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While the upper cadres were plowing fields and quarrying stones,
the young Red Guards (storm troopers by another name, and prob–
ably storm troopers who had mor,e license for spontaneous brutality
than their German counterparts, who were meticulous murderers
on command) ravaged a country's repositories of culture: libraries,
temples, laboratories, Some of my hosts pointed to the physical rem–
nants of destruction and recalled scenes of fighting on university
campuses.
Almost every Chinese I met had a tale of suffering-personal
variations on themes that by now are familiar to Westerners. The
stories were told without self-pity, but with a deep sense of national
loss and tragedy. By virtue of their immediacy, these tales informed
my lectures: the Chinese experiences, so vivid in their minds, were
analogous to earlier European suffering. In an orgy of egalitarian–
ism, a country's elite, as we would call the chief victims, was
hounded, often to death. Individual stories dramatized the horrors,
as when a young widow told me of her husband, an eminent doctor,
who in the clinic he had headed was allowed to die for want of
proper, easily available treatment, just as her father was condemned
to perish through similar deliberate neglect. Some acknowledged
that they had accepted the logic of persecution. One historian from an
upper-class, Mandarin background told me that in banishment he
had thought he was expiating the sins of privilege. Perhaps that kind
of ideological internalizing lingers on; he told me that he was proud
that his children had at last broken the intellectual spell and were
manual workers. (He, on the other hand, had a telephone, a sign of
renewed privilege and wealth, for the phone cost him approximately
ten times his rent.)
Fellow academics lamented the enduring damage to institu–
tions. During the cultural revolution, the universities were swamped
by academic illiterates whose only qualification was political fanati–
cism. As a consequence, the ratio today of teachers to students at
Peking University is one to two. Those illiterates, appointed earlier,
remain, to the dismay of some of the returned scholars. (In the West,
we had a mild and self-inflicted version of the cu ltural revolution,
when universities were assaulted by similar waves of resentment and
misunderstood egalitarianism , when young assistants were
appointed for their progressive credentials without regard to aca–
demic distinction. At the time, continental universities had their
Mandarins and their Maoists, and the battle between them
enfeebled our universities as well.)
