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PARTISAN REVIEW
all look the same to a foreigner-a foreigner who may have stayed
in China for fifty years like myself? I mean they seem to have the
same kind of
feat~res,
the same cast of countenance, the same expres–
sionless, mysterious look that may denote stupidity or racial wisdom
or cunning or benevolence or patience or ruthlessness or any of those
virtues and vices that, rightly or wrongly, have been attributed to
you as a nation. I will not, of course, include you. You are a so–
called intellectual, a 'mental worker,' as Mencius put it, not a 'phys–
ical worker.' You with your plastic-rimmed glasses and your cynical
smiles and shrugs, are, to me, not a perfect Chinese. You belong,
rather, to the Universal Republic of Intellectuals. (You see, I am
flattering you again. Will you drink your beer off so as to acknowledge
my compliment?) But the majority of the young men of your country
are not like you. They puzzle me because they are Chinese. And
they are also the masses-the mob."
"May I ask what is the difference between the masses or the
mob and----,a flock?"
"A very clever question. Will you be satisfied if I say that a
flock is the masses converted, or the masses saved? But I am really
not the man to answer your question. For after such a number from
my own flock (oh, those rebellious goats!) have stood up and de–
nounced me, I must say frankly that I know as little about my flock as
about the masses. The masses are so fickle, so silent, so unresponsive,
that I have never been sure of their conversion. One day you may
think you have won them over, and the next day you will find they
have again slipped out of your fold and that they are grazing in the
happy pasture of pagan freedom. Of course, I may still win them
back. But how hard my work would be if I should find them penned
up in my enemy's enclosure, and that they are happy there, happy
to live with the butcher and the devil! The masses can be won over,
but perhaps not by me. It is not that I am old. It is because I am
an intellectual like you-lam not one of them. And moreover, in
my particular case, I am a foreigner. I can never become a Chinese,
in spite of all my amiability and my diligent studies in your culture
and civilization. Even you, for instance, are not treating me as a
Chinese. You are treating me simply as a fellow member of your
Republic of Intellectuals.
Am
I right?
"Now the Communists I had to deal with were people not like
