China and the West

Miller, Arthur. Salesman in Beijing [ID D34735].
There is another China here than the one I glimpsed five years ago and the one I have read about. In those societies the leveling dogma could never have been so openly contradicted, nor would it have been greeted with free laughter…
There is much tree planting going on, and along the road in from the airport hundreds of acres of nursery containing sophora mainly, but a few other quick-growing species I sould not identify, there being no leaves yet. An immense number of apartment-block guildings, some of them completed and occupied, has filled up whole neighborhoods that were open land five years ago…
One cannot help wondering why the Chinese xould not have accomplished more by this time, and the answer seems partly their stupefying ideology, which has crippled their natural ingenuity, stunned them. They themselves seem to feel something similar now ; they are apparently no longer interested in being angry at Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four who led them backward, and simply want to get on with modernizing the country…
The current hop is that if a controlled amount of private enterprise is unleashed, the national wealth will multiply. In Chinese terms, it is an unacknowledged recognition of what has long been denied : that it may be necessary for a bourgeois interval to precede socialism, that primitive accumulation and development is necessary, after all, before there is something worth socializing. But as contradictory as it sounds, the values of Communism and feudalism are kin – the stress on selfless service rather than individual aggrandizement, the concept of fealty to a hallowed leader or social unit rather than a one-to-one relationship between the individual and his inalienable rights, and higher authority extending up to God…
An interesting short discussion with Ying the other moring on China's isolation led directly to a talk about the two thought-systems China has laid upon herself : first the Confucian, and on top of that, The Marxist. Correct behavior is decreed from cradle to grave – obligations to family and state, relations between the sexes – a veritable web is woven in the Confucian system to catch the individual wherever he tries to move. On top of this grid another, the Marxist, set of obligations is overlaid. But the heavy emphasis on chastity in Chinese Marxist practice is unique – chastity, that is, as a social good. After all, Marx had an illegitimate son and Engels several children out of wedlock…
Yesterday the Chinese Government announced that it was canceling all cultural and athletic cooperation with the United States because of the Hu Na affair. This nineteen-year-old tennis player has decided not to return here…
At the Foreign Languages Institute, where I spent an hour in the afternoon with a dozen faculty and thirty or so graduate students, I learned that there is really no set system behind their decisions as to what foreign works to translate. Heller's Catch-22 is now very popular, and Bellow's Humbold's Gift. Agatha Christie, however, beats everyone else, with at least fice different translations of the same book… Perhaps my awareness of this contributed to my feeling that students and faculty here had no great forward motion, no driving philosophical concept, out of which to form new ideas. It was not an atmosphere of fear of expressing unorthodox thought but of not having yna, it seemed to me…
Whether speaking to foreigner of Chinese, one is constantly told that most of the people support the Deng program. At the same time there is always a line of applicants at the American Embassy seeking emigration visas. This may be not so much a contradiction as proof that there is less difficulty and stigma connected with emigrating than there as before Deng Xiaoping took over…
April 19. Last evening to dinner with Gladys Yang and her husband, Hsien Liu Yang. April 20. In the evening we return to visit Hsien Liu Yang and Gladys Yang, and their two guests, the cartoonist Hua jünwu and Zhang Jie, whose stremely popular novella Gladys has anthologized and which has been made into a hit movie…
April 24. Train from Beijing to Datong… The famous grottoes and hour's dirve from the coal and textile town of Datong are a kind of celestial theatre carved into the sandstone mountain in the mid-fifth century. Vaulted idol-houses, actually, where immense Buddhas sit, one of them four or so stories in height, surrounded with dancing attendants, saints, women servants, and guardians – all carved into the walls of the place in a single integral piece directly out of the rock within the room itself, rather than borught from outside...