CHINESE SHADOWS

by Simon Leys ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1977

Plain talk from the land of make-believe. A Belgian Sinologist, writing of his return to China after seventeen years (1955-72), observes bitterly how little the most informed foreigner can learn, how close to an Orwellian asylum the People's Republic has become; and he grieves for the Chinese people even as he mocks their deluded Western liberal ""friends."" The separate vignettes are tales of captivity. In the vast Chinese world, foreigners are confined to a single hotel in each of a dozen cities, allowed to talk only to servants, bureaucrats, guides (whose simplest human response is monitored), shown selected art-works and monuments (to conceal all that has been destroyed), denied any but the national newspapers-and, to enforce their isolation, granted special privileges redolent of the old imperialism. Lovely, lively, diverse Peking has been turned by the ""Cultural"" Revolution into a cultural desert; ""Tientsin has the funereal and grotesque poetry of a decor by Kafka""; Canton offers the startling sight of people doing nothing-"" lots of young men squatting, smoking, talking, and playing cards."" No written history of the Chinese Communist Party exists (therefore it need not, as in Russia, be repeatedly rewritten). To mask hierarchical distractions, army insignia have been replaced by a system of pockets--four for officers, two for privates. ""Directives from on high are deliberately ambiguous; in case of failure, the leaders have a fall-back position, while those who have applied the policy are stranded and unprotected, and can be sacrificed to the rancor of the masses."" Leys, who found China in 1955 ""full of youth and life,"" invokes history to refute the Western image of the country as traditionally totalitarian and puts his hope in the people's exceptional patience and intelligence, in the young--freed, paradoxically, by their cynicism. He is wry, amusing, acute--and unsparing.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION