Fang Lizhi is an astrophysicist who is the closest thing there is to a Chinese Sakharov. After the Chinese government’s murderous suppression of the democracy movement in July 1989, Fang spent about a year inside the American embassy until he was allowed to leave for Britain. Before his departure, he wrote an essay in which he discusses the “technique of forgetting history.” It is, he says, a Chinese Communist device “to force the whole country to forget its history . . . to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness.” His immediate concern is that the details of the Tiananmen massacre will fade, but his point is larger:

If inside China, the whole of society has been coerced into forgetfulness by the authorities, in the West the act of forgetting can be observed in the work of a number of influential writers who have consciously ignored history and have willingly complied with the “standardized public opinion” of the Communists’ censorial system.

What gives Fang’s point all the more weight is that throughout China’s modern history, Westerners have had a special custodial responsibility for that country’s cultural and historical memories. For upheaval, followed by chaos, followed by totalitarianism made the traditional homegrown scholarly pursuits difficult, if not impossible. Yet in the past forty years, the Western Sinological community, convinced on the whole that the Communist takeover in 1949 ushered in a better regime than the one it successfully overthrew, has been more than passively complicit in the process Fang describes.

To be sure, a new attitude toward the Beijing regime has been created by the events of June 1989, not only among American Sinologists but among American intellectuals generally. A measure of this change is that a generation ago, one mark of a truly enlightened American was his insistence that his government “stop pretending that China doesn’t exist.” Now, as likely as not, he is apt to complain that the present Republican President is just too soft on Chinese Communism. But it remains to be seen whether this sudden new propensity to tell something of the truth about post-1949 China will persist and whether it will issue in some serious revaluation of the Sinologists’ past illusions and mistakes.

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How bad was it, then, in pre-Tiananmen days? As always, where Western attitudes toward Communist regimes are concerned, one is grateful to Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims for collecting the assessments of the typical visitor. Thus David Rockefeller once praised China for producing “dedicated administration, . . . high morale, . . . community of purpose.” Simone de Beauvoir called life in China “exceptionally pleasant.” Felix Greene thought “there was no jockeying for power or personal rivalry” in Beijing as there was in the Kremlin.

But these, after all, were laymen who were not necessarily supposed to know any better. What about a group from whom one would expect more—people steeped in the history and the language of China, and supported in their studies by great universities, rich foundations, and the federal treasury? Of these, probably the single most representative figure was Professor Emeritus John K. Fairbank of Harvard, who was also the most influential figure in the development of China studies in America. Back in 1972, after President Nixon established conspicuous political relations with China, Fairbank was asked by Foreign Affairs to provide the long view, which he did in an article whose conclusion was that “the Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.”

It is noteworthy that by the time Fairbank pronounced this confident judgment, the worst excesses of the Maoist regime were already on the record and, considering China’s self-enforced isolation, reasonably well-documented. For example, there was the careful interviewing of Chinese refugees by Miriam and Ivan London, whose work in the aggregate produced a picture radically at variance with the conventional Sinophilia of the time. Moreover, in 1971, the Senate Judiciary Committee had published a minor, though unheralded, classic, 28 pages long, entitled “The Human Cost of Communism in China” and written by Richard Walker, then a professor at the University of South Carolina. Walker’s estimates of “casualities to Communism in China” ranged between 34 and 64 million. In the years since, as more facts have been made known—many through casual admission by the Chinese government itself—Walker’s work has held up very well. Even “mainstream” Sinologists will now quietly acknowledge it, although its implications for the profession’s intellectual and moral standards these past decades have yet to be squarely faced.

Indeed, it was not the academic experts but a number of journalists (themselves exceptional within the media world) who first challenged the kind of attitude expressed in Fairbank’s Foreign Affairs article of 1972. In the late 1970’s Fox Butterfield of the New York Times and John Fraser of the Toronto Globe and Mail pioneered in reporting on Chinese dissidence. In 1982, Butter-field in particular published China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, which marked a revolution in foreign commentary about China. Since he had been Beijing bureau chief for the Times, as well as a student of Chinese history, and since he had proper credentials and background, his forthright account of what he had learned from individual Chinese about the real character of life in the People’s Republic could not easily be dismissed. The book has recently been reissued1 and serves as a useful backdrop to a group of new volumes which carry the imprint of the 1989 Beijing massacres and the subsequent repressions.

Steven W. Mosher’s China Misperceived: From American Illusions to Chinese Reality2 is a good starting point in the examination of these new books, for his dissection of “ideological flights of fancy” among scholars, academics, and others has a prima-facie plausibility that would have been unappreciated even eighteen months ago.

Mosher himself, now the director of the Asian Studies Center at the Claremont Institute in California, once seemed destined for conventional Sinology. He left the Navy in 1973 to take up the study of China in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and later went on to work on a dissertation at Stanford. When in 1979 he departed for field research in China, he was, he says, “favorably disposed toward the Communist revolution,” which, he then believed, “had created a society that was egalitarian, just, unselfish, and liberated.” But his observations of the harsh realities of China’s village life changed his mind. In the end his relationship with Stanford was also poisoned; in something of an academic cause célèbre, the university severed its ties with him, preferring instead to maintain relations with a Chinese regime bent on punishing Mosher for his criticisms of its social practices.

Mosher’s subject was China’s birth-control programs and their coercive aspects, especially forced abortions, and the controversy proved prophetic, since his criticisms seem finally to have been accepted by mainstream demographers. In Slaughter of the Innocents,3 John Aird, formerly a senior China specialist at the U.S. Census Bureau and a contributor to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee’s periodic reports on China, has produced a history of China’s birth-control programs which confirms Mosher’s earlier assessment. Aird’s provocative title is justified by his highly detailed review of the available evidence, and his dispassionate methodology—some 70 pages of footnotes to about 110 pages of text—makes his indictment doubly devastating.

Thus Mosher was ahead of his time, even as his colleagues are now trying to catch up. Happily, his new book, which assembles many embarrassing pronouncements about China, is right up to date. Indeed, it now seems likely that many in the Sinological profession who previously did nothing but condescend to tough criticisms of Chinese Communism will merely coopt some of his outlook, implying that they, too, shared his skepticism about the Chinese regime all along.

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But leaning on a “heretic” like Mosher is not necessary, since it is now possible to come to an emphasis on China’s political deficiencies through a much safer and more acceptable academic route. A case in point is Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia, whose earlier interest in China concerned warlords in the 1920’s and factionalism within the Communist party in later decades. (His wife, Roxane Witke, wrote a biography of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s widow and the most famous member of the “Gang of Four.”) Now, in a collection of his essays called China’s Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy,4 Nathan offers an analysis essentially derived from Tocqueville’s famous aphorism about the dangers faced by an incompetent dictatorship when it attempts to reform itself. As he sees it, the political dissidence of the 1980’s originated in Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. There was at the same time, in Nathan’s view, a growing American interest in Chinese human-rights abuses made possible by the openness of the American political system to Chinese students in the United States (Deng’s reforms having allowed thousands of Chinese to study here). A gradual deterioration of relations thus took place between the students here and the regime there, and then a subsequent deterioration in relations between the regime and intellectuals at home.

The “democracy movement” in China was also convoluted. According to Nathan, many of the activists had a quite limited agenda, and were not interested in challenging the basic validity of “socialism.” Others wanted a more modern regime, better suited to managing the rapid economic growth initiated by Deng’s “four modernizations” of 1979. Inside the government itself, many of the reformers wanted a transition from totalitarianism, but only to a “new authoritarianism.” They cited South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan as the kind of polity best suited to China’s condition as a developing country. But at the same time, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent some of the others, were undergoing democratic revolutions of their own.

In assessing future prospects, Nathan seems to think that nothing much can happen until the American Political Science Association agrees upon the proper analytical model. There is no doubt, as Nathan writes, “that the large number of democratic transitions in recent years have required political scientists to develop new perspectives on the problem.” It reminds one of the old saw about the bumblebee, whose ability to fly seemingly contradicts the laws of aerodynamics. The bee, of course, is ignorant of such paradigms, and flies on anyway. So, too, the benighted peoples of the world who, having had no seminars in comparative politics at any of our great universities, press ahead in their “Eurocentrism” and in their struggle for capitalism and democracy, even as professors assure them that such are impossible, even unworthy, aspirations.

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Until recently, Chinese themselves have been conspicuously absent from the discussion of these matters. Over the years, we had come to know the dissidents of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Some of them had become world figures in either literature or politics. But we had never been able to personalize China’s situation in this way, and we had effectively no knowledge of any local heroes. No doubt this is a comment on both Chinese society and our own, but it is slowly starting to change; though we are far from having a comfortable Chinese perspective, there are at least things to read.

Liu Binyan, for example, is a sixty-five-year-old Chinese journalist who is now writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. One way or another, he has been a victim of every major Chinese political “campaign” since 1957, but he was allowed to come to this country in 1988. China’s Crisis, China’s Hope5 is based on five lectures he gave last year at Harvard.

Trends of political thought within the Chinese intelligentsia are not easy to categorize. The difficulty arises, in part, because the intellectuals sometimes think themselves the heirs of the scholar-mandarins who were the ruling group in imperial times by dint of greater learning and superior virtue, while at other times they think themselves heir to the reformist and revolutionary thinkers and activists of this century, who brought down the old order and struggled over what should replace it. But in all events, they are accustomed to a role as the nation’s conscience, and are certainly used to a high standing and a degree of deference that their Westeren counterparts do not enjoy. It is quite clear that Mao and the party did not like them; as Liu stresses, the intellectuals were singled out for special brutalities and humiliations, not merely liquidation. But he also thinks that intellectuals often responded by even greater efforts to demonstrate their loyalty; at the least, China’s intellectuals “were far more compliant” in their dealings with the Communist party than were their counterparts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And for quite a while, the Communist party retained its prestige among them.

For Liu, the problem is the alienation of the party from its own ideals, its various abuses which Liu and his cohort courageously exposed. Yet he seems not to have given up the hope “that the false can be turned into the genuine,” that is, that the nominally democratic mechanisms of the state might someday become real. Liu is obviously a brave man who embodies more of a sensibility than he does a political program. He foresees a slow dissolution of the apparatus, but the changes he envisions are more of degree than of a fundamental kind.

It is therefore interesting to contrast the constrained hopes of this older survivor with the experiences of a man but a third his age. Shen Tong, now a biology student at Brandeis, was at age twenty-one one of the principal leaders of the Tiananmen demonstrations. In Almost a Revolution (written with Marianne Yen)6 he has produced what seems to be the first book-length memoir by one of the important participants. Naturally talented academically—Shen survived the brutal national competition for a coveted spot at Beijing University—he is also politically precocious. He tells us that two of his grandparents committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 rather than be “paraded in the village square wearing dunce caps and humiliating placards.” Shen’s father worked as a translator for China’s Foreign Ministry. Born in 1968, with no direct experience of the worst of Mao’s excesses, Shen is of the generation that takes the outer world rather than the condition of “preliberation” China as a standard. If, for the elders, China’s circumstances are wonderously improved over those of a generation ago, younger Chinese know enough about Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, or South Korea to turn these into relevant examples. Thus, by the time young Shen and his equally gifted colleagues showed up on the nation’s finest, most prestigious, campus, their obviously brilliant though highly eclectic and undisciplined intellectualism seemed destined to be turned on the regime. The regime, of course, regarded them as ignorant ingrates.

Shen offers us a day-by-day account of the crisis as it developed from April 15, 1989—the day of the death of the highly regarded reformist premier Hu Yaobang—to the massacres of June 3-4, until his own escape from the country. In the students’ efforts to assimilate almost every strand of Western thought no matter how contradictory the parts, in their intense debates among themselves, in the noble futility of their outburst, they called to mind Peking University in the 1920’s, and the efforts then to work a comparable political miracle. But however historians measure this latest event, it is already part of world culture. Now that he is a free man, Shen tells us that he has met Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, and even served as a grand marshal of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Atlanta. His compatriot, and the best known of the students, Wuer Kaixi, has also been to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis.

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It is, then, likely that many thousands of young Chinese will settle in for the long haul here in the United States and that they will, in fact, have to achieve a proper balance between future political activity and the other ordinary business of living. They are apt to develop a complicated outlook as they attempt to keep their relationship to two widely separated countries in common focus. It is in this connection that Bette Bao Lord’s Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic7 has a particular interest, even beyond its obvious elegance and evocative power.

Mrs. Lord, Chinese by birth, is married to President Reagan’s ambassador to China, Winston Lord, a man whose involvement in Chinese-American relations goes back to his work in 1971 as an aide to Henry Kissinger during the latter’s now-fabled secret mission to China. Mrs. Lord, it will be remembered, is the author of the best-selling novel of a few years ago, Spring Moon, and former Ambassador Lord was conspicuous among the “new China lobby” for his outspoken criticism of President Bush’s low-key response to the Tiananmen massacre.

Mrs. Lord had an interesting life even before all of this. In some respects, it foreshadowed the experiences that a newer generation of Chinese-Americans, and Chinese in America, seem destined to have. She was born in 1938 in Shanghai. Her family fled to the Chinese interior ahead of advancing Japanese armies. She left the country in 1946, accompanying her father, a Nationalist Chinese diplomat, to New York. The family did not return after the Communist takeover in 1949, and Mrs. Lord herself did not visit China until she was thirty-five; later, of course, she returned as the wife of the American ambassador.

Like so many of the extraordinary Chinese our country has come to know, she has a grasp of both cultural traditions at their highest. In particular, she has a great gift for marrying the English language to sensibilities it was not designed to depict. Her book is a collection both of brilliantly-done vignettes—renderings of personal tales she has been told—and, at the same time, a complex reflection on the meaning of these personal tragedies in the context of her own life in both her countries. This is thus a political book, in that it is designed to keep attention on the brutalities in China, but it is also a deeper rumination.

It may be that the latter part will be of greater interest over the longer run. For example, some have likened the arrival and the now seemingly indefinite stay of thousands of Chinese in our country to the flight of European intellectuals to America in the face of the Nazis, or even to the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. Whatever the differences in circumstances or scale, it is clear that the U.S. is now the home, and will remain the home, of some truly formidable people who will inevitably attain to positions of high standing. They will, of course, be Americans—indeed, exemplary Americans—and yet like other immigrants before them, they will retain a special interest in their ancestral homeland. How they will act on China, and how in turn that will influence that nation as a whole, remains to be seen. But we are aided in our understanding of how this might work itself out by Mrs. Lord, who reminds us that the methods will be intelligent and subtle.

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As for professional students, analysts, and historians of China here in America, there is a ripple effect in the making. Just as the worldwide clamor for Western-style democratic capitalism has dissolved the conventional paradigms, the old enthusiasm of Sinologists for the New China may well have to bow to the testimony of those who have actually experienced it. And when recent events conspire to destroy the received interpretations of China’s history, but before anything has yet appeared to replace them, the result can be striking.

For example, Professor Jonathan Spence of Yale is probably the man best suited to write the one-volume retrospective history of modern China. His past work has been unusually creative, insightful, even arresting, not at all in thrall to the reigning jargon. He has written about emperors, missionaries, foreign advisers, literary figures, dispossessed peasants. The Search for Modern China8 would almost certainly have been the most significant synthesis yet written, and yet the reader—and maybe even the author, too—must now be unsatisfied by it.

A decade ago, in The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981), all of Spence’s skills were present in an account of China’s last century as seen through lives of three representative intellectuals. The book had the style and the assurance of a man who knew where things were going and was pleased enough with the direction. But now a story once thought exciting turns out to be depressing even for Spence himself. It shows in the writing. In searching for modern China, Spence seems to find merely the same old violence, upheavals, natural disasters, famines, and wars, but not the ability to impose much redeeming social importance on them. Most of all there is the plain fact that today’s China is no longer in the vanguard of anything. China was the great failure in the historic year 1989: no velvet revolution, no bamboo curtain demolished once-and-for-all, not even very much glasnost. It is almost as big a disappointment as Vietnam.

All this has had a sobering effect of the Sinologists, but the profession still is not ready for real revisionism, revisionism that would cast a new glance at Western imperialism, at the Chinese civil wars, at “Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought,” at the global vitality of Western liberal values. Of course no such revisionist interpretation will be possible until the profession comes to terms with its own less than honorable past; on the evidence of at least some among this recent crop of books, Sinologists are still too far from engaging in that kind of—shall we call it?—“self-criticism.”

1 Times Books, 492 pp., $24.95.

2 Basic Books, 260 pp., $19.95.

3 A.E.I. Press, 196 pp., $16.95.

4 Columbia University Press, 242 pp., $24.50.

5 Harvard University Press, 146 pp., $22.50.

6 Houghton Mifflin, 342 pp., $19.95.

7 Knopf, 245 pp., $19.95.

8 Norton, 876 pp., $29.95.

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