Commentary by Richard Kraus

36 Twentieth-Century China Commentary by Richard Kraus Fitzgerald's ambitious essay is a welcome note in a bottle, washed up on the lonely shores of the remote island inhabited by political studies of the People's Republic. Contemporary China specialists who spend their time hyping investment opportunity or military threat will, of course, have a hard time understanding why one would want to cross, much less smash, the great wall ofJ949.But those who sometimes read history will be encouraged by Fitzgerald's gesture. Rather than applaud the many agreeable features of Fitzgerald's essay, I will instead focus on.one aspect which is troubling. Fitzgerald is naive in his analysis of the exchange of cultural goods between China and the West. Deng Xiaoping's reform policies, he says, ...precipitated a flow of books, music, lifestyles and ideas into China but with one or two notable exceptions sent little of cultural interest flowing back in the other direction. The outstanding exception to this cultural barter-trade has been the contemporary biography and autobiography. Jung Chang's Wild Swans is Fitzgerald's exemplary "cultural artefact, traded in a cultural exchange of histories between China and the West which now implicates all historians in the unfolding of the history we record." Let us examine this artifact more closely to consider the interrelated issues of cultural exchange, cultural product, and academic complicity. Cultural Exchange. Like Fitzgerald, I respect JungChang's work. I believe that the Chinese government is foolish for its hostility toward Wild Swans, which I regularly assign to my Chinese politics students. Nevertheless, there is more to say than Fitzgerald suggests about the nature of the foreign market for Chinese autobiographies. Why are certain kinds of autobiographies written and then published for Western consumption? Peasants and workers don't write many autobiographies, and when they do, they find little audience among educated readers in the West. In contrast, Western readers love a good tale of unwarranted suffering, especially one in which the victim is a sophisticated person whom we might imagine dining at our tables. Fitzgerald treats this writing and the Western audience for it as if it were a kind of neutral sharing in China's sorrows. An alternative interpretation views such books as a commercially successful and sentimentally appealing development of an audience for apparently "dissident" memoirs. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. XXIV NO.2 (April 1999): 36-39 Commentary on ."In the Scales of History" 37 These autobiographies are also part of an international cultural politics that hardens Western public opinion against China by constantly bringing Western readers face to face with the most illiberal aspects of modem Chinese experience . At least· lung Chang's account shows flashes of self-consciousness of her privileged position as a high official's daughter. This is not true of some others in Fitzgerald's catalog, including Nien Cheng, who seemingly imagined the Cultural Revolution to be directed personally against herself. Fitzgerald sees the whole range of such biographies· as "part of a broader cultural movement that implicates all of us in the West in cutting historical figures down to size and placing ordinary people at the centre of China's modem history." But this view brutally wrenches these sometimes moving, often interesting works from their context as products of an intermittently privileged part of Chinese society. Their authors are far from ordinary, and that is their appeal. But to mistake them for ordinary people is to repeat the folly of Chines~ who once believed that Anna Louise Strong and Rewi Alley were typical Westerners. Fitzgerald neglects another successful high-brow· art export from China, the films of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. Movies such as Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, or Farewell My Concubine tell very different stories ,to the same audience of Western intelligentsia. To be sure there is suffering, but it is of a more grandly historical sort, less immediately traceable to the Communist Party. The major impression on Western minds, I suspect, is one of faded grandeur and decayed imperial beauty, which is one of the commodified sensations sold by the tourist industry, another important category of cultural exchange omitted by Fitzgerald. Cultural Products. Fitzgerald gently reminds...