A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

• Share

(14 of 18)

If Beijing is not serious about its anticorruption campaign -- and given the regime's track record, there is little reason to believe it is -- it means only that, like leaders everywhere, China's rulers reflect their culture's values. So, just as the people engage in pretense when dealing with the government, the leadership in turn expends considerable time and energy of its own in going through the motions.

The Cultural Revolution's aftermath makes the point. Very little effort has ever been spent investigating the question of why so many followed so dastardly a design. Personal accounts of the period's horrors have been written ("scar literature" it is called). But unlike the Germans, who have collectively wrestled with the Holocaust's blackest implications for 40 years, the Chinese appear content to let the past rest.

Perhaps because the Chinese are historically indifferent to introspection (as befits a culture where family rather than self is the core of an individual's identity), I never hear a coherent analysis of the Cultural Revolution, an event that so inverted the natural order that parents were shamed, beaten and in some instances even killed by their own children. All I pick up is a line or two about the traditional absence of psychological study in totalitarian societies, and some bits and pieces, mostly about the worship of Mao as a semidivine figure, and tales of the Chairman's senility.

No matter why Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution, what is most interesting today is that the Chairman's successors appear totally uninterested in the question. For the party's present leaders, so expert at rewriting history that they regularly crop from official photographs whoever is currently out of favor, it has been enough to blame a few scapegoats for a decade of chaos and leave it at that.

Those eager to delve further have been rebuffed. When some Shanghai writers proposed a Cultural Revolution museum in 1986, Beijing said no. The leadership apparently fears that any thorough investigation would quickly run to criticism of the current regime and so must be prohibited. The outer boundaries of permissible complaint in China have been set. Anything may be criticized except that which really matters: the right of the party to rule. To today's leaders, the experience of the past demands a straitjacket on political dissent and helps explain why Deng so feared accepting the Tiananmen demonstrators' demand for free expression.

Since bureaucratic sadism is familiar to everyone everywhere, I was somewhat prepared for the denial of a simple request during the 600-mile, 18-hour train trip to Beijing. But I was not prepared for the sheer delight visible on the conductor's face when she said, "Meiyou, the rule does not permit turning on the lights before 7 p.m. and it's only 6:30. You will just have to wait 30 minutes."

"But it's storming outside, it's dark, and it's hard to read."