Yan Ba turned a page. He could sense the total concentration in the room. No one moved; everyone waited for what came next. He had planned to talk for five hours. That is what the delegates were expecting. When he told the president his lecture was written, he had been told that no pauses would be allowed. The delegates would have to remain in their seats from start to finish.
‘They must see the whole picture,’ the president had said. ‘The whole must not be split up. Every pause brings with it a risk that doubts would crop up, cracks in the coherent understanding that what we must do is necessary.’
He devoted the next hour to a historic overview of China, which underwent a series of dramatic changes not just during the last century but throughout the many centuries since Emperor Qin first laid the foundation of a united country. It was as if within this Middle Kingdom a long chain of hidden explosive charges had been laid. Only the most outstanding leaders, the ones with the sharpest visionary eyesight, would be able to predict the moments when the explosions would take place. Certain of these men, including Sun Yat-sen and not least Mao, had possessed what the ignorant population regarded as an almost magic ability to interpret their times — and would bring about the explosions that someone else, let us call her the nemesis divina of history, had placed along the invisible path that the Chinese nation had to traverse.
Needless to say, Yan Ba spent most of this part of his lecture talking about Mao and his era. Mao founded the first Communist dynasty. Not that the word ‘dynasty’ was used — that would have aroused echoes of the previous rule of terror — but everyone knew that was how the peasants who had spearheaded the revolution regarded Mao. He was an emperor, despite the fact that he allowed ordinary people to enter the Forbidden City and didn’t force them to step to one side, at risk of being beheaded if they didn’t, when the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman, went past. The time had now come, Yan Ba explained, to turn back once more to Mao and accept with humility that he had been right about how the future would evolve, even though he has been dead for thirty years. His voice was still very much alive; he had the capabilities of a prophet and a scientist to see into the future, to shine his own kind of light into the dark of future decades.
But what had Mao been right about? There was a lot he had got wrong. The leader of the first Communist dynasty had not always treated his contemporaries the way he should have. He had been at the forefront when the country had been liberated, and the dream of freedom, the spiritual content of the liberation struggle itself, according to Yan Ba, was about the right of even the poorest peasant to hope for a better future without risking being beheaded by some despicable landowner. Instead, the landowners were now the ones who would be decapitated; it would be their blood that enriched the earth, not that of the poor peasants.
But Mao had been wrong in thinking that China would be able to make enormous economic advances in just a few years. He maintained that one iron foundry should always be sufficiently close to another for the workers to see the smoke from each stack signalling to one another. The Great Leap Forward, which was supposed to project China into both the present and the future, was a huge mistake. Instead of large-scale industrial production, there were people in their backyards melting down old forks and saucepans in primitive furnaces. The Great Leap Forward failed; Chinese workers were unable to jump over the bar because their leaders raised it too high. It was now impossible for anyone to deny, even though Chinese historians had to be sparing with the truth when describing difficult times, that millions of people had starved to death. There was a period of some years when Mao’s rule was not unlike earlier imperial dynasties. Mao had locked himself into his rooms in the Forbidden City and never admitted that the Great Leap Forward had been a failure. Nobody was allowed to talk about it. But nobody could know what Mao actually thought. In the writings of the Great Helmsman there was always an area conspicuous by its absence: he concealed his innermost thoughts. No one knows if Mao ever woke up at four in the morning, the bleakest time of day, and wondered just what he had done. Did he lie awake and see the shadows of all the starving, dying people who had been sacrificed at the altar of his impossible dream, the Great Leap Forward?
Instead, Mao counter-attacked. Counter-attacked what? Yan Ba asked rhetorically, and paused for several seconds before answering. Counterattacked his own defeat, his own failed policies, and the danger that there might be whispering in the shadows, a backstairs coup. Mao’s exhortation to ‘bombard the headquarters’ — a new kind of explosive charge, you might say — was his reaction to what he saw around him. Mao mobilised young people, just as everyone does in a state of war. Mao exploited young people the way France, England and Germany did when they marched them off to the battlefields of the First World War to die with their dreams choked by the slushy mud. There was no need to go on about the Cultural Revolution — that was Mao’s second mistake, an almost entirely personal vendetta against the forces in society that challenged him.
By then Mao had started to grow old. The question of his successor was always at the top of his agenda. When the next in line, Lin Biao, turned out to be a traitor and perished in a plane crash on his way to Moscow, Mao began to lose control. But to the very end he continued to issue challenges to those who would outlive him. There would be new class warfare; new groups would try to benefit at the expense of others. Or as Mao repeated as a mantra, ‘Each individual will be replaced by his opposite.’ Only the stupid, the naive, anyone who refused to see, would imagine that China’s future was assured once and for all.
‘Now,’ said Yan Ba, ’Mao — our great leader — has been dead for thirty years. We can see that he was right. But he was unable to identify precisely the conflicts he predicted would come. Nor did he try to do so, because he knew that was impossible. History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.’
Yan Ba noticed that the audience was still concentrating hard on every word he said. Now that he had finished his historical introduction, he knew they would be listening even more intently. Many no doubt had a premonition of what was about to come. Yan Ba was aware that he was giving one of the most important speeches in the history of the new China. One day his words would be repeated by the president.
There was a little clock placed discreetly next to the lamp on the lectern. Yan Ba began the second hour of his lecture by describing China’s present situation and the changes that were necessary. He described the widening gap between different groups of citizens that was now threatening future developments. It had been necessary to strengthen the coastal areas and the big industrial centres that were at the very heart of economic progress. After Mao’s death Deng had decided rightly that there was only one way to go: to emerge from isolation and open Chinese ports to the world. He quoted from Deng’s famous speech, which declared that ‘our doors are now opening and can never again be closed’. The future of China could only be fashioned by cooperation with the world around it. Deng’s understanding of how capitalism and market forces worked so ingeniously together had convinced him that the moment when the apple could be picked was soon; China could once more and with conviction assume its role as the Middle Kingdom, a great power in the making and, in some thirty or forty years’ time, the world’s leading nation both politically and economically. During the past twenty years China had developed economically in a way that was without precedent. Deng had once expressed it by saying that the leap forward from every citizen owning a pair of trousers to a situation in which every citizen could choose to acquire a second pair was a leap greater than that first one. Those who understood Deng’s way of expressing himself knew that he meant something very basic: not everybody could be in a position to acquire that second pair at the same moment. That hadn’t been possible in Mao’s time either: the poorest peasants living in the remotest areas in their squalid villages were the last in line, long after the urban dwellers had cast off their old clothes. Deng knew that progress could not take place everywhere simultaneously. That went against all economic laws. Progress was a sort of tightrope walk, attempting to ensure that neither wealth nor poverty grew so fast that the Communist Party and its inner circles, who were the tightrope walkers, fell off and hurtled down into the abyss. Deng was no longer with us, but the moment he had feared and warned us about, the point at which balance was in danger of being lost, was now upon us.