Chinese Shadows

"This book came like a bolt of lightning, because in the seventies – despite the fact that the Cultural Revolution was still going on – many China watchers were starry eyed about Maoism as a wonderful experiment. Those who went to China saw what they wanted to see, and usually came back with glowing accounts of a New China, and a uniquely collective and altruistic human being not driven by material desires. Chinese Shadows was a completely different take. It’s a collection of essays in which he totally demolishes the romantic myth of the Maoist experiment. This was especially devastating in France, because Paris was the centre of intellectual Maoism. Leys is a wonderful essayist – very sharp and funny – and he demolished the reputations of famous writers on China like Ross Terrill. It was not well received at all at my university. Some of my professors were inclined to see in China at the time something that might not work in the West, but which was a unique product of an ancient high civilisation. Leys really put the cosh on that. Yes. And don’t forget that a lot of this has to do with the history of the Left in the West, regardless of China. In the sixties and seventies, most of the new left were very disillusioned with the Soviet Union, and Maoist China took the place of their notion of left wing experimentation. There was a lot of third worldism as well, with Raymond Williams at the forefront – the non-Western world as the rural rebellion against the Western metropole, a kind of neo-colonial struggle. And China became the focus of that."

"Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys. He is a marvellous writer, and was one of those people who dared to say things. The book came out in 1977, as interest in China was beginning to incubate. He was in Beijing and he looked at the toll that had been taken on Chinese culture, archaeology, religion – he looked right down the barrel of the gun and described [the Cultural Revolution] in all its horrific dimension. He’s very Western, an undying humanist, and unrepentant about his humanism. Well, unlike Pierre Ryckmans or [his pen name] Simon Leys, who was living there as a diplomat, I was coming in for the first time. I was very confused by what I found, and I don’t think it’s adequately reflected in my book. I thought I knew how to feel comfortable around Chinese, because I’d spent a lot of time around them in America, but when I got to China I felt tremendously uncomfortable and insoluble. Of course one understands it now, but the Cultural Revolution was going on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Simon Leys looked at it from the perspective not so much of trying to understand China but just of what he saw, and whether this was a violation of some basic, fundamental human principles. And it was. The Cultural Revolution was a political seizure of catastrophic and savage proportions. It’s the contradictions that exist in parallel. On the one hand China has changed dramatically. Unbelievable amounts of high-speed change. But on the other hand there’s so much beneath the surface that blunders on and remains the same, undisturbed – whether it’s the structures of government, the ways Chinese interact with each other, or the ways they look at the outside world. These things are very deep and in many ways unyielding. I think it’s going to be a very long, hard slog. Our best hope is peaceful evolution. It’s a kind of terrible wager what the best way forward is, and I don’t know the answer to it. But I do know that if we’re looking at this interaction between East and West, we have to ask what is the best policy, the best angle of repose for the West to seek in relation to China. How do you influence China most instrumentally and effectively and constructively? That’s a really hard question. In a way it is the only question, if you’re interested in American foreign policy. The answer is not forthcoming. I guess I would say that pressure has a positive effect and a negative effect. One constantly has to be adjusting and recalibrating the mix. And as one can see from the books I’ve cited, China is extremely neurotic about comparison, about having its weakness, its insecurity, its lack of confidence put before it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s what happened in [the Tiananmen square protests of] 1989, and it induced a massive epileptic seizure of control afterwards. And we’re still paying for it. That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to people exercising their rights. It’s just a simple observation that within the context of a Communist Party that’s still got a lot of chops, you have to be very careful with your judgements about what can work and what can’t work."

"Yes, Mao was still the cuddly guy in the Andy Warhol paintings and the visionary statesman who allowed Nixon to visit China. He was the man standing up in Tiananmen Square with 27,000 giggling schoolchildren waving their flags at him. But the truth, as we now know, was much, much worse. At the time, it wasn’t easy to write a polemic of this kind against Mao, but the style of writing is brilliant: it’s a literary work as much as a work about China. It’s sarcastic, it’s witty, it’s deeply learned. And it absolutely takes apart Mao’s defenders limb by limb. It’s the sort of thing that utterly cuts through all sorts of cant, and I still enjoy picking it up and reading it today. It’s not true in describing day-to-day life in China now. But it’s certainly true about Mao. And you still can’t talk about Mao like that in China these days. Leys is a Belgian-Australian, the ultimate high-minded scholar. I think he may have worked for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing at one point, but ended up at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra. He was a great defender of Chinese culture, and the refinements of Chinese culture. He wrote a wonderful essay once on the art of calligraphy. But he made a trip back to China in 1976 and was absolutely horrified at the changes that had taken place. For example, Mao had knocked down the old city walls. There’s one chapter where he goes to find one of the famous old city gates, which he thinks has survived the Maoist purge of the old city, and it’s not there. He goes almost into a delirium – he thinks he’s lost his way, that he must have come to the wrong spot. And then he realises that it’s gone altogether. There are these quite remarkable scenes that illustrate his horror at the utter destruction of the Mao period. He uses a great word to describe the Maoist policy: he calls it cretinous. It’s so evocative of his bitterness at what has happened and his scorn for the apologists in the West who defended Mao. He has conversations with Chinese people. But he’s not allowed to talk to ordinary Chinese, which is another theme in the book. He is shadowed by people wherever he goes. It’s really an utterly spooky and deeply pessimistic work but also gripping to read. I can’t fathom why it has gone out of print and hasn’t been republished."