The Search for Modern China.

MODERN CHINA is a contradiction in terms. China is imprisoned by the great wall of its past, a past of absolute rulers and violent rebellions, artistic productivity and periodic famines, xenophobia and, paradoxically, the blind adoption of foreign ideas.

Jonathan Spence attempts to explain contemporary China by examining the structure of its imprisoning past. Spence knows China's history; he is the author of eight books on the subject, all of which are both scholarly and readable. The Search for Modern China is filled with fascinating information, written in a relaxed and natural style, and illustrated with important historical photographs and beautiful representations of Chinese art. The book has been highly praised, deservedly so.

Nonetheless, Spence's search has not been entirely successful. The problem is that he does not seek answers outside of China itself. While Spence is informative about the Jesuit missionaries, the European and American traders, and the Western ideas that influenced China, he fails to discuss China in the context of the Communist world. A major part of China's modern history, unfortunately, did not begin in China. China's political system is cruel to its citizens and hostile to free thought because it is Communist.

For instance, China has neighborhood committees to control the day-today lives of its citizens just as Cuba does, not because neighborhood committees were always a part of Cuban and Chinese tradition, which they were not, but because both countries are ruled by Leninist parties. Chairman Mao's mummy is on display in the middle of Tiananmen Square not because the emperors of the Ming and Qing (Manchu) Dynasties built enormous tombs, which they did, but because Lenin's mummified corpse lies in a similar building in Red Square. China's great famine of 1959-62 was not just another Chinese famine; Mao Tse-tung did what Stalin had done: he sacrificed human lives in a ferocious attempt to speed up industrialization. Spence observes:

As China's investment in industry rose to an amazing 43.4 per cent of national income in 1959, grain exports were also increased to pay for more heavy machinery. The average amount of grain available to each person in China's countryside, which had been 205 kilos in 1957 and 201 in 1958, dropped to a disastrous 183 kilos in 1959, and a catastrophic 156 kilos in 1960. In 1961 it fell again-to 154 kilos. The result was famine on a gigantic scale, a famine that claimed twenty million or more lives between 1959 and 1962.

In 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, perhaps the craziest phase of his 27 destructive years in power. Schools were closed, teachers were attacked by their students definitely not a part of Chinese tradition), families were separated, millions of city dwellers were exiled to the countryside, and works of art and literature were systematically destroyed. Owning a musical instrument was a crime. Although Spence discusses the rigid class distinctions enforced by the Communists, he fails to mention the grotesque division of the Chinese people into the five red classes (hong wu lei) and the five black classes (hei wu lei). Members of the black classes (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, criminals, and rightists) were subjected to "struggle sessions" in which they were questioned, ridiculed, and sometimes physically abused. The inclusion of rich peasants among the black classes is reminiscent of Stalin's persecution of the analogous class in the Soviet Union, the kulaks.

Many theories have been advanced to explain why Mao would do something so harmful to his country. Spence mentions Mao's view that "the Chinese revolution was losing its impetus"; he also refers to Mao's age, "and his concern that his senior colleagues were seeking to shunt him aside." But there is a much simpler answer, one the author does not suggest: Mao Tse-tung started the Cultural Revolution because he believed in it. Mao was a good Communist; he knew that the Communist Manifesto called for breaking down the distinctions between the city and the country. Mao believed that after Communism was achieved, the state would wither away (was there ever a state less likely to wither than that of the People's Republic of China?), because there would be no class differences, which were to be eradicated through "thought reform."

Is there anything in Chinese history to explain why a civilization both practical and artistic should commit itself to Marxism, with its total disregard for reality in favor of theory? Spence tells us about a scholar named Gong Zizhen, born in 1792. Gong believed history moved through three stages: chaos, ascending peace, and universal peace. Gong also stated that as the rich get richer and the poor poorer, "the most perverse and curious customs arise, bursting forth as though from a hundred springs and impossible to stop." Is this the Chinese version of the revolution of the proletariat? Was Gong a Chinese precursor of Marx? Hardly.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalinthe real Gang of Four-still rule China; their photographs still hang in places of honor throughout the country. The events of 1989 have shaken the Communist world, but China, where 1989 started, is still in the grip of Marxist rigidity. That Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng continue to hold power today is evidence of the basic instability that all China's governments have shared. The most stable societies are those in which there are regular procedures for the change of administrations and legitimate ways to express opinions. If China had had an orderly political system, its leaders would have been forced by public opinion to leave office. The Ming and Qing Dynasties, like the Nationalist and Communist regimes that followed them, came to power through war. The early Qing emperors fought civil wars against the Three Feudatories; the later ones against the Taiping Rebellion. Both these revolutions were put down, which does not indicate stability but merely the success of the ruling side. Such regimes may have the strength to win the war, but not to keep the peace. Throughout the centuries China's rulers have feared foreign ideas, but the great wall of China's past has never been impervious. Spence explains the role that Christianity played in the thinking of Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taipings, who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. Mao used the thought of one Westerner, Karl Marx, to uproot other Western ideas such as the supremacy of law over rulers and the establishment of political rights. Mao launched a campaign against the "four olds": old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. How ironic that the regime he created-a regime more irrational, more violent, more opposed to free thought and human creativity than any other in China's history-is described today as merely another chapter in the long history of Chinese tyrants.