FRITZ STERN
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rial strength. But not every adversary of the Soviet Union is Peking's
friend: time and again I raised the question of Poland, where
events were taking place that seemed to me among the most momen–
tous in the history of Bolshevism since the revolution of 1917, and
the Chinese were evasive. They were pleased by the anti-Soviet
thrust but disturbed by the withering of the Party. They preferred
to draw their economic and social lessons from Hungary and
Yugoslavia. It is piquant to think of remote Hungary as a partial
model for some Chinese province, but in their pragmatism and
their anti-Soviet orthodoxy, the Chinese are willing to test all
manner of models.
Certainly pragmatism is the credo of the upper cadres, and the
higher up the ladder of political power, the freer the championing of
nonorthodoxy. The extraordinary Vice President of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, a veteran diplomat and public servant,
Huan Xiang, was utterly candid about the Chinese need for partial
models from abroad. China, he asserted, would find her own brand
of sociali sm in the next twenty years. The first condition had already
been met, the abandonment of past mistakes. The next stage would
involve selective borrowings. As he put it, the adoption of new tech–
niques from foreign countries was like adding grafts to the body: the
grafts must prove compatible or the body would reject them. He
described how the Chinese in different provinces were experiment–
ing with different forms adapted from other nations. The new bor–
rowed forms had to conform to Chinese traditions and exigencies.
If
they did, they would help China find its path to a successful,
humane socialism. He added that the Chinese had already resolved
the problem of succession-which, I thought to myself, no totalitar–
ian regime before it had solved.
But is his prudent optimism warranted, will a billion Chinese
find the way that no other people in this century has found? Or is it
more likely that there will be many disappointments, many zig-zags
in the road to socialism, including a new outburst of xenophobia and
a return to a still more tightly controlled society?
I left China wondering whether I had seen totalitarianism in
remission or in permanent retreat. There had been fleeting incidents
of coercion, of Chinese afraid to talk to us, there had been stories of
exit visas denied, of families forcibly separated. I knew that beyond
these incidents and stories was the simple fact that vast areas of
