China and the West

Ginsberg, Allen. China trip [ID D32503].
I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought—- and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and Mozartean-minded, very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. But you can only have a subtle, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level.
If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered anti-state activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said.
In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said, 'My girlfriend'. I asked him, 'What's your pleasure in that? ' He said, 'I'm young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love.' But he said he couldn't show it to very many people; maybe one or two friends.
The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, 'Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours. If a student is caught just making out, it could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford, he might be sent to teach high school in the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community.
So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China.
I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Association to meet leading writers in China at a four-day conference. The subject of the conference was 'The Source of Inspiration,' a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about individual sources of inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression.
The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism.
The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the 'open door' and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some intellectuals fear that the new technology China is buying might lead to a high-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. 
I spent a lot of my time among the intellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside, or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines. Elderly physicists were forced to stand bowed over wearing dunce caps, answering questions from a bowed position day and night. Intellectuals were humiliated by such job assignments as cleaning night soil out of the 'streetside water coffin'.
While I was there, there was a big self-examination within the party. Each party group had to check out the validity of the rumors about members' activities during the Cultural Revolution, rumors that somebody had used undue violence or zealotry in persecution of so-called 'bourgeois stinkers' – their neighbors.
I went to a meeting of freshman English faculty. It was all discussion of the latest purification of the party, of all the miscreants and how to deal with the fact that half the faculty was not at the meeting and can't teach anyway because they don't speak English, having gotten their jobs for the 'correctness' of their Maoist views during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards reigned. New they are dead wood but still occupy positions, so the faculty is only limping along on half the number of proper instructors and having to feed and house obsolete political hysterics.
Almost every city in China was involved in the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. Many people I spoke to remarked that the people who made the Cultural Revolution – the Red Guards, the professors who were informers – are now working side by side with their 'rehabilitated' victims.
A typical comment was, 'The man who led the investigation of me and interrogated me for months on end in 1967 now has a lesser post than me : he's clerk in the English faculty. I see him every day in the office'. I asked him how he accepted that, and he told me, 'What should I do ? Where is he going to go ? Where am I going to go ? I can't ask that he be sent to jail; there'd be too many. We don't want to start another reign of violence. We're trying to get on with the future'.
A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the foreign language magazine. And they knew about the Beats—there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yi Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his Ph.D. on Edmund Wilson at Harvard.
The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement in rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature.
The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nai-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said.
There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market—including Western nations peddling opium—dominated Chinese politics.
In Shanghai, I supped with the president of Fudan University, a specialist in molecular physics. She had been locked in her office during the Cultural Revolution, given a menial job, kicked and left slightly crippled. Now she is a member of the ruling Central Committee. I told her, 'I have heard students everywhere and they all tell me they don't believe in communism, they're disillusioned'. She said, 'Not all think that way. It is a difficult problem. It's true many of the students are disillusioned with socialism. We have all suffered a great deal. We have to work together, we have to find solutions. I think things will change for the better'.
I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no facade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses—even in the teachers' houses—and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout China; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking.
Chinese students laughed or tittered whenever I said something outrageous. American teachers in China are allowed to say anything they want—presumably you wouldn't go so far as to denounce Deng or the Communist Party, but you can make jokes at their expense.
I read students a William Carlos Williams poem, 'Danse Russe', that goes,
If I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself
I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,
who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household.
I explained that, despite the notion the Chinese have of American conformity, despite their view of the American businessman, this is what people are like at heart.
After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner—whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat—turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-'50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous heroic poem by Mao that goes in part:
The mountains are dancing silver serpents,
The hills on the plain are shining elephants
I desire to compare our height with the skies.
We were Americans, we were going away and he wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces.