Fritz Stern
CLIO IN CHINA
I arrived in Peking for my first visit to China in early June
1981, invited by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and by one
of its offsprings, the Institute of World History, to lecture on recent
European history. The time was propitious: Deng Xiaoping had
resolved that in the aftermath of the cultural revolution "pragma–
tism," the experience of facts, and not ideology, should determine
policy and govern the minds of the ruling elites . But the subject was
delicate: for communist totalitarianism, with its prescription of uni–
versal dogma, the" historical front" has central importance, and I
wondered what combination of flexibility and rigidity I would find. I
was aware of my own prejudice. As a child of the 1920s and 1930s, I
came to China with a hatred of all totalitarianism, a hatred nurtured
by many visits to repressive societies of all political stripes.
The reception at the airport was charm and courtesy, a mixture
that continued for the entire three weeks. Over and over again dur–
ing the first few days I recalled my visit to the Arbatov Institute in
Moscow in 1979 and made mental comparisons. My Chinese hosts
were beguiling, while the Soviets had been stiff, unbending, end–
lessly correct.
*
The longer my wife and I stayed in China, the more
my appreciation and apprehension grew: the style was so open and
generous that the sudden and relatively infrequent reminders of
intimidation and indoctrination impressed us all the more forcibly.
And day after day the same self-rebuke: How can anyone be confi–
dent about any impression or interpretation of a country so vast, so
elusive, so enticing, and so marvelously alien; and,
a fortiori,
how
can a stranger to Chinese history and culture grasp anything at all?
And yet impressions crowded in, and what follows is a record of
those impressions and of tentative observations about what I learned
as I was teaching in China .
• The Chinese sentiments about the Soviets found instant expression: at the air–
port, the venerable, deeply sympathetic director of the Institute remarked in an
aside and with a knowing smile, " I also read your speech at the International
Historical Congress in 1975 about the major Soviet presentation," a speech in
which I had attacked the shoddiness, dogmatism, and sterility of the principal
Soviet paper. My speech in turn was attacked in
Kommunisl.
