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social life remained under the strictest kind of social control. But I
left China exhilarated at the thought that the Chinese might approx–
imate their vision of the future, worried lest the harshness of eco–
nomic reality might thwart these hopes. As a Westerner, deeply
impressed by the spirit of the people I had met, I thought it already a
great victory of the human spirit that one could say that the future
was open and uncertain. Ifin the next two decades the Chinese were
to achieve their own synthesis of freedom and order, then our cen–
tury-for all its violence and horror-will have recorded a great and
dramatic victory. The West needs to see China not simply in its
geopolitical position as an exposed bulwark against the Soviet
Union, and not as some gigantic market that might or might not
beckon, but as a country and a civilization whose future destiny will
in some sense also constitute a test of whether the values and institu–
tions of the West-values so often twisted and degraded when
applied to China-do indeed bear universal and enduring elements.
In the drama of world history, the Chinese future and the European
past remain linked.
We regret the death of
BERNARD DE BOER,
who was one of the few
distributors of literary journals.
