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scene from that period: heroic peasants or slaves endlessly rising up
against villainous, cowering war lords-a succession of identical
futile revolts, bred of oppression, ultimately leading to the One
Great Revolt that succeeded, to the true dawn of Chinese history.
*
I had had misgivings about my ignorance of Chinese history
and in one sense they were all too justified; in another, they were
irrelevant because many Chinese colleagues I talked with never even
referred to the e ra "before liberation."
In
official culture, millenia
of Chinese history seemed lost, downgraded to monotony; they are
present in the minds of specialists and in some collective uncon–
scious, informing the deep sense of pride and hope that seem to give
the Chinese the strength to be infinitely courteous
to
foreigners with–
out ever being obsequious. The Peking museum testified twice over
to the terrible simplification to which Chinese history had been
reduced: a history with only four heroes (including Stalin, whom even
the Soviets had to demote posthumously, but whom the Chinese,
for the time being, still ce lebrate as the successful modernizer
at all costs) and with a patte rn of the past that denies ambiguity and
complexity-h istory according to a primitive communist schema, a
rigid periodiza tion , simple, elementary, all-black and all-white, a
moral clarity that extinguishes all doubt.
In
the Christian tradition ,
perfection ended with the fall; in the Chinese scheme perfection lies
in the future, a triumph of communism that will mark a new era of
human history. The present Chinese elite, in fact, expresses an
ex travagant faith in some great future in twenty years or so.
My first view of Peking and of the official version of Chinese
history was bleak. And false. What is frozen in stone or dogma is
one thing; what is in the Chinese spirit is dynamic and changing. All
through my trip I sensed their still incredulous, coll ective relief that
the great nightmare of the cultural revolution had lifted .
That revolution was on the minds of eve ryone I met , as suffer–
ing endured (in some cases inflicted?), as a national trauma of
ungraspable magnitude . How often I heard variations on the com–
mon theme: forcibl e removal to the countryside, regardless of age
and health , under primitive conditions and cut offfrom one's family.
• The re-creation of even the most distant past in the image of the communist
present reaches perhaps its most risible extreme in the neolithic museum near the
magnificent Xian. There, in a reconstructed miniature neolithic village, the largest
building was labeled as hav in g been used for "discuss ion of public affa irs."
