The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  2009

  THE WAKE OF AN EMPTY BOAT

  Zhou Enlai

  ALONE among the Maoist leaders, Zhou Enlai had cosmopolitan sophistication, charm, wit and style. He certainly was one of the greatest and most successful comedians of our century. He had a talent for telling blatant lies with angelic suavity. He was the kind of man who could stick a knife in your back and do it with such disarming grace that you would still feel compelled to thank him for the deed. He gave a human face (and a very good-looking one) to Chinese communism. Everyone loved him. He repeatedly and literally got away with murder. No wonder politicians from all over the world unanimously worshipped him. That intellectuals should also share in this cult is more disturbing—although there are some extenuating circumstances.

  Zhou was a compulsive seducer. I am of course not referring to his behaviour with women, which was always said to be exemplary and anyway should not concern us. What I mean is simply that, for him, it seems no interlocutors ever appeared too small, too dim or too irrelevant not to warrant a special effort on his part to charm them, to wow them, and to win their sympathy and support. I can state this from direct and personal experience, an experience that was shared over the years by hundreds and thousands of enraptured visitors—primary-school teachers from Zanzibar, trade unionists from Tasmania, Progressive Women from Lapland—not even the Pope had to cope with such time-consuming, bizarre and endless processions of pilgrims. He was also the ultimate Zelig of politics, showing tolerance, urbanity and a spirit of compromise to urbane Western liberals; eating fire and spitting hatred to suit the taste of embittered Third World leaders; displaying culture and refinement with artists; being pragmatic with pragmatists, philosophical with philosophers, and Kissingerian with Kissinger.

  It should not be forgotten that besides these strange and absorbing social activities, he was also directing the entire administration of the most populous nation on earth. He personally solved a thousand problems a day, having to substitute in practically every matter for a timorous bureaucracy that was forever reluctant to make any decision or bear any responsibility. He dispatched the affairs of the state with the supreme efficiency of an old Daoist ruler who knows that one should govern a large empire the way one cooks a little fish. He seemingly never slept and still looked always relaxed. He could simultaneously display an exacting attention for minute details that was worthy of a fussy housewife, and a breadth of vision that awed the greatest statesmen of our time. Although he permanently occupied the centre of the stage, his public activity was still a mere sinecure compared with the other show—far more intense, absorbing and momentous—that was running non-stop offstage in the dark recesses of inner-party politics. There he had to perform incredible acrobatics in order to remain on top of the greased pole—eliminating rivals in a relentless power struggle, dodging ambushes, surviving murderous plots hatched by old comrades, and so on. His task became more and more superhuman as he had to lend single-handedly, for the benefit of a bemused international audience, an impressive façade of humanity, intelligence and sanity to a regime whose increasing cruelty, ineptitude and madness were finally to come out in the open during the last ten years of the Maoist era.

  Zhou’s reputation may eventually suffer from the posthumous debunking of Mao (which is a paradox, as, in the end, Mao ruthlessly attempted to get rid of him). Still, some Chinese intellectuals are now probably being unfair when they describe him as having merely played Albert Speer to Mao’s Hitler. Zhou’s relation to his master did not reflect a straightforward subordination; the actual situation was far more complex. For many years before Mao reached supreme power, Zhou had actually been running the Chinese Communist Party behind the screen of a series of ineffectual or unlucky nominal leaders who were purged one after another. Zhou weathered these successive crises practically unscathed; from these early days onward, he displayed an uncanny ability for political survival that was to become the hallmark of his long career. He developed methods that made him unsinkable: always exert power by proxy; never occupy the front seat; whenever the opposition is stronger, immediately yield.

  His unique skills made him forever indispensable, while simultaneously he cultivated a quality of utter elusiveness; no one could pin him down to a specific political line, nor could one associate him with any particular faction. He never expressed personal ideas or indulged in penning his own theoretical views. Where did he really stand? What did he actually believe? Apparently he had no other policies but those of the leader of the moment, and nourished no other ambitions but to serve him with total dedication. Yet the brilliance of his mind, the sharpness of his intelligence, the electrifying quality of his personal magnetism, eloquence and authority constantly belied the kind of bland selflessness that he so studiously displayed in the performance of his public duties; Zhou’s enigma lay in the paradox that, with all his exceptional talents, he should also present a sort of disconcerting and essential hollowness.

  Twenty-three hundred years ago, Zhuang Zi, in giving advice to a king, made him observe that when a small boat drifts in the way of a huge barge, the crew of the barge will immediately shout abuse at the stray craft; however, coming closer, if they discover that the little boat is empty, they will simply shut up and quietly steer clear of it. He concluded that a ruler who has to sail the turbulent waters of politics should first and foremost learn how to become an empty boat.

  History provides few examples of statesmen who were as successful as Zhou Enlai in mastering this subtle discipline. It enabled him to become the ultimate survivor. There was no limit to his willingness to compromise. Once, when the communists had to co-operate again with the nationalists, a local party cadre rebelled against this shameless fraternisation with fascist butchers and indignantly asked Zhou, “Should we become mere concubines?” Zhou replied coolly, “If necessary, we should become prostitutes.” Yet he was not seeking survival for survival’s sake; he survived in order to win. He combined utter fluidity with absolute resilience, like water, which takes instantaneously the shape of whatever container it happens to fill and simultaneously never surrenders one single atom of its own nature—in the end it always prevails. The contrast between the posthumous fates of Mao and Zhou is quite illuminating in this respect. Mao’s mummy was left to rot in a huge and grotesque mausoleum in the heart of Peking, as if better to witness from this vantage point the dismantling of all his policies. As for Zhou, once more, he vanished into thin air—quite literally this time, since he wisely requested that his ashes be scattered over the country—and beyond his death it is still he who is ruling today over China, through his own hand-picked successors.

  Zhou made history for half a century and wielded enormous power over one-quarter of mankind; yet he apparently never succumbed to the temptation of self-aggrandisement and the lust for supremacy to which none of the other Chinese leaders remained immune. He withstood countless trials, crises, humiliations and dangers; he repeatedly served, with stoic loyalty, leaders who did not have his ability or his experience; and yet he never wavered in his commitment to Chinese communism. From where did he derive his spiritual strength? What motivated him? Like many bourgeois intellectuals of his generation, in his youth he was fired by intense patriotism. In his early twenties, while in Europe, he seems to have identified once and for all the salvation of China with the victory of communism. We know nothing more of his spiritual evolution. Zhou’s conundrum was thus compounded with a tragic irony: this man who generously dedicated himself, soul and body, to the service of China, ended up as the staunchest pillar of a regime that managed to kill more innocent Chinese citizens in twenty-five years of peace than had the combined forces of all foreign imperialists in one hundred years of endemic aggression.

  1984

  ASPECTS OF MAO ZEDONG

  SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS acquire historical dimensions. In the celebrated interview he granted Edgar Snow, Mao Zedong allegedly described himself as “a lonely monk walking in the rain under a leaking umbrella.”
With its mixture of humorous humility and exoticism, this utterance had a tremendous impact on the Western imagination, already so well attuned to the oriental glamour of the Kung Fu television series. Snow’s command of the Chinese language, even at its best, was never very fluent; some thirty-odd years spent away from China had done little to improve it, and it is no wonder that he failed to recognise in this “monk under an umbrella” (heshang da san) evoked by the chairman a most popular Chinese joke. The expression, in the form of a riddle, calls for the conventional answer “no hair” (since monks keep their heads shaven), “no sky” (it being hidden by the umbrella)—which in turn means by homophony (wu-fa wu-tian) “I know no law, I hold nothing sacred.” The blunt cynicism shown by Mao in referring to such a saying to define his basic attitude was as typical of his bold disregard for diplomatic niceties as its mistaken and sentimental English adaptation by Snow is revealing of the compulsion for myth-making, of the demand for politico-religious kitsch among certain types of Western intellectual.

  In fact, the crude riddle so naïvely misunderstood by Snow provides us with one of the keys for understanding Mao’s complex and contradictory personality. There is little doubt that Mao’s spontaneous inclinations generally favoured radical policies, and yet, looking at the countless twists and turns of his entire career, leafing through many of his earlier writings, it would be easy to put together a file on the subject of his “revisionist capitulationism” and “rightist opportunism” thick enough to hang three dozen Liu Shaoqis and Deng Xiaopings. And for that matter, his record as “leftist adventurist” could without difficulty eclipse even Lin Biao’s. Actually, in order to discourage such an exercise, the Peking authorities wisely refrain from publishing Mao’s complete works: the authorised version of the Selected Works is a carefully censored one. Although Mao was genuinely impatient with bureaucratic practices, he nevertheless became both the architect and the cornerstone of the most gigantic totalitarian bureaucracy this planet has ever known.

  To reconcile such paradoxes, one must either learn the mental acrobatics of a very sophisticated game played by the enlightened vanguard and called “dialectics,” or, more vulgarly, face the fact that rather than being the prophet-philosopher as described by his worshippers, Mao was essentially always and foremost a practical politician for whom what mattered above everything was power—how to obtain it, how to retain it, how to regain it. In order to secure power, no sacrifice was ever too big—and least of all the sacrifice of principles. It is only in this light that it becomes possible to understand his alternations between compromise and ruthlessness, benevolence and ferocity, suppleness and brutality, and all his abrupt volte-faces: none of these were ever arbitrary.

  Although political power was the ultimate yardstick of all his actions, it would of course be foolish to assume that a man of such stature was merely pursuing power for power’s sake. He had an acute awareness of his place in history; this intense historical consciousness—which in our age he shared perhaps only with de Gaulle—also made him profess an unabashed admiration for the great tyrants of the past: Napoleon, Qin Shihuang . . . If the fluctuating tactical imperatives make it very difficult at times to distinguish his actual policies from those of his successive rivals and scapegoats, his style remained unique. We can grasp it most clearly in some of his artistic creations. His calligraphy (one of the major arts of China) is strikingly original, betraying a flamboyant egotism, to the point of arrogance, if not extravagance; at the same time it shows a total disregard for the formal discipline of the brush, and this contempt for technical requirements condemns his work, however powerful, to remain essentially inarticulate. His poetry, so aptly described by Arthur Waley as “not as bad as Hitler’s painting, but not as good as Churchill’s,” was rather pedantic and pedestrian, managing to combine obscurity with vulgarity; and yet, within the framework of an obsolete form, it remains, in its very awkwardness, remarkably unfettered by conventions. Moreover, the fact that he devoted some part of his energy to the uncertain pursuit of the aesthetic hobbies of a traditional gentleman and scholar is in itself quite revealing. As Erica Jong has observed: “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.” And sometimes it drives a man into politics.

  This phenomenon of the failed artist as a statesman, of political leadership as self-expression, ought some day to be properly analysed; in the course of such a study, Mao could provide one of the most exemplary cases. The kind of idealism, subjectivism and voluntarism that inspired his most daring initiatives betrays the aesthete’s typical approach. Even some of his basic political utterances rest on artistic metaphors—like his famous observation about China’s “poverty and blankness,” which make her more easily available, like a blank page for the free improvisation of a great artist’s brush . . . Like a sculptor who submits the yielding clay to his inspiration, shapes it in accordance with an inner vision, the artist-statesman, using history and nations for his material, attempts to project in them the images from his mind. This visionary quality accounts for most of the unexpected, dazzling victories of Mao’s maturity; unfortunately, it was also at the root of the increasingly erratic, capricious and catastrophic initiatives of his late years when, increasingly divorced from reality, ever more absorbed in his lonely dream, he repeatedly brought the very regime he himself had created to the brink of chaos and destruction.

  Strangely enough for a leader of such stature, Mao had very little personal charisma. He was a poor speaker, with a high-pitched, unpleasant and monotonous voice. His thick Hunanese accent, of which he never could rid himself, did little to improve this. The masses could easily relate to leaders like Zhu De and Peng Dehuai because of their simplicity and human warmth; they liked Zhou Enlai for his patrician charm and selfless dedication to the service of the nation. But with Mao it was a different story; well-orchestrated propaganda imposed his image upon the people as that of a Sun-God. More than 2,000 years of imperial tradition have created in the collective consciousness the constant need for a unique, supreme, quasi-mystical head; the shaky and brief republican interlude did not succeed in providing any convincing substitute for this, and Mao knew shrewdly how to manipulate this traditional legacy to his own advantage.

  That he was in fact the main organiser of his own cult cannot be doubted; he justified the necessity of it to Edgar Snow by observing cynically, “Khrushchev did not build his own cult, look what happened to him!” But if he became a god for the masses, those who were in direct contact with him were somewhat put off by his aloofness, his secretive and devious ways, his utter lack of personal loyalty, the ruthlessness with which he could get rid of lifetime companions-in-arms and faithful assistants once they had become a hindrance or dared to voice criticism. One of his early admirers, the American journalist Agnes Smedley—a dedicated revolutionary who had the courage, during the war, to break through the Kuomintang blockade and join the communists in Yan’an—gave in 1943 a remarkably frank account of her first encounter with him:

  His hands were as long and sensitive as a woman’s . . . Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete. I was in fact repelled by the feminine in him. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me, and I became so occupied with trying to master it, that I heard hardly a word of what followed . . . The following months of precious friendship both confirmed and contradicted his inscrutability. The sinister quality I had at first felt so strongly in him proved to be a spiritual isolation . . . In him was none of the humility of Zhu De. Despite that feminine quality in him, he was as stubborn as a mule, and a steel rod of pride and determination ran through his nature.

  In complete contrast with the intellectual revolutionary elite of his time, which was sophisticated, urban and cosmopolitan, Mao belonged to the old inward-looking peasant world. His intellectual landscape was furnished not so much with Western Marxist writings—which he read belatedly, in a haphazard
and superficial way—as with Chinese classical literature, historiography and fiction, with which he developed a lively if patchy and unsystematic familiarity, typical of a self-taught provincial genius.

  When already the master of China, he had himself photographed at his desk for an official portrait: it was not by accident that the collection of books stacked in front of him was not one of Marxist classics, but a famous series of eleventh-century Chinese manuals on imperial bureaucratic government. His attacks against Confucius sprang from a pathetically Confucian frame of mind; he still lived in a world—utterly foreign to younger Chinese generations—where Confucius occupied the place and fulfilled the function he envisaged for himself, that of Supreme Teacher of an all-encompassing orthodoxy. The anti-Confucius campaign was but one more expression of the living anachronism he himself had become. His world was still a ritual world, ruled by ideology rather than laws, by dogmatic scriptures—yesterday the Confucian classics, today the Little Red Book—rather than popular debate.

  When he pronounced “the primacy of the red over the expert,” he was merely rephrasing a 2,400-year-old axiom from the Confucian Book of Rites: “What is achieved by technique is inferior, what is achieved by virtue is superior.” Such deep roots in the Chinese traditional universe accounted for his most brilliant achievements in the past: when waging guerrilla war in the remote peasant heartland of old China, he had no rival. But when it came to confronting a new world and a new age, when he had to guide China into the modern era, his very strength turned into his worst limitation. He always tried to reduce new problems and issues to terms more familiar to him, those of the backward peasant hinterland, the nostalgic arena of his early victories.