564
PARTISAN REVIEW
who smoked cigarettes-even though many favored brands from my home
state of North Carolina.
But there were also subtler changes at work. Beijing University had
previously been home to one of my favorite statues of Mao Tse-tung. In
front of a central building he had stood, his hands clasped behind his back,
facing into the wind, perhaps the wind of change. Though Mao was already
dead when I first visited Beijing University, it hadn't occurred to me that
this
statue would have been toppled by the time I returned. I rather imagined
that at worst Mao would simply lose his currency, but his statue remain a
landmark-a bit like the Confederate soldier on the front quad of my own
university in Chapel Hill. Mao's statue was a casualty, however, not just of
shifting political currents but of a deep-seated ambivalence on the part of
young Chinese intellectuals towards their past. Not only recent symbols such
as Mao but ancient figures ofChinese culture were subject to attack. Students
grappled with the challenge offiguring outjust what it did and should mean to
be Chinese even while accepting certain Western influences and proposing
innovations of their own. They had not lost their pride in being Chinese, but it
was coupled paradoxically with a humiliation at whatever seemed to have
made China weak in the modern world.
Among the bits ofWestern influence at work in China, of course, were
partial stirrings ofcapitalism. When I gathered with my student friends to
talk
about the prospects for democracy it was in a privately owned and operated
restaurant housed on the University campus. And though there was talk of
inflation overall, this restaurant drew praise for providing us more good food
than we could eat, and quite enough beer, for the equivalent of a little over a
dollar a head. Of course even that was an expensive meal for Chinese
students who would ordinarily pay fifty cents or less for a dining hall meal,
carrying their own metal dishes with them, and using a spoon rather than
chopsticks because it meant a single implement would do for soup and other
dishes, and because it wouldn't
full
through a mesh bag.
Around the table, my new friends
(I
had met only one of these stu–
dents before) praised my handling ofchopsticks-a routine sort ofcompliment
for a Chinese to pay a foreigner. They deferentially asked my opinion ofand
advice for the Chinese student movement though I had but recently arrived.
And gradually, after a little prodding, they began to tell me more of what
they thought lay ahead. Some expected real democracy in a year or so,
others wondered whether they would see it in their lifetime. All did think it
inevitable, a matter simultaneously of historical necessity and popular will.
They told me that intellectuals had a central role to playas the conscience of
the nation and as the source of a new vision of Chinese culture. They relived
inspiring moments from the April 27th march when students had broken
