It matters little whether we are rich or poor;
we 400 million Chinese are today in serious difficulties.We live in a house which is about to collapse,
a boat which, leaking badly, is about to topple over.
We are on a pile of firewood which has already caught fire;
indeed, our position is no better than that of a bird in a cage,
a fish in a frying pan,
or a prisoner in a cell.We are treated like slaves; no, we are treated worse than slaves.
We are treated like horses and cattle or dogs and sheep
that are to be pushed around as our masters please,
or cut into pieces whenever they choose.This tragedy of enormous proportion is unprecedented in our history,
a history that has lasted 20 dynasties or 4000 years.
The decline of our sage's teachings
and the impending extermination of the very life of the nation
--how can any tragedy be any more painful than this one?
It is so painful that words are inadequate to describe it...In short, there is no way of saving our country except to arouse and enhance our will power.
Let not a single moment pass without thinking about our own duties.
A prairie fire begins with the striking of a match,
and every river originates from a trickle.If we 400 million Chinese bother to arouse ourselves,
we can generate enough heat to do whatever we please,
and succeed as well.Who, then, can say that our nation cannot be saved?
(quoted in Vohra The Chinese Revolution, 1900-1949, pp 2-3, 11 [DS772.5 .V64], reformatted for emphasis)
Last year we called him the Foreign Devil,
Now we call him 'Mr. Foreigner, Sir'.
We weep over the departed but smile when a new wife takes her place.
Ah, the affairs of the world are like the turning of a wheel:
When 'Sir' goes out the door,
Even old Mr. Wang gets out of his way,
For fear he should get a taste of the foreigner's whip.
When 'Sir' buys something
There's no question of haggling over the price
lest the police in the street intervene on his behalf.
When he comes to your house
Your wife and your daughter are both at his disposal,
And he even has the nerve to thank you for your hospitality.
When he goes home, drunk,
You escort him, all smiles.
'If you have time, come again tomorrow, a little earlier'.
If he utters a word it is accorded the respect of an Imperial decree.The Christian convert, the Christian convert,
Strides around the capital so arrogant.
Last year he could not bear the knives of the Boxers,
Now he is like a tiger come down from the mountains...
If one word is out of order the convert rages,
Give him a little money and he is all smiles.
The convert's scorching breath can devour people.
He wants to be the foreigner's tame rabbit.
The daughters of high officials escort him at banquets.
The daughters-in-law of Ministers act as his go-between...
Alas! Oh for more knives like the Boxers
To deal with the Chinese Christian converts!(quoted in Christopher Hibbert The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911
pp 358-359 [DS740.4 .H48 1970])
The Great WallOur wonderful Great Wall!
This engineering feat has left its mark on the map, and is probably known to everyone with any education the whole world over.Actually, all it has ever done is work many conscripts to death --it never kept out the Huns. Now it is merely an ancient relic, but its final ruin will not take place for a while, and it may even be preserved.
I am always conscious of being surrounded by a Great Wall. The stonework consists of old bricks reinforced at a later date by new bricks. These have combined to make a wall that hems us in.
When shall we stop reinforcing the Great Wall with new bricks?
A curse on this wonderful Great Wall!
(in Schurmann and Schell Republican China p. 160)
All talk directed against the peasant movement must be speedily set right. All the wrong measures taken by the revolutionary authorities concerning the peasant movement must be speedily changed. Only thus can the future of the revolution be benefited. For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China's central, southern, and northern provinces several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at the head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing, or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.The main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against corrupt officials in the cities and against the bad practises and customs in the rural areas. In force and momentum the attack is tempestuous; those who bow before it survive and those who resist perish. As a result, the privileges which the feudal landlords enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces. Every bit of the dignity and prestige built up by the landlords is being swept into the dust. With the collapse of the power of the landlords, the peasant associations have now become the sole organs of authority and the popular slogan "All power to the peasant associations" has become a reality...
The peasants' revolt disturbed the gentry's sweet dreams. When the news from the countryside reached the cities, it caused immediate uproar among the gentry. Soon after my arrival in Changsha, I met all sorts of people and picked up a good deal of gossip. From the middle social strata upwards to the Kuomintang right-wingers there was not a single person who did not sum up the whole business in the phrase "It's terrible!" Under the impact of the "It's terrible!" school then flooding the city, even quite revolutionary-minded people became downhearted as they pictured the events in the countryside in their mind's eye; and they were unable to deny the word "terrible". Even quite progressive people said, "though terrible, it is inevitable in a revolution". In short, nobody could altogether deny the word "terrible". But, as already mentioned, the fact is that the great peasant masses have risen to fulfill their historic mission and that the forces or rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces or rural feudalism. The patriarch-feudal class of local tyrants, evil gentry, and lawless landlords has formed the basis for autocratic government for thousands of years and it is the cornerstone of imperialism, warlordism, and corrupt officialdom. To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the national revolution. This is a marvelous feat never before achieved, not just in 40, but in thousands of years. It's fine. It is not "terrible" at all. It is anything but "terrible"...
(this goes on and is worth reading in its entirety: "Report on an investigation of the agrarian movement in Hunan")
Events in China since 1976 have bred a certain humility among those who study this vast and fascinating country. It is rare now to find people who will sally forth and say anything with ceratinty, about almost any aspect of China; just as rare are political activists who still feel a strong pull from Beijing. The image of something new, unique, progressive, diabolical, fascinating, attractive, loathsome captured the minds of foreign observers of all stripes for four decades, roughly dated perhaps from the publication of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China. Surely there was something coherent there that could be loved or attacked, admired or reviled. We thought we knew what that image was. Now, much if not all of it seems to have been an illusion.The Chinese revolution was never as liberating as progressives thought, as threatening as Cold Warriors thought, as dynamic as developmentalists thought. It did not change nearly as mucuh in China as we thought. Perhaps it did not change all that much, it is possible to hear people say today. Perhaps it was as bad, if not worse, as its enemies said.
So, we live in a quieter time, but also a sadder time because the results of this century's greatest revolution now sit tarnished. The harsh glare of reality has revealed China to be human: a big, poor, proud county buffeted by internal and external forces that are often beyond its control; a country with immense developmental problems about which very little can be done in the 'short run' that most of us spend our lives in. And it is, of course, not just China. We live in a time of lost mastery, when no nation stands as a beacon of hope and progress, when all nations wrestle with seemingly intractable problems. What is remarkable is that a sober, conservative mood should strike nations as diverse as China and the United States at about the same time, just as radical currents came simultaneously in the 1960s.
Sober reflections and quiet moods carry over into scholarship as well, of course, and so it perhaps is not a surprise that the field of contemporary China studies, in its mainstream, has been struck dumb by events since Mao Zedong's death. It still is impossible to find a single book that does much more than narrate the events of the past seven years, let alone seeks to relate them to what went before, and above all what scholars said about what went before. It is much more common to hear remarks about chucking out hundreds of books, now rendered irrelevant by events. Some of the major figures in the field have had virtually nothing to say. There have been, of course, varieties of I-told-you-sos written by people in whom the Chinese revolution awakened little sympathy or reflection. But we are talking about people who connected in some way, for good or ill, with four decades of events in China suffused with awe, mystery, fundamental change, and the deepest human emotions.
(from Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 1983 China from Mao to Deng: the politics and economics of socialist development [Bruce Cummings] pg 3)
It seemed to me that China cast a kind of magic spell over Americans and other Westerners. There was nothing new in this. It had been going on since the French philosophes of the 18th century, who imagined that the ancient sage Confucius had created a perfectly harmonious government which China was still following. In the late 19th century, when a current of missionary zeal swept churches and college campuses in the United States, Americans dreamed of converting China to Christianity and 'saving' China in a single generation. At the turn of the century, as Americans became terrified by the specter of what was then termed overproduction, a new image arose --that of the fabulous China market, the 400 million customers who would buy up the excess of American manufacturers. During WW II, when we were fighting Japan, we looked to Chiang Kai-shek as a valiant democrat leading China into the free world. All these images were more the projection of our own myths than a hard look at reality. Indeed, they contained a measure of cultural condescension, an unwillingness to look at things from the Chinese perspective.(from Fox Butterfield Alive in the Bitter Sea, pg 7 [DS778.7 .B87 1983])