Man Of The Year: Visionary of a New China

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straitjacket of the Cultural Revolution. "The great spiritual wealth created by mankind was strange to them " it said. "They never heard of such names as Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Hugo and Mozart. Young people's minds were locked up in airtight cells. Now the prison has been smashed."

In a brief, astonishing display of what that liberty might produce, posters that attacked Mao, praised Teng and alluded favorably to the economic achievements of Taiwan went up at the end of November Peking's "democracy wall." In remarkably open conversations with foreign newsmen, citizens of the capital asked searching questions about nonsocialist political systems, evincing particular interest in that of the U.S. Finally, a wall poster addressed to Jimmy Carter appeared on democracy wall. "We should like to ask you to pay attention to the state of human rights in China," it said. "The Chinese people do not want to repeat the tragic life of the Soviet people in the Gulag Archipelago. This will be a real test for your promise on human rights." The poster concluded with greetings to "your wife and family," and was signed "The Human Rights Group." Authorities removed the poster within a few hours, an indication that its message was unsanctioned Liberalization has its carefully defined limits. The phenomenon of democracy wall, for all its air of spontaneity, had a quality of official orchestration about it

None of China's new international gregariousness should obscure the bleak totalitarianism with which it maintains internal discipline. The discipline may be eased at times, but the mechanisms of control, especially through the Pao-wei forces, the secret police, remain at government disposal. In a report in November, Amnesty International, the human rights organization based in London recorded a number of legal outrages A teacher named Ho Chun-shu, for example, was said to have been executed at the beginning of 1978 for writing and distributing a "counterrevolutionary pamphlet." Last June, however, China released about 110,000 people who had been jailed since Mao's "antirightist" crack down in 1957.

It is an index of a new Chinese sensitivity to foreign opinion that in November the People's Daily in Peking ran a full page of five articles outlining human rights criticisms and urging that new civ il and criminal codes be adopted to protect those rights. "In some places," said the People's Daily, "the legal rights and interests of citizens are badly infringed. Rations are cut. Private property is tak en away, rural markets are closed down, and legal economic activities are not guaranteed. All of these things can still happen."

What makes this sudden extroversion so fascinating is that China, from its earliest times, has been largely obscured to outside view and comprehension. Under its succession of imperial dynasties, the Chinese defined the world as "all under heaven" and themselves as celestials of the Celestial Empire. "Throughout the ages," wrote Lu Hsün, "the Chinese have had only two ways of looking at foreigners: up to them as superior beings or down on them as wild animals. They have never been able to treat them as friends as people like themselves." China traditionally looked inward, suffering a foreign