China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

3. Confessions of a Peking Tom

36 3 Confessions of a Peking Tom In the early 1970s Carolyn and I traded our love beads and Birkenstocks for a home mortgage and a station wagon. After the birth of our second child, Kristen, in 1970, we found ourselves being drawn into the seductive somnolence of the suburban L.A. lifestyle. “Hippie chic” was the fashion du jour, and my Berkeley beard, T-shirt, and jeans gave way to muttonchops, psychedelic shirts, a Nehru jacket, and a full Afro-style ’do. Dahuzi had morphed into Datoufa (Big Hair). My research in this period focused on the dynamics of the Cultural Revolution, which proved to be a major source of frustration for me. Inside China the political situation remained extraordinarily murky, as the smoldering embers of Mao’s last revolution continued to flare up periodically, fueled by a powerful new source of political uncertainty: Chairman Mao’s deteriorating health and his approaching “appointment with Marx.” The more I struggled to comprehend the broad political and human impact of the Cultural Revolution, the more I found myself unable to grasp its enormity. Without being able to set foot in China it was impossible to determine the magnitude of the devastation or to verify any of the alleged beneficial side effects of radical mass mobilization claimed by the regime’s propagandists and echoed by their left-wing sympathizers in the West. Although there were widespread reports of Red Guard violence and anarchy between 1966 and 1969, there were precious few reliable eyewitness accounts and no credible statistics whatever. Moreover, the most horrific tales of rampant death and destruction generally came either from Chinese Nationalist sources with an obvious axe to grind or from invet- confessions of a peking tom 37 erate Western anti-Communist organizations with an abiding interest in exaggerating the chaos on the Chinese Mainland. Making matters even more perplexing, a recent spate of books by European and American leftist scholars had portrayed the Cultural Revolution as a huge success in terms of its putative effect of liberating the masses of Chinese workers and peasants from the tyranny of bureaucrats and elitist intellectuals. Amidst such hugely conflicting interpretations, the big picture remained frustratingly opaque. In this situation I sometimes found myself waffling in my personal assessment of Mao’s revolution. For example, when choosing articles to include in a 1971 anthology, China in Ferment: Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, I selected two recent essays by Marxist scholars praising the egalitarian, selfless ideals of the Maoist program. And in my concluding essay I hedged yet again, suggesting that although Mao had failed to eliminate privatism, self-interest, and elitism from Chinese society, it would be unwise to condemn him for trying. Still, my own waffling was rather mild compared to the ringing endorsements of Mao coming from some of my fellow academics. One colleague of high repute, in a burst of hyperbole that he would later come to regret, famously compared Mao to Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin Roosevelt. Another wrote of Mao, shortly after his death, that “By the example of his struggle, [Mao] communicates the vigor of hope, the vitality of possibility, the vision of justice. . . . Had he lived longer, he probably would have pioneered yet brighter trails on steeper mountains.” Because the Cultural Revolution coincided with a rising popular backlash against U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, there was a tendency in some left-wing academic circles to suspend disbelief and embrace the Maoist model as an alternative to American capitalism. This ideological flirtation with Maoism was amplified and reinforced by Middle America’s blossoming love affair with China. In the warm afterglow of President Richard Nixon’s February 1972 “opening” to China, ordinary Americans were given a sanitized, rose-tinted view of life inside China, as U.S. television networks aired a steady stream of soft news showing industrious people working hard, families picnicking at the Ming Tombs, consumers shopping at well-stocked department stores, and colorfully dressed moppets playing happily at after-school Children’s Palaces. The combination of media fawning and left-wing scholarly attraction to the Cultural Revolution’s abstract ideals fueled a brief national infatuation with all things Chinese. 38 confessions of a peking tom My own ambivalence, including my suspension of disbelief, ended rather abruptly in mid-1972, when I came across a detailed firsthand account of Cultural Revolution upheaval in Fujian. It was...