Under this relentless tir de barrage of tautologies the reader feels progressively benumbed. Sometimes, however, he is jerked out of his slumber by one of Terrill’s original discoveries: “Superstitions are gone that used to make rural people of China see themselves as a mere stick or bird rather than an aware individual.” If he genuinely believes that in pre-Communist China people saw themselves as “a stick or bird,” we can more easily understand why he deems Maoist society to have achieved such a “prodigious social progress.”
Terrill claimed that he was not a proponent of Maoism, but he made no secret of his admiration and sympathy for the regime (“[it is] somewhat absurd for non-Chinese to think of themselves as ‘Maoists.’ To be Maoist — when far from China — is hardly helpful to China, one’s own society, or the relationship between the two. The editors of this book [China and Ourselves] are certainly not Maoists. They admire the Chinese revolution”) — this very regime which, as we now learn from the People’s Daily and from Deng Xiaoping himself (and even, to some extent, from Terrill’s latest writings!) went off the track as early as 1957 and ended up in a decade of near civil war and of “feudal-fascist terror.”
Terrill visited China several times; his most extensive investigations, resulting in his influential 800,000,000: The Real China, were conducted during the early 1970s — a time that was, by the reckoning of the Chinese themselves, one of the bleakest and darkest periods in their recent history. The country that had been bled white by the violence of the “Cultural Revolution” was frozen with fear, sunk into misery; it could hardly breathe under the cruel and cretinous tyranny of the Maoist gang. Though it is only now that the Chinese press can describe that sinister era in full and harrowing detail, its horror was so pervasive that even foreigners, however insensitive to and well insulated against the Chinese reality, could not fail to perceive it (though it is true, sadly, that too few of them dared at the time to say so publicly). Yet what did Terrill see? “To be frank, my weeks in China exceeded expectations… The 1971 visit deepened my admiration for China and its people…” In that hour of ferocious oppression, suffering and despair, of humiliation and anguish, he enjoyed “the peace of the brightly coloured hills and valleys of China… the excellence of Chinese cuisine…”
Do not think, however, that his enjoyment was merely that of a tourist: “I happen, too, to be moved by the social gains of the Chinese revolution. In a magnificent way, it has healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man of China.” Maoism was “change with a purpose… the purposive change bespeaks strength, independence, leadership that was political power in the service of values.” “China is a world which is sterner in its political imperatives but which in human terms may be a simpler and more relaxed world.” How much more relaxed? Even though the country is tightly run, “this near total control is not by police terror. The techniques of Stalinist terror — armed police everywhere, mass killings, murder of political opponents, knocks on the door at 3 a.m., then a shot — are not evident in China today… Control is more psychological than by physical coercion… the method of control is amazingly light-handed by Communist standards…” “The lack of a single execution by the state of a top Communist leader is striking… even imprisonment of a purgee is rare… Far more common has been the milder fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in 1966… They lived for many months in their own homes. No doubt they lounged in armchairs and read in the People’s Daily the record of their misdeeds… Liu was sent to a village, his health declined and in 1973 he died of a cancer…” (Actually, if one did not know of Terrill’s essential decency, one might suspect him of making here a very sick joke indeed; Liu, who was very ill, was left by his tormentors lying in his own excrement, completely naked on the freezing concrete floor of his jail, till he died. As for Deng, though it is true that he was less roughly treated, he confessed in a recent interview that he spent all those years in constant fear of being assassinated.)
According to Terrill, Maoism has worked miracles in all areas: it “feeds a quarter of the world population and raises industrial output by 10 per cent per year”; it has achieved “thirty years of social progress”; thanks to it, even the blind can now see and the paralytic can walk, as Terrill himself observed when visiting a hospitaclass="underline" “The myth of Mao is functional to medicine and to much endeavour in China… it seemed to give [the patient] a mental picture of a world he could rejoin, and his doctors a vital extra ounce of resourcefulness…” In conclusion, “there are things to be learned [from Maoism]: a public health system that serves all the people, a system of education that combines theory and practice, and economic growth that does not ravage the environment.”
The impossibility of substantiating these fanciful claims never discouraged Terrill; for him, it was enough to conjure up those mythical achievements by a method of repetitive incantation, reminiscent of the Bellman’s in Lewis Carrolclass="underline"
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.
Alas! After he had said it three times, there came the turn of the Chinese to talk, and they told the world quite a different story. Not only the dissenters writing on the Democracy Wall in Peking, but even the Communist leadership itself was to expose in gruesome detail the dark reality of Maoism: the bloody purges, the random arrests, tortures and executions; the famines; the industrial mismanagement; the endemic problems of unemployment, hunger, delinquency; the stagnation and regression of living standards in the countryside; the corruption of the cadres; the ruin of the educational system; the paralysis and death of cultural life; the large-scale destruction of the natural environment; the sham of the agricultural models, of Maoist medicine.
As a result of these official disclosures, Terrill has now to a large extent already effected his own aggiornamento: his latest book, Mao, as well as some of his recent articles, reflects this new candour. Sometimes it does not square too well with the picture presented by his earlier writings — but who cares? Readers’ amnesia will always remain the cornerstone of an Expert’s authority.
The People’s Daily has already apologised to its readers for “all the lies and distortions” it carried in the past, and has even warned its readers against “the false, boastful and untrue reports” that it “still often carries.” The China Experts used to echo it so faithfully — will they, this time again, follow suit and offer similar apologies to their own readers?
Or perhaps they were living in a state of pure and blessed ignorance. It is a fact that official admissions of Maoist bankruptcy are a very recent phenomenon; nevertheless, for more than twenty years, voices of popular dissent have been heard constantly in China, turning sometimes into thunderous outcry. These voices were largely ignored in Terrill’s works; having first carefully stuffed his ears with Maoist cotton, he then wonders why he can hear so little, and concludes, “To be sure, it is very hard for us to measure the feelings of the Chinese people on any issue”!