Intro to Chinese Liberalism by John Pomfret

Prologue

As the ideological battle between the Chinese communists and the Kuomintang sharpened in the late 1920s, political assassinations, kidnappings, and disappearances became routine. But there was one thing on which the extremes of China’s political spectrum could agree: the United States had become a threat.

The problem for China’s politicians was that despite political disappointment at Versailles and a deafening drumbeat of anti-imperialism at home, the Chinese remained broadly predisposed to Yankee influence, and not simply in education. American culture was flourishing in China, especially in its greatest city, Shanghai.

Shanghai’s nickname – ‘Paris of the East’ was a misnomer; the city, the most polyglot metropolis in Asia, was more of a mix of Manhattan and a frontier boomtown. Though the British directed much of the economy, Americans owned thee power and phone companies, ran the best schools, and dominated entertainment and the arts. In Shanghai, there were ‘radio and jazz bands, cocktails and correspondence schools, night club and cabarets, neon lights and skyscrapers, chewing gum and Buicks, wide trousers and long skirts, Methodist evangelists and the Salvation Army, reported journalist Edgar Snow, who moved there in 1928. The Yanks cast a long shadow. The year Snow moved there barely two thousand Americans lived in a city of more than two million people. That didn’t stop Snow from declaring, however, that Shanghai ‘has become Americanized.’

Babe Ruth (Beibei Luosi in Chinese) visited in December 19345 at the head of a barnstorming  team. American adventurers, scam artists, playboys, and sportsmen, dramatic troupes and circuses, movie stars and musicians – all beat a path there. By the early 1930s, the neoclassical British buildings that lined the Bund along the Huangpu river were making way for American inspired art deco palaces. Films starring Douglas Fairbank, Charlie Chaplin, and the Keystone Cops beat out anything the Europeans had to offer. In 1935, more tan 350 American movies were shown in China – more than 90 percent of all films ( by contrast, today’s China allows in only 34 foreign films a year.)  The Chinese churned out a stream of copies: Chinese Westerns, Chinese romances, Chinese slapstick. Chinese directors invariably had kung-fu starts don cowboy hats. Hollywood shaped the Chinese sense of what’s funny and what’s romantic, too.

The arrival of Duke Ellington’s first recordings in the 1920s touched off a craze for American music and a Great Harmony of sorts in the melding of American jazz with Chinse folk tunes. Black American musicians became a fixture in Shanghai’s clubs. The Depression in America was still in full swing back home, and American jazz bands jumped at the chance to cross the Pacific for a long-term gig. Working in Shanghai beat ‘looking for jobs in such ridiculous places as hot-dog stands’ in America, wrote Buck Clayton, whose band, Buck Clayton, and the Harlem Gentlemen, held court at the swanky Canidrome Ballroom through-out 1935.

Clayton teamed up with a Chinese musician named Li Jinhui to being a jazz sensibility to Chinese folk songs. The result, known as shidaiqu, or ‘modern melodies,’ was a hit. Critics from the Left and Right lambasted Li’s compositions for their romantic content and decidedly non-revolutionary vibe. The Nationalists and Communists both called them pornographic. Regardless, the foot-tapping arrangements lodged themselves in the minds of the Chinese and set the foundation for modern Chinese music- Cantopop and Mandopop. In 19767, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards branded Li a ‘corrupter’ of public morals; he died of a heat attack during a beating that year.

American values worried Chiang Kai-shek. Though he modeled China’s new capital, Nanjing, on Washington,  DC, Chiang was less inclined towards American ideals than Sun Yat-sen. Challenged by warlords and the Communist Party, he had little use for the American concepts of personal freedom or democracy. He valued loyalty above all.

In his views of America, Chiang shared something with Mao Zedong, who loathed the way many of his compatriots admired the United States. As Chiang told American reporter Lewis Gannet in 1926, ‘Thinking men in China hate America more than they hate Japan.’ Japan talked to China in terms of ultimatums. “She says frankly she wants special privileges,’ Chiang said. ‘We understand that and know how to meet it.’ But  the Americans, he aid,  ‘come to us with smiling faces and friendly talk’ but do nothing to help China. ‘Because we have been deceived by your sympathy talk,’ Chiang said, ‘we end by hating you the most.’

Where Sun Yat-sen was clearly inspired by Abraham Lincoln in formulating hos ‘Three People’s Principles,’ Chiang linked those concepts to Confucius. ‘There is nothing in European and American political thought that surpasses’ the Confucius classics, he declared. Chiang would denounce liberalism and Communism with equal intensity.

The Communist Party had also fixed its sights on American liberalism. By the 1920s, the party’s founder, Chen Duxiu, who had once branded Woodrow Wilson ‘the number one good man in the world,’ had lost his affection for the American Way. When he learned that US immigration officers had detained a group of Chinese students at the US border, he exalted. Let those Chinese suffer, he sneered, because ‘it is public knowledge that almost every single American-trained student opposes revolution, worships money, and idolizes the United States. The fewer such Chinese the better.’

A string of Communist Party congresses starting in 1922 identified the United States as one of the main enemies of China’s revolution. It was a formidable opponent, the party noted, because so may Chinese were passionately pro-American. The party spilled vast quantities of ink trying to convince Chinese not to be hoodwinked by America’s promises. In a 1929 policy paper, the Communists charged that American missionary , health, and education activities were ‘only a disguise of liberals.’ Anyone who doubt that, said Chen Duxiu, ‘is a traitor.’

Mao Zedong’s youthful dalliance with American ideals was over as well. In the 1920s, he applauded a string of terrorist bombings in the United States that touched off America’s Red Scare. To him American liberalism was an ‘extremely harmful’ tendency that ‘disrupts unity, undermines solidarity, induces inactivity and creates dissension.’

The change of heart was not merely political. With the dawn of the 1930s, influential Chinese began to take a more jaundiced view of American culture, too. American women in particular came under increased scrutiny. Once an ideal, they were now portrayed as extreme. Tis transformation was charted, for one, in the pagers of Linglong magazine, China’s popular women’s weekly in the 1930s – a combination of House and Garden and Cosmopolitan. Its entertainment section ran the usual stories of stars and films. But most noticeable was the focus on American excess.

Linglong’s second issue in 1931 featured actress Clara Bow - the It Girl of 1931. ‘She’s so hot even her clothes have come off,’ read the caption. Next to Bow, the editors ran a photograph of a Shanghai beauty – Miss Zhou Ming. Zhou sat demurely on a bench with clothes covering everything but her face and hands. The message was clear. America was an advanced country, but it lacked morality.


The Liberals

As China modernized the question was, how fast? The writer and poet Sophia Chen, a friend of Hu Shih, who had fled an arranged marriage to attend Vassar College, spoke of a broad anxiety that social changes ‘too much, too soon’ were threatening the foundations of Chinese culture. Chinese writers came up with a new storyline for America; it was too free, to loose, too wild. An. An article in 1934 reported on an American kissing competition; the winning couple smooched for three hours and two minutes. ‘The strangeness of Americans is clear from this,’ Linglong’s editors opined. Chinese couples, it advised, should kiss ‘in moderation.’

Hu Shih battled this anti-American tilt. Writing in 1930, he pleaded with the nation’s young not to heed ‘the fools who’ve never been abroad who drone on ‘Look to the Eat! Look to the East! The Western way won’t work!’ Only by acknowledging that the West surpassed China ‘in its material wealth, political system, morality, knowledge, music, art and physique,’ he wrote, would China have any hope. Hu Shih’s critics called him a traitor. When a US-educated Chinese political scientist named Chen Xujing seconded Hu Shih’s position with a passionate call in 1933 for the ‘wholesale Westernization’ of Chinese society, he was likewise criticized.

Mao, Chiang, and others feared American liberalism because, like other aspects of American culture, it was so well received. Though China’s liberals have been airbrushed from China’s modern history, in fact from the late 1920s to the 1940s a group of several hundred men and women, many educated in America, became the conscience of their nation in opposing the tyrannical ideologies of the Communists and the Kuomintang, resisting Japanese imperialism, and advocating democracy. Some of China’s greatest writers and thinkers embraced the promise of American democracy. One of them was Lin Yutang.

Born into a family of poor Christians in rural Fujian province, Lin was a top student who spent his high school years in Shanghai at the American-run St. John’s College and then won a half-scholarship at Harvard. Following a stint helping Jimmy Yen teach reading to Chinese workers in Europe, Lin returned to China to pursue a career as a writer.

In a 1924 essay, Lin created a word in Chinese, youmo, to sound like the English word ‘humor’. In promoting this neologism, Lin was trying to carve out a place where the Chinese could debate their country’s future with a smile,. I the face of increasingly violent demands for ideological purity from both ends of the political spectrum, Lin advocated something revolutionary: tolerance. His magazines (he would be involved in more than six) welcomed all types of writers – socialists, Marxists, anarchists, liberals, Confucianists, his most ardent supporters, and his fiercest critics – as long as they were civil. And much to the chagrin of the Communists and the Kuomintang, the magazines were popular.


In his essay titled ‘On Humor,’ Lin noted that it was not that laughter did not exist in Chinese literature and culture. It was that it had been marginalized and underappreciated. In China, he wrote, ‘the serious becomes too serious and the non-serious too vulgar.’ He founded China’s first two humor magazines: The Analects Fortnightly and This Human World.

 Lin launched his magazines in the middle of a momentous battle over how China’s best a brightest should serve the nation. Like Hui Shih, he believed that China should adopt the values of the liberal West. Lin disagreed with the notion that the struggle for ‘national salvation’- to which both the Communists and the Nationalists laid claim –justified sacrificing individual rights or a civil society.

He poked fun at Communist orthodoxy and at the censorship of the Kuomintang. He described himself as a man on a ‘tightrope.’ His high wire act was risky. When he fingered a warlord general involved in the opium trade, secret agents shadowed him. Nationalists thugs assassinates two of his colleagues with whom Lin had founded the China League for the Protection of Civil Rights.

The Communist-controlled League of Chinese Left-Wing Writers attacked Lin, too. His problem, one leftish writer argued, was that his magazine encouraged people to think, when, given China’s plight, such publications should instead drive people to hate. Essays ‘must be daggers, spears must be able to kill,’ the writer claimed. To the leftist art critic Hu Feng, Lin was ‘China’s Nero, who would fiddle while the country burned. (After the Communist revolution, Hu would spent thirty-five years in the Communist gulag for questioning Mao Zedong.) In 1936, Lin left China for the United States.

In America, Lin authored two back-to-back best sellers about his homeland. My Country and My People, published in 1935, was the first popular non-fiction book written by a Chinese. Two years later came The Importance of Living, one of America’s first self-help books, A witty antidote to the dizzying pace of 1930s America.

Lin presented the Chinese as a global minority. He sketched a portrait of an approachable, unthreatening people, of an olds and great culture different from the West but worthy of respect. His tone was almost apologetic. He treated white fears and prejudices as if they were products of rational thought. He dwelt on China’s artistic, literary, and philosophical heritage, suggesting that China was superior to the West and that the Chinese were more intelligent than other ethnic groups, but in such a gentle way that Americans lapped it up. He censured Americans for their racism and the Chinese for their absence of ‘public citizenship.’ He noted that Confucius’s teaching made for strong families but was disastrous for society at large, as ‘the family became walled castle outside which everything was legitimate to loot.’

Back in China, others took up his torch. In 1919, Luo Longji (pictured above) was a Boxer Indemnity student at Tsinghua University during the May Fourth Movement. He led protests, prompting three deans to resign. Luo then went to America, and earned a PhD in political science at Columbia. Returning to China, he joined Hu Shih and Lin Yutang on a magazine called Crescent Moon. Luo challenged the dictates of the Nationalist and Communist  Parties, which demanded that individuals sacrifice their freedom for the greater good. He countered that a free society would always be stronger than the one that stifled expression.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Luo became the most active politician in China besides Chiang and Mao. He edited newspapers, organized protests, formed political parties, participated, when he was allowed to, in national conferences, and dodged assassins, when he was not. The questions he raised – among them whether China could recapture its greatness if it limited freedom – continue to vex China’s leaders today.

Luo was equally critical of the Kuomintang and the Communists. In September 1929, he blasted the Nationalists for violating the ideals of Sun Yat-sen. Why, he asked, was it considered ‘rebellious’ to want a constitution, which China did not have, or ‘a cover for nefarious plotting’ to discuss human rights, which China also lacked? For that effrontery, he was arrested and jailed for several months.

Writing about the Communist Party the next year, Luo asked, ‘What magic does the Communist Party have to make everyone completely selfless? Like most American-educated Chinese, Luo preferred the arduous process of evolution to the bright flameout of a revolution. What he really wanted was for Chiang Kai-shek to embrace reform and create an attractive alternative to the Communists. The first steps, he argued, would be to allow freedom of thought and end the Nationalists’ one-party rule. Luo  agreed with the argument- advanced by Liang Qichao and other thinkers- that China needed a ‘new people.’ But he rejected the contention- promulgate by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong- that such a transformation could occur only under a dictatorship.



The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom; America and China, 1776 to the Present by John Pomfret ; Picador Paperback, 2016. Pages 204-210

Detailed accounts of this period to follow.

Flannery O'Connor by Rupert Thomson

According​ to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-story house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My Relatives. According to her mother, Regina, ‘no one was spared.’ Three years later, as a result of her father’s ill-health, the family moved to Milledgeville, a town of six thousand. Milledgeville’s only distinguishing feature was its lunatic asylum, the largest in the world at the time. After graduating from high school in 1942, O’Connor enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women, where she read social sciences, then went to the University of Iowa on a scholarship to study journalism. While still in her twenties, she started to show symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as lupus, the autoimmune disease that killed her father. Apart from a few nights, she spent the rest of her life in Milledgeville, where she raised peacocks, attended mass, drove a ‘hearse-like’ black Chevrolet and wrote fiction in a Georgia State sweater with a bulldog on the front, ‘to create an unfavorable impression’.

O’Connor’s ideas about her writing were unambiguous. In a letter to John Lynch, a reviewer and an academic at Notre Dame, in 1955, she says: ‘I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified.’ She described herself as a ‘hillbilly Thomist’: like Aquinas, she believed that all creation is good. Evil represented the absence of good, or the wrong use of it, she said, and without grace, ‘we use it wrong most of the time.’ O’Connor’s best-known characters – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away – are embodiments of that predicament or struggle. They wander in a wilderness of the spirit. They are in a constant and desperate search for grace.

In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and O’Connor the storyteller. In his opinion, the theologian does the storyteller a disservice. He would rather she had restrained what he calls her ‘spiritual tendentiousness’; her work is ‘more equivocal than she intended’. John Hawkes took a similar stance in an influential essay for the Sewanee Review in 1962, in which he claimed that O’Connor employed ‘the devil’s voice’ for her ‘vision of our godless actuality’. Responding to Hawkes, O’Connor admitted that ‘the devil teaches most of the lessons that lead to self-knowledge.’ In the years since, critics have abandoned a Catholic interpretation of her work in favor of a psychological and secular approach. If this amounts to a betrayal of O’Connor’s ‘anagogical vision’, perhaps that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.

The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. .  . O’Connor was familiar with Gordon’s work; she told her that the short story ‘Old Red’ had been ‘the making of me as a writer’. Gordon was thirty years older, but both women had grown up in the Deep South – O’Connor in Georgia, Gordon in Kentucky and Tennessee – and both were practicing Catholics. While they lived in an age ‘far removed from Christ’, as the philosopher Jacques Maritain had put it, they agreed that Christian dogma remained the perfect ‘instrument for penetrating reality’.

According to Katherine Scott, one of O’Connor’s schoolteachers, ‘it was obvious that she was a genius. Warped, but a genius all the same.’ Critics have tended to seize on biographical details, portraying her as a crackpot visionary from the Bible Belt. Time magazine’s review of The Violent Bear It Away is by no means untypical in describing her as a ‘retiring bookish spinster who dabbles in the variants of sin and salvation like some self-tutored backwoods theologian’. Spinster. Dabbles. Critics recognized the directness and force of her prose, but unlike Gordon they queried her use of it. They claimed that the spiritual dimension was undermined by the violence. The voice, too, posed a problem: it was detached, idiomatic; its humor withering. They weren’t sure if they were supposed to laugh. The easiest option was to relegate her work to the margins, like a form of outsider art. Towards the end of her life, while addressing students at the Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor referred to the bewilderment and ambivalence her work attracted, imagining readers complaining: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’

Despite the protests of her neighbor, Charlotte Conn Ferris, who said, ‘I don’t know where Mary Flannery met those people she wrote about, but it was certainly not in my house,’ O’Connor reflected the world she lived in, where religion was degraded, commerce seductive and all-encompassing and racism not only acceptable but rampant. She was regularly accused of exaggeration, and yet her writing is never gratuitous or crude. The grotesque isn’t exceptional, O’Connor seems to be saying; it is all around us. In his introduction to the French edition of Wise Blood, J. M. G. Le Clézio wrote that ‘if the world that Flannery O’Connor has created shocks us it is not so much because it is confused and brutal, but because it is true.’

The brutality and prejudice endemic in the Deep South at the time are present in O’Connor too, and she made no attempt to disguise it. Her offensive remarks to her friend Maryat Lee may have been facetious, or she may have been playing devil’s advocate, but she was unequivocally disdainful about the integrationists from the North. When James Baldwin toured the southern states in 1957, O’Connor had the opportunity to meet him. She chose not to. Her excuse was that she had to observe ‘the traditions of the society I feed on’. But perhaps it is also true that she felt tainted. Perhaps she felt that it would have been fraudulent or hypocritical to pretend she was not unaffected by the racism of her day. Is the violence in her fiction sadistic? Or does it come from her own sense of complicity?

She is just as guilty as the characters Hawkes calls ‘wonderfully merciless creations’. She is just as much of a sinner. Grace means that it is not your place to appraise others, still less condemn, since they may have a role or a purpose that is hidden from you. Because of this, O’Connor consistently withholds judgment. The writer’s role, she said, is not to understand experience, but to understand ‘that he doesn’t understand it’. In this sense her writing is an expression of grace at work.

It is also possible, as the critic Josephine Hendin argues, to view O’Connor’s gallery of characters as ‘projections of their author’s complex, conflicted self-image’. Systemic lupus erythematosus causes the immune system to attack healthy tissues throughout the body and O’Connor was gradually and cruelly transformed into one of her own grotesques. The effects of the disease included hair loss, joint pain, sores and lesions to her face, arms, neck and back, as well as chronic fatigue. Initially misdiagnosed, the eventual treatment – ACTH, or adrenocorticotropic hormone – only intensified her disfigurement, resulting in fibroid tumors, bone deterioration, muscle atrophy and a swelling of the fatty tissues. In one letter to a friend, she was characteristically scathing, describing herself as ‘practically bald-headed on top’ with a ‘watermelon face’. She died in 1964, aged 39.

Simone de Beauvoir by Joanna Biggs

At her funeral, of all the passages of all the books she’d written, Lanzmann chose to read the last paragraph of Force of Circumstance:

    I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and all its randomness – the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken – there is no place where it will all live again.

From the grave, Beauvoir clinches the argument. Life isn’t supposed to be lived as some kind of example to others; all it is, all it can be, is a crashing together of moments. Beauvoir couldn’t come again – and thank God. But I have my heroine back, freed from her concrete block.

Widford Mole

The Mole That Worketh Underground
To the Editor of the Herts Guardian

Sir- Who turned up twenty-six mountains at Widford? Why, the underground mole! Who grubbed under the gravestones in the churchyard? Eadem impia talpa! Why, the very same red-snouted velvet-waistcoated gentleman. Nobody says the mole does not work very hard (if this be a virtue); but it cannot be denied, even by his friends, that he is voracious, grasping, pugnacious, and unscrupulous. If he fight with his own brother he will bite and devour him and eat every bit up.

Who printed ‘Compliments of the Season’, which were sent to the good people at Widford, by the underground railway, on New Year’s Day? The printer put no name, Mr. Mole. You know who he was? Who addressed the envelopes? And who chuckled as he put them in the pillar box? It looks very much like the work of the underground mole. It was not exactly the work of one who does things above board.

There is the street cad who bawls out, “Who stole my donkey?’ and then runs around the corner and sneaks in a doorway. Is not this the same mole who chalks up ‘No Popery’ and then runs away? Who ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built? Why, don’t we all know?

There is one good thing- Englishmen do not admire vermin and our cousins over the water shun the skunk.  The gardener puts his heavy heel down in the mole’s head, and the rat that burrows beneath or floors is simply regarded as ‘hostis humani generis.’ What species of Englishmen, then, are those, who lend their countenance and approval to human vermin of this category? They must possess influence and attractive powers, or they would not draw within their vortex such kindred parasites as pander to their malignity and hatred. The hired bravo works simply as a wretched hireling and not for the gratification of his own envy and malice, vermin though he be. But of all the crafty, voracious, ruthless, and unscrupulous pests of society, who is the most pernicious of vermin? Why, the Master Mole, who works underground, burrows under the threshold of our homesteads, invades the sanctuary of our hearths and filtches away our good name under cover of darkness.                                    LAPIDIS
5^th January, 1883.