History Majors

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06schell.html?ex=1156305600&en=3a94bd2e0f65da00&ei=5070

It is commonplace these days for visitors to be swept away by the breathtaking energy and dazzling high-rise vistas of Shanghai and Beijing. Even for Sinophiles like myself, who have been watching China for decades, the amazing development of this erstwhile People’s Republic can have an intoxicating way of obscuring the contradictions beneath. China’s progress also makes us forget that China did, in fact, undergo a “socialist revolution,” a protracted period of brutalizing class warfare that now can all too easily seem like an irrelevant prelude to a new and invincible future.

It is, of course, naïve to imagine that a nation can escape the gravity of its history. John Pomfret’s “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” arrives as a timely antidote to this tempting form of amnesia. Why, Pomfret asks, have so “many in China, including some of my classmates, believed that not looking back was good for the country?”

Having entered into the drama of China in 1980 as an exchange student at 南京 University, then moving on to become a correspondent for The Associated Press and finally the Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post, Pomfret is in a good position to tackle this question. For during the two decades he spent observing China, he witnessed one of the great political and social upheavals of our time.

“Chinese Lessons,” which follows the lives of a group of Pomfret’s former classmates, is a highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future. What makes this book particularly rewarding is that Pomfret not only describes China today, he also reminds us what came before, thereby posing the important question: Is it possible for China to avoid reckoning with its past and still become a responsible, possibly great, nation?

“If my parents had been murdered by the state, I would have devoted my life to vengeance, to political activity or at least to unearthing the evidence,” Pomfret reflects, as he hears endless tales of abuse. “Why did so many stories in China always seem to end with the bad guys getting away, literally, with murder?”

His answer is simple: Party leaders have prohibited ways of redressing grievances and controlled honest historical research, discussion and reflection. Memory has been punished, repression rewarded. In few countries is there more unfinished business than in China. “Survival was the key,” one pragmatic acquaintance observes.

Pomfret graphically highlights the cognitive dissonance in China’s mind-bending transmigration from class revolution to consumerism through the story of Old Xu. This classmate transformed a once “somnolent party History Office” in the provinces into the market-driven “Good Times Advertisement Agency.”

Paradoxically, Pomfret does not see these changes as subversive to the Leninist system. “Instead of being denigrated by the party as ‘capitalist exploiters,’ ” he explains, “private industry was now a bottomless A.T.M. for the party machine.” Nonetheless, one classmate-turned-party-official can still lament that “People need something to believe in!”

What this crisis of belief means for the future is one of the deeper questions Pomfret raises. With so many cancellations of old values systems and identities over the past century, China has been in a constant state of self-repudiation and self-reinvention. After reformers of the Qing Dynasty first began to question Confucian values during the early years of the 20th century, China was swept by a cascade of revolutions.

In the 1920’s, the May Fourth Movement turned intellectuals against tradition and toward Western science, democracy and then socialism. In the 1930’s Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists attempted to create a new East/West syncretism. With Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949, China was plunged into revolutionary “totalism.” Finally, in the 1980’s the pragmatism of 邓小平 brought authoritarian capitalism. All these tectonic reversals of identity have left China culturally deracinated and disoriented.

“China has had a great run since the Tiananmen Square crackdown,” Pomfret notes. But it has destroyed its traditions, and “the current vacuum in everyday morality hampers everything.” And as he walks down a newly developed commercial street with a classmate turned mall mogul, he wonders, “What could fill China’s spiritual void?”

Then, like a Zen satori, it hits him: “Shopping. . . .

The discontinuity between China’s “socialist” past and “capitalist” present perplexes Pomfret. But it is the unfathomable depth of unexpiated guilt for the brutalization the Chinese heaped on one another under Mao that leaves him most mystified. Since there is little likelihood of public reckoning with the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution as long as the Communist Party rules unilaterally, he sees a basic blockage at the moral heart of China’s spectacular rise. It’s something that makes him very tentative about the future.

So we are left to wonder: Does it matter that there has never been a full public apology for the nightmare of the Communist revolution, that no Chinese leader has ever symbolically knelt down as a form of national penance for the party’s crimes against its people, much as the German Chancellor Willy Brandt did in the Warsaw Ghetto for crimes against the Jews of Europe? Indeed, if the watchword in Germany is now “Never forget,” in China it is “Never remember.”

In 1945, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers gave a series of unflinching lectures at the University of Heidelberg on “The Question of German Guilt,” saying that the nation needed a psychological “purification.” “The temptation to evade this question is obvious,” he acknowledged. “We live in distress — large parts of our population are in so great and such acute distress that they seem to have become insensitive to discussions.”

Jaspers then entreated his countrymen to understand that their distress could only be relieved by “truthfulness toward ourselves.” As he put it, “the guilt question is more than a question put to us by others, it is one we put to ourselves. The way we answer it will be decisive for our present approach to the world and ourselves.”

No philosopher or public figure in China has been permitted to give the kind of open acknowledgment that Jaspers, and many other Germans, did. And, because Chinese media outlets remain tightly controlled, no such ceremonial moment of honest re-evaluation, much less national catharsis, seems likely any time soon.

The issue of whether China ultimately chooses to confront its past or continues “hiding behind history” will almost certainly end up being as important to its future as all the foreign investment, technology transfers, I.P.O.’s and high-rise buildings that now so impress visitors and eclipse the past. As one former classmate, a Red Guard who beat and tortured supposed “class enemies” during the Cultural Revolution, candidly asks Pomfret: “How do you think a society where that type of behavior was condoned, no, not condoned, mandated, can heal itself? Do you think it ever can?”

It is a question that the Chinese Communist Party has not yet asked, much less answered.

Orville Schell is the dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 14 books about China.