CHINESE SHADOWS by Simon Leys Viking; 220 pages; $10
An old Chinese tale tells about a tyrannical prime minister of the 3rd century B.C. who assembled his courtier to test their loyalty. He had a deer brough before them and proclaimed it a horse. Those who imprudently disagreed paid the price of calling a horse a horse with their lives.
Chinese Shadows is a brilliant, uncompromising account of political distortion and sycophancy in contemporary China. Simon Leys, the pseudonym for Pierre Ryckmans, a distinguished Belgian-born Sinologist, lucidly argues that the Chin of Mao, so far from being a revolutionary paradise of egalitarianism, is a monstrous tyranny ruled over by a new privileged class of bureaucrats and generals.
Leys, who spent six months in 1972 in the People's Republic, begins with a basic fact of life in China; resident foreigners are rigorously cut off from virtually any spontaneous contact with ordinary Chinese people. Diplomats and journalists in Peking are stuck away in "the far-off suburban quarantine station that passes for the foreign quarter." Enter a restaurant, and the foreigner is led away to "a special lounge smelling of camphor," where eating a meal feels "like indulgence in a solitary vice." There are also special stores, exhibits and train compartments, an organization that handles all problems from providing servants to air tickets, and even a beach resort where, except for top bureaucrats, the Chinese are rigorously excluded. What all this indicates to Leys is the obsessive official fear that the masses might be contaminated by the ideas of outsiders.
The quarantine in Peking has its counterpart in the carefully guided official tours by which the Maoist authorities have shrunk the "immense and varied universe" of China. Westerners are limited to the dozen or so cities, factories, communes and schools whose reason for being seems to be the welcoming of friendly travelers. Leys takes the tour, finds that aside from a few carefully preserved historical monuments, China's cultural treasures have been sealed off behind curtains of barbed wire, converted to barracks, or utterly destroyed by the Red Guards during their Cultural Revolution. Leys' long list of such monuments reads like a catalogue of a vanished past. Certainly it belies the propaganda claim that Peking has carefully preserved the country's ancient heritage.
In fact, Leys makes a convincing case for his charge that Peking itself is "a murdered town, a disfigured ghost of what was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world." The fabulous imperial Forbidden City remains; so does the exquisitely harmonious Temple of Heaven —marred only by a huge red screen bearing the inevitable Mao poem. But the capital's ancient wall and magnificent gates have been torn down. Dozens of graceful arches have been destroyed. Whole neighborhoods have been bulldozed for broad, eerily empty avenues. The reasons once again have to do with the politics of totalitarianism. "Exalting deserts of tarmac" are required for those mass demonstrations in which the Chinese pay homage to Maoism.