries earlier. But if we are to progress further, one more essential ingredient must be thrown into the pot and done so without reservation or compromise. That is the ingredient of human enquiry and the right to criticise and disagree.

I foolishly believed, as Mao proclaimed, that these ingredients were optional, even somehow petty bourgeois. I now believe them to be essential ingredients without which no higher level of society can emerge. Both Mao and Stalin, and possible Lenin too, saw freedom of criticism as luxurious extras that their war torn and scarcity plagued revolutions could not afford. For decades I argued along the exact same lines and in the process excused any number of criminal and barbaric outrages. I now understand that those who criticise are not anti-party class enemies, but are in fact the natural and healthy dialectical expression of human thought. Deny that aspect of humanity and the project is lost before it begins. Putting food in the stomach and a roof over the head without the right to think critically, simply means moving to a bureaucratic state of well fed, brain-dead automatons. Providing the basic needs for all citizens and removing the grinding fear of poverty and scarcity are the preconditions of any social progress. But in the end, as the citizens of the former Soviet Union and satellites will testify, that is not enough. That is certainly not a communist revolution which promises a degree of harmony between the needs of the collective and the sometimes critical, if not outright deviant aspirations of the individual.

Humans have the potential to be so much more than mere worker bees subordinate to the hive. No, we can certainly do better than that. Communism must offer that possibility, both as a movement and as a functioning society, no matter what the exigencies of the day. And if it cannot offer that much, that particular version of the future will soon be relegated to the already overflowing dustbin of history.

Chung, who may or may not harbour her own bourgeois habits, yearnings and proclivities (and who doesn’t?), describes well the climate of fear and peer pressure that Mao’s regime was able to inculcate amongst a largely illiterate peasant populous. Chung explains the dynamic:

The party’s all-round intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as thought reform. Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for thought examination was held for those in the revolution. Everyone had to both criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others. The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from bourgeois backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self criticism tapped into this.

Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. P219

I have seen this criticism and self criticism in action and I recognise both the pettiness and underlying methods of party control that Chung speaks of. And when it was the turn of the great leader to self criticise he would simply lambaste himself (and it was always a he) for being too soft and indulgent with his underlings. To go against the line of the great leader was to be immediately branded anti-party and bourgeois to boot. Excommunication would quickly follow. This was the Catholic Church all over again with just the thinnest veneer of socialist rhetoric. An allegiance to Divine Truth delivered from on high with unquestioning obedience was required if you wished to stay in the fold. And to be outside the fold in Mao’s China, according to Chung’s account, was indeed a cold and dangerous place. Chung confesses her own culpability:

I was not forced to join the Red Guards. I was keen to do so. In spite of what was happening around me, my aversion and fear had no clear object, and it never occurred to me to question the Cultural Revolution or the Red Guards explicitly. They were Mao’s creation and Mao was beyond contemplation. Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgement.’ P404

Over the past ten thousand years, humans have had many, many rebellions and revolutions, all veraciously calling for more social justice and equality and all inevitably falling, in the end, under the same old tardy class dictatorship. The class elite changes but the brutish oppression, national chauvinisms, tribal hatreds, religious bigotries and the debilitating inequalities stubbornly remain.

Modern day Britain, boasting as it does to be the mother of democracy, has not yet escaped its ancient class chains. France, once epicentre of the European enlightenment, has also failed to shrug off the tyranny of class. The new worlds of America, Australia and Canada with their noble sounding constitutions and much heralded freedoms of expression, have merely reproduced all the same narrow class privileges of the old world. And in the East, seventy years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has been and gone with barely a reminder left of its once heroic collectivist project. The brutality of class is back with a vengeance in the new Russia complete with billionaire oligarchs and an entrenched government with one foot in the old military-industrial complex, and the other in the ever expanding Russian Mafia. As for India, home to over a billion citizens, it just cannot shrug off its centuries old caste system, but it has managed to create a wealthy middle class that it happy to leech off the misery of its 800 million impoverished peasants.

Then there is China, an interesting historical hybrid that feeds and houses its people but fears the internet and individual with equal military efficiency. The worst excesses as described by Jung Chang may have passed, but whatever China is, it is not a mecca of humanist internationalism, rational humanist planning, nor a centre of free flowing human intellectual discourse. For those still demanding, or at least dreaming of a more collectivist, more rational, more humane society, the task, it seems, is still very much on the drawing board.

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