페이지 이미지
PDF
ePub

Miss YUAN. The reason that my sisters and brothers and myself were able to obtain such a good education is that our father had an identification as essentially a liberal personality. That is, he wasn't a capitalist, he didn't have the worse type of class identification.

On the other hand, he did not have the best type of proletarian-type of designation within the system. So that because his occupation and his class identification was not so bad, nor was it so good, at the time when I went to the university in 1954 I was still permitted to go on to a university through examinations.

In 1954 there was not so strong a movement against families that came from the class that my father represented, that is the professional, technical, liberal class. All this is changed now. It would be impossible now for someone coming from a family with that occupational designation to go to college.

Mr. WHALLEY. Was this education provided free by the country or was it pretty expensive?

Miss YUAN. No, I had to pay for my own education. I gave the money, myself.

REAL ENEMY REMAINS UNITED STATES

Mr. WHALLEY. We have always been taught that Russia should be the No. 1 enemy of China because Russia has a large piece of land that they refuse to return. Russia apparently was helping China in the fifties until China was making too much progress and then they withdrew their support.

What was the feeling of China after Russia withdrew its support in the late fifties?

Miss YUAN. Americans have, I think, some misunderstanding about China's attitude toward the Soviet Union. In fact, the real enemy of China is viewed by China as the United States. The Chinese have a different attitude toward the Soviet Union than they have toward toward the United States.

Although there is hostility toward the Soviet Union at the present time, China considers its real enemy to be America.

For Communist China the Soviet Union is a competitor within the Communist Chinese system. This is a leadership struggle between Peking and Moscow over leadership of the Communist movement. This is a contradiction which Peking thinks can be eventually resolved.

On the other hand, China views the United States as its real enemy because the United States represents the imperialist forces within the world and the struggle between Peking and the United States is a struggle between proletarian-led socialism and capitalism and the imperialism which follows it.

This is not a contradiction which is resolved except by a life and death struggle between the parties involved.

SUBCOMMITTEE VISIT TO CHINA

Mr. WHALLEY. Do you think it would be good if the chairman would take his subcommittee to China to learn something, themselves?

Miss YUAN. The Chinese mainland absolutely has no system such as this. When it becomes a free China, then your chairman is able to take his committee to China. I am looking forward to that day coming.

85-381-72—14

Mr. GALLAGHER. If we go, you will come with us?
Miss YUAN. They would kill me.

Mr. GALLAGHER. Thank you very much, Miss Yuan.

The subcommittee has learned a great deal today. Our record will indicate that we have learned something about what life is really about in mainland China. Your views have given us a very needed balance and perspective to the information that is available to the American public about the People's Republic.

For your very outstanding service and your very courageous life, I want to personally compliment you.

Thank you for being here today.

Miss YUAN. Thank you.

Mr. GALLAGHER. The subcommittee will stand adjourned. (Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the subcommittee adjourned, subject to the call of the Chair.)

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX 1

[From the Atlantic Monthly, November 1971]

THE 800,000,000-REPORT FROM CHINA

(By Ross Terrill)

The China we do not know is opening to view, albeit slowly and selectively. Back from his second extended visit to the mainland, Professor Terrill, a native Australian now teaching at Harvard, tells what life is like in China today.

A READER'S GUIDE

yuan (Y)-Chinese monetary unit, forty cents.

PLA-People's Liberation Army--the Chinese Army.
Liberation-Chinese term for 1949 revolution.
mou-one sixth of an acre.

catty-half a kilogram.

Shimmering mirage, a China is conjured in our minds by scraps of news and speculation. Devilishly well organized; neat and regimented; striding ahead to overtake Russia and America; clean, abstemious; an army of sexless puppets, their daily life an incarnation of the Thought of Mao Tse-tung. Absence from China feeds the mirage. Fear, buttressed by ignorance, hints that China is formidable, or awful, or awfully formidable. How cunning those Chinese are! Do they not constantly surprise us? Such sacrifice of indulgence today for glory tomorrow! We can be like Voltaire, philosophic China-watcher of another age. Sitting in Paris, he spun a mental tapestry of China less from facts than from disenchantment with the Europe of his day. The picture of Confucius in his study was a totem; maybe our pictures of Mao are too. As if the Chinese millions were mere moving illustrations of a Concept. Walk-on actors in a Drama of Historical Optimism or a Drama of Historical Pessimism!

The actual world of sweat and cicadas, boiled rice and bicycles, is a bit more complex. After seven years, I was back again. Did the mirage lift for a moment? Instead of "China," here were rivers and mountains, and people getting up, working, eating, singing, arguing, planning, going to bed. Not objects for investigation, but situations, in which I seemed to be involved only a little less than the people around me.

Of course a visit has its illusions, as does absence. You feel the human simplicities of China too acutely. You get talking to Shanghai citizens about bringing up children, to a professor in Peking about how he teaches modern history. As if you and they stood on the same ground, wrestling with the social problems of the 1970s and the human dilemmas of all time. That is illusory. For while we remain grouped in nation-states, as long as East Asia remains a place of collision between American substance and Chinese shadow, China is another world. Mao rules them; Nixon rules us. Our human solidarity is at the mercy of what they cook up between them. You leave Canton, cross the border at Shumchun, and China again becomes "China." One corner of the triangle of hope and terror, the United States, Russia, and China. Stage play of Communism, before the beaming portrait of Chairman Mao. Belly of real estate at the southeast tip of Eurasia, which fifty nuclear bombs could turn into charcoal and gas within a week.

But the separateness is not forever. The strangeness of China is not objective, like that of the platypus. Separateness and strangeness both stem from the past relationship between China and ourselves. Here there are changes; will soon be more. Countries' "images" of each other can depart terribly from fact. U.S.Chinese relations give rich illustration. Yet international politics and our human

existence do play out a crazy dialectic. It means that visiting China has its bit of the future to reflect. "Being there," like waking up at 3 a.m. gives its own special angle on the totality of things.

Being in China in 1971 means realizing that although in the United States Vietnam looms large on our mental screens, with China a big country behind Vietnam, in Peking Vietnam fades into one of many countries down beyond the Middle Kingdom's southern provinces. It means observing that chance and distraction fleck Chinese politics no less than ours; a Foreign Ministry official remarked, when Peking in late June did a long (and favorable) commentary on the Common Market: "During the Cultural Revolution we rather neglected the Common Market; now we're catching up and getting our position straight."

Being in China means fielding queries at a university in Sian about how we dealt, at Harvard in the spring of 1970, with the question of giving or not giving grades and exams to students who went on strike because of the invasion of Cambodia. It means finding propaganda less depressing when spoken than when one reads it from afar on the printed page, because people do not always mean what they say, and when they do mean it, do not always believe it. You read a tirade about the high tide of African revolution; then next day a Chinese diplomat who has worked in Africa remarks on the immaturity of African movements and their inability to make revolution as China made it. Paraphrasing the ancient writer Sun Tze, he smiles: "They don't know themselves and they don't know the enemy; that's the trouble."

To be there is to recall-did I need the reminder?-that Chinese cooking is not just a "great cuisine of the world," but a daily joy of 800 million and the major factor in any calculation of bright and dark sides to the Chinese people's life in 1971. To hear a high official say, when speaking of Western leftists who stay away from Taiwan for reasons of conscience: "They should go, see what the place is like. When foreign leftists come to Peking, I urge them not to stay away from Moscow, but to stop over there and look around." "Being there" means boredom and humor, clashes of personality, getting up at 5 a.m., finding time to read the newspaper, deciding between the ballet and the cinema for tonight's entertainment.

I suppose each man has his China, as his Rousseau. A visit does not do much to replace the subjective with the objective. But the subjective has its own scale of truth and falsehood. The visitor is a human being; what hits him?

OUR SOCIALIST COUNTRY WILL NOT BE CONTROLLED BY ANYONE

Appealing imprecision. People wander round; daydream. They will, when marketing, or in conversation, let the world go by in search of the pearl of great price. They don't mince like Japanese, but amble as men in secure possession of the earth under their feet. They will stand and stare at you, then win you with a grin if you look up in anxiety or irritation. Officials at banquets, faces pink with wine, lean head-in-hand across the table, forgetting their elbows in the excitement of a line of talk. Men on duty in trains, when every passenger has been served his tea and all is calm, turn down the radio and play poker, or draw the blinds, swing two seats together. and snooze in the peace of the afternoon sun. China is comprehensively organized, but not perfectly organized-certainly not to Japanese pitch. The ragged edges, the ragamuffin element, the expansive gesture, have happily not been organized out of existence.

Asia's heart. China has a staggering cultural self-confidence, and she is beholden to no one. In the timeless haze of Peking you realize that today's Bangkok, Saigon, Taipeh, are not cities of Asia's Asia but of America's Asia. Here in the "Forbidden City" is the real challenge to Western hegemony. Today but an embryonic challenge, partly of the spirit, tomorrow it will develop the sinews of a power challenge. The importance of China is being transmuted from symbol to actuality by the increasing powerlessness of the West in Asia. In China you feel a strength which comes from belief in oneself. America's Asia cannot match this kind of strength. But then America's Asia is China's periphery. And in Peking, China seems to Southeast Asia as the garment to the hem.

China's touchy pride. I went to the East Room of the Great Hall of the People on July 5 with E. Gough Whitlam, leader of the Australian Labor Party, for a late-night talk with Chou En-lai. Recounting China's bitter experience with Russia, the Old Tiger warned us against trusting our ally, the United States. His point was a passionate assertion of each country's right to run its own affairs. Whitlam said America had not treated Australia badly, as Russia had China. The Premier threw apart his arms. "But they both want to control others."

He beat his wicker chair for emphasis. "Our socialist country will not be controlled by anyone."

Chou summed up what is evident up and down China: deep sensitivity about China's dignity as an independent power. It goes back to the humiliation of the Opium Wars, when Britain bullied a weak China into a falling-domino torrent of concessions.

THE CHINESE NATION IS STUDYING AS IF FOR SOME COSMIC EXAMINATION

"You are constantly reminded that "those days are gone." The East wind prevails over the West wind. China has stood up. She will not be controlled by others.

The past is very present. Halfway between Sian and Yenan, in the orange loesscountry where Chinese civilization began, lies the market town of Hwang Ling. I drove there to see the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, father of the Han people. My Chinese companions (who had suggested this visit) entered with awe the gray-green gardens, lit up by the red pillars of a temple of commemorative tablets to the Yellow Emperor. It was 7 a.m., and the gnarled trees, one said to date from the time of the Yellow Emperor (some 5000 years ago), were ghostly in the still, clear morning air.

My Communist companions gazed at the elegant inscription: "Cradle of the Fatherland's Civilization." One of them, a diplomat called Chou Nan, who does calligraphy with a brush daily and writes poems in the traditional style, quoted suitable lines by heart from the Chinese classics. The five Chinese clustered round the hoary tablets, as Mr. Chou pointed out passages to his eager colleagues. Not a single slogan or Mao quote is found near the mound in which the Father of China may (or may not) lie. "It would be unsuitable here," a Shensi provincial aide explained crisply. I looked around the site, well kept by the Communist government. Apart from the historical inscriptions, some in Kuo Mo-jo's rich hand, the only writing nearby was a placard on an old gray tree. "Protect the forest, fight fires."

Mental unity. Chou En-lai urged me to study the essay Peking put out to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. “As you are a professor in America and Australia, it can be reference material for you." That essay was, in early July, a Bible in China.

Drivers read it. The girls in the elevator at the Peking Hotel read it, between passengers. The radio broadcasts it. Companions cite it. Hosts ask my reaction to it. In Shanghai it is no less omnipresent; the same in Nanking, in Wusih. Sometimes a visitor to Harvard might think students read only books by Harvard faculty. A parallel impression, magnified a thousandfold, I had in China. It is intellectual incest on a Gargantuan scale. Information, opinion, comes down from the mountain of authority to the plateau of public consumption. The people all have this official information; they have no other. The whole country, from Canton to the northeast, from the east coast to Sinkiang, has at least a surface mental unity unmatched in China's history. (Just as the whole country has the chronological unity of being on Peking time.) There is a rule by phrase, a bond in headlines, a solidarity by syntax. In the beginning was the Word . . . To the visiting writer, information is like melons in the market. If it's available, you get it. If it's not, your hands are empty. There is nothing in between. No point in trying to get light on government policy from a Chinese who has not received it from above. When you get something, however, it is reliable. The system would surely delight an eighteenth-century philosopher; the "Word” is sovereign. On the other hand, it is a nightmare for the diplomat who has to put something in the pouch every week. Mingling one night with foreigners in Peking, I recalled a remark of a French diplomat who served in China, then in the United States: "In Peking we had too little information. In New York we had too much. In neither case did we know what was going on."

Formidable children. Here is a French class at the Middle School attached to Peking Normal University. The faces are pictures of concentration. The class screams in unison: "Vive le parti communiste; Vive la solidarité des peuples du monde." I ask one pretty lass in a colored blouse why she studies French. "To further the world revolution." The answer seems ridiculous, but the ardent hunger for knowledge behind it is not.

The Chinese nation is studying as if for some cosmic examination. The bookshops are stiff with schoolchildren reading and buying textbooks, a lot published in the last year. A laundryboy is wrestling with Marx's The Class Struggles in

« 이전계속 »