|
|
Interviews by Ben Lowsen and Ouyang Bin
[url=http://asiaquarterly.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/macfarquhar-edited-for-database.jpg]
The text below is based on exclusive interviews conducted by the Harvard Asia Quarterly with Professor Roderick MacFarquhar in spring 2010 and spring 2011, respectively. In accordance with the interviews, it is divided into two parts. In Part I, we solicit MacFarquhar’s general opinions on Chinese politics since 1949, placing especial emphasis on the Maoist legacy and the enduring rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In Part II, MacFarquhar discusses his personal biography, including his time in military service, journalism, British politics, and academia.
Part I: Reflections on Chinese Politics
The Maoist Legacy
Harvard Asia Quarterly: How would you characterize Chairman Mao Zedong as a person?
Roderick MacFarquhar: Well I think that Mao was obviously, as many Chinese colleagues have suggested, very much a romantic revolutionary in the sense that he was not a cold, precise planner like Stalin or Lenin. He was someone who reveled in upheaval, because he became revolutionary in the upheaval. And to be fair, he was involved in upheaval himself as a young man in the Autumn Harvest Uprising. But later on, after 1949, when there was upheaval he was far distant from it; he started it, but was not directly involved in it, which was convenient. But I think that as a politician he was, to put it mildly, devious – maybe all politicians are devious, but I think that the way the Gao Gang episode was played by the Chairman, the way that he reneged on his Hundred Flowers promise in 1957 and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and most important, the Cultural Revolution when he purged senior leaders who had been with him for thirty or forty years – in order to do that, he was very devious. So I think a manipulative, devious politician in terms of his interaction with his colleagues, but in terms of the Revolution in general much more of a romantic, with a belief in the “human wave” tactics of revolution.
As an ordinary person, it is very difficult to separate out his revolutionary persona. But again, he was clearly in some sense of the word a romantic because he got very attached to Zhang Yufang, a young woman he took into his household who he trusted tremendously. The story is that on one occasion, they had a quarrel and she left, and that he would have gone to any lengths to bring her back. In fact, his aide Wang Luqing, was able to persuade her to come back; otherwise, it is unclear what Mao would have done to get her back.
But on the other hand, he seems to have been able to distance himself from the normal emotions of a husband and a father. Clearly, there was some form of a love life with Jiang Qing way back in the Yan’an days. When that faded, one doesn’t exactly know. But he had no compunction about abandoning women who were wives officially or not. And he does not seem to have been – I say “seem” because one can’t tell this from afar – a particularly caring father. But one doesn’t really know these intimate things. One would probably have to have a long session with one of his daughters. Of course, his son died in Korea. But someone who was able – perhaps you’d say all revolutionaries, perhaps you’d say many, perhaps all leaders have to – to distance himself to some extent from ordinary human emotions in order to do his job. But he probably did it more than most.
HAQ: Right after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping stated that we should remember Mao as 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. What percentages would you give him?
RMF: Well, Deng Xiaoping had to say that. On the one hand, he had to acknowledge that Mao had made a big mistake in launching the Cultural Revolution because that was such a devastating period. On the other hand, he had to preserve Mao’s name and reputation in general, because it was essential to the legitimacy of the whole Chinese Revolution. That’s why his picture is still up on Tiananmen. I would put it the other way around – 70 percent error, and 30 percent, from the Chinese point of view, okay.
Thirty percent would be his great achievement in leading the Communist Revolution to victory, and for the first time, really, in a century, giving China a united and peaceful country. So that was a very big achievement. But after that, I would be much more critical than Deng could be. Of course, Deng supported many things that Mao did. For instance, even in the early years, if he had persisted with new democracy, which he proclaimed before the Chinese Communists came to power, and which Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai wished to pursue, then you would not have had these terrible campaigns in the 1950s: the two campaigns against counter-revolution; land reform with all the bloodshed, there should have been land reform but the bloodshed was unnecessary; the Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns against corruption; the reform of intellectuals. All these campaigns caused many, many [deaths] – the exact figure we don’t know, the figure we have is Mao’s figure, which says that something like 800,000 people died or were executed as a result of these campaigns.
Even those campaigns pale in significance to the size of the Great Leap Forward, where anywhere between thirty and forty plus million people died who should not have died. It was the result of Mao’s romanticism about what could be achieved by just hard hand labor of the peasantry, and his refusal to accept criticisms of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai midway through the Great Leap. The result was many deaths. Then of course came the Cultural Revolution, in which probably not nearly as many people died as during the Great Leap famine, but the whole country was thrown into a terrible upheaval, and the unity and peace which Mao and the PLA and the Party had brought to China in 1949 were totally disrupted. For ten years!
So I would say 30-70: 30 percent for leading China through the Revolution and bringing China together as a united, strongly led, peaceful country; 70 percent for all the damage he did to that victory afterwards.
HAQ: So what do you think about the popularity of Mao in China today?
RMF: There is a New Left group in China that sympathizes with Mao. They are appalled at the enormous corruption that the thirty years of reform have brought about and they believe that going back to some of the Maoist methods will stop that corruption. Of course, that will stop the prosperity as well but they claim not. And it’s not surprising that there should be a revival of interest in a period led by Mao when the country seemed to be reasonably uncorrupt and well-led – with some exceptional periods that I’ve mentioned. And there are people who believe that the capitalism that has been brought to China has resulted in the terrible social damages of corruption. According to Chinese that I’ve spoken to in years past and who were old enough to know what it was like in pre-Communist days, corruption now is much, much worse than under the Nationalist Party; of course, corruption was one of the reasons why the Nationalists lost the support of the urban bourgeoisie. So I can understand why there is a kind of romantic view of the past. Some of China’s leaders after the Cultural Revolution wanted to go back to the 1950’s, because that seemed like a time of stability, a time when China was looking forward to developing on Soviet economic lines. And so you can imagine that there are people who would say: “This corrupt capitalist society will fall down. We must change it.”
There is another kind of Mao fever – which we saw on the centenary of his birth in 1993 – of Mao becoming sort of like a household god. There are stories of peasant habitations having traditional icons like a Buddha plus a picture of Chairman Mao. So he’s been sort of domesticated. I think that in a society which apart from the 300-400 million people along the coast perhaps is minimally educated still – better than in the past but still not well-educated – it’s not surprising that people would think of Mao as a sort of talisman and look to him for protection. We all know the story of the taxi that crashed into a bus that had a picture of Mao on the windscreen. The truck driver died but no one in the taxi was hurt, even though the taxi was much smaller. So that also inspired worship of Mao in the form of a household god.
So I think you have these two currents: going back to Mao because of the policies and ethos of the 1950s; and thinking of Mao not so much as a political leader but more as a father figure and household god.
HAQ: What do you think about the CCP’s attitude toward Mao’s legacy? Should one differentiate between Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, for instance?
RMF: As far as I can tell, even though it took Jiang Zemin a while to jump on the bandwagon, all the Chinese leaders are committed to the reform program. Why? The first thirty years [after the 1949 Revolution], China fell behind the rest of Asia. Everyone had miracles and China just tore itself apart. The second thirty years, China has become the second-biggest economy in the world and has hundreds of millions of people who are more prosperous than ever before in Chinese history. So of course the CCP is wedded to the reform program. What does it think of Mao? It also knows that because of the corruption, because of the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution etc., that the legitimacy of the Party is far less – and has been undermined, in fact – compared with 1949 when the Party came to power. And so the one thing that is still legitimate is Chairman Mao. From Deng Xiaoping on they have kept that picture on Tiananmen, they have kept insisting that Mao Zedong Thought is something that they have to abide by. Of course, no one consults his works to decide what their policy should be; yet they desperately need the Chairman as a legitimator.
There are only two things that legitimate the rule of the CCP. One is the Chairman as a sort of founder. If his reputation were totally sullied, then the Party would be in a very grave situation. The second thing, of course, is the economic success. As long as economic success continues, the Party will say: “We are the legitimate rulers, because look what we’ve done for China.” But the Chairman is very important, because as every country knows, economic success persists for some time, and in the Chinese case has persisted for an extraordinary number of years, but eventually there will be problems. Then, the legitimacy based on economic success may dissipate and you’ve only got Chairman Mao. So you have to keep Chairman Mao there.
HAQ: So you don’t think that Xi Jinping and later generations of Chinese leaders will do to Mao what Krushchev did to Stalin?
RMF: Krushchev did that to Stalin in exactly the same way as Deng Xiaoping insisted there had to be the Resolution of 1981 summing up the Cultural Revolution and giving an assessment of Mao’s mistakes. The air had to be cleared. The people had undergone terrible times and an explanation had to be made by the Party as to why they did. And the same for Krushchev: people had undergone terrible times – purges, gulags, and all that – in the time of Stalin, and that had to be eliminated.
But there is a very significant difference between Krushchev and Deng Xiaoping. Krushchev had the good luck to have Lenin to fall back on. Stalin was eventually removed from the mausoleum, but Lenin is there to this day. But if you remove Mao, who have you got? No one. So the day that the CCP says we’re removing Mao’s picture and we’re no longer abiding by Mao Zedong Thought, I think will be the day that the Party is on the way out.
The Chinese Communist Party and Its Continual Hold on Power
HAQ: Scholars have often predicted the fall of the CCP, like after the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Incident. So why did it not?
RMF: Why did the CCP not fall as a result of these terrible things? Well, it almost did. In the case of the Famine, the Party was still very strongly disciplined; otherwise there would not have been a Great Leap. And during a famine, people are too hungry, weak, and desperate to revolt. You have to organize to revolt, and they were in no condition to. And the Party was still strongly organized under Mao and his colleagues. There was a fallout of a few people – Peng Dehuai and others – but as a whole, the Party remained strong and disciplined and the people were weak and desperate to have food, not to revolt.
In the case of the Cultural Revolution, there could have been a real problem, not so much of a revolt of the people against the Party, but more likely a splitting of the country. In the early months of the Cultural Revolution, maybe for about a year, it was not clear what was happening or going to happen in Xinjiang, because Wang Enmao, who was the First Secretary, Political Commissar, and Commander of the troops of Xinjiang, was someone they wanted to get rid of, but it was very difficult to get him out, because they couldn’t send an army up to Xinjiang to fight him. So the country could have fallen into war had Mao not stopped the rot by sending the Red Guards down to the countryside and then let the army reunite the country and put it under strong discipline. So there was a danger there but it was more about splitting the country than starting a revolt.
But in the case of Tiananmen in 1989, what you had then was an illustration of how desperate the Party had become in terms of its cohesion. Because if you remember, you had a Politburo Standing Committee of five members, and the issue before them was whether to institute marshal law or not. They never took a vote, but it is clear that the division was two in favor, two against, and one saying: “I’ll wait to see what Deng Xiaoping says.” And they couldn’t decide, so that the “Eight Gerontocrats” led by Deng Xiaoping had to take the decision into their own hands and use the PLA to clear Tiananmen Square. Now when you use the military against your own people you may be showing them that you’re not going to take any nonsense, like Gadaffi in Libya is trying to do at the moment. But it shows that politics have failed to solve a political problem. Once you rely on the military, it shows how weak the Party is. But of course, had Deng Xiaoping not been there, I doubt that there was anyone else who had the prestige, the self-confidence, and the loyalty of the military to have given the order to fire on Tiananmen Square. So I think there was a real danger in 1989, that Deng Xiaoping saw that danger and saved Mao’s revolution by ordering in the troops.
HAQ: But Deng died in 1997. Many years have passed. Why can the CCP still control society so comprehensively today?
RMF: The CCP today has some 75 million plus members. A lot of people want to join the Party because it’s a route to a better career through the connections you make and perhaps to more money through corruption. So the Party is a very solid organization [in which members are] not so much disciplined as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, not so much inspired by the desire to transform China, as they are driven by the desire to transform their own personal circumstances. They are determined to cling on to that, on the one hand. On the other hand, the majority of the people who might stand up against the Party in normal Western thinking – that is to say, the educated people – have either been frightened or bought off. The businessmen who might be strongly in favor of private enterprise have been co-opted by Jiang Zemin’s policy of the Three Represents. They’ve been admitted to the Party, which is like admitting the wolf to the sheepcote. So there are hundreds of millions of educated people who are perfectly satisfied with the present regime.
Let me tell you a story. I once asked a senior scholar official whom I knew well enough to ask this question: What about the possibilities of democracy? The answer was very interesting and revealing: “Democracy? The last 50 years, peasants have led us [i.e. the Party]. If we have democracy the peasants will rule us forever.” The educated class – the “mandarin class”, if you like to use the old phrase – they are also pleased with the present situation, because unlike in the past, when redness counted for more than expertise, their expertise is important now. So if you’re an educated person, even if you’re not making millions as a businessman, you’ve got a place of honor in the power structure. So why would you vote against that?
The third thing is that the Communist Party has been very successful in protecting itself by preventing the rise of any nationwide organization. That’s why when they suddenly realized how powerful the Falun Gong was throughout the country, and how it could summon its followers unbeknownst to anyone in public security, and could turn up in large numbers in front of Zhongnanhai [the central headquarters of the CCP and the State Council of the PRC], Jiang Zemin cracked down on them with considerable force. You do have tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations of various kinds in China every year, but they are all local. As long as they are kept local, the regime is fine. What it has to do is prevent anything from becoming national.
Now the only way, it seems to me, that you could have real problems for the Party is if the leadership splits. The Chinese leadership cannot be any different from leaderships in other countries – they must have different ideas about what the right policy should be. But the leadership knows one thing above all: they either hang together or they hang separately. It’s that urge to achieve a unity or consensus at the top that strengthens the Party below.
HAQ: Do you think the current situation is sustainable in China?
RMF: The analogy I give to my students is that China is very stable, prosperous, and moving forward but that the political system is fragile. It’s fragile because there is no political leader who really commands the loyalty and attention of the people; the CCP is no longer as well disciplined and does not have the authority and legitimacy it had under Mao because of corruption; and there is no longer any kind of ideology to keep the Party and the society together. So it’s a fragile political system. But it’s like a sandcastle: you build a very strong sandcastle and it will stay there until a wave breaks over it. So you never know when a wave will break or what the wave will be. But the Party leaders are clearly concerned about this.
This is illustrated, for instance, by their reaction to the events in totally different countries in the Middle East. They seem to have arrested so many dozen prominent intellectuals, lawyers, and journalists who individually or even together pose no threat at all. Ai Weiwei must be a nuisance, a thorn in the flesh of Party leaders. But a leader of a counterrevolution? Of course not. So it just goes to show how nervous the Party is to insist that any time any danger appears it must be snuffed out immediately.
HAQ: So it’s still hard to say whether or not this kind of system can be sustainable?
RMF: Of course, no one likes to predict the future but everyone always tries to. Yes, you can’t tell. One makes mistakes. After Tiananmen, it was clear to me that the students were not going to rise up again if they risked getting killed. It seemed to me that if there were really trouble it would be the workers who were thrown out of state industry in the northeast perhaps. But it turned out that the next source of problems was the Falun Gong. I don’t think anyone knew about the Falun Gong. I don’t think even China’s leaders knew much about the Falun Gong before it happened.
And then there are other crises. If the milk crisis had resulted in the deaths of more than four babies, it could have resulted in a spark of some sort. If the devastation and destruction of the Sichuan earthquake had been spread over more than one province, with people protesting the way the school buildings were so badly constructed that they collapsed, that could have [posed a threat to Party legitimacy]. So the Party, and you can understand their concern, is always on the alert for any danger that could affect the stability of the country.
HAQ: A lot of Western scholars think the private sector entrepreneurs will be another pro-democracy force in China.
RMF: That’s a line that’s being purveyed – peddled, I would say – by a number of people: by politicians wishing to justify their relations with China; by businessmen wishing to do business with China; and some scholars. The fact is that there is no indication that Chinese businessmen have any interest in having a democratic system until their own interests are at stake. And on the whole, businessmen are competitive, so they will very rarely come together to demand anything. You have to have a highly developed system, with people knowing each other for many years – as for instance in Wall Street, where these people banded together to defend themselves because they were all under attack. But the Chinese communist government has a very cozy relationship with businessmen. It supports them and allows them into the Party, which gives them more access to power. So I don’t think there is any indication that private enterprise leads to democracy, which is a fallacy that has been used as an excuse for not criticizing China and just going out and having relations [with it].
I think the United States and the West in general should have relations with China, and they should be as good as possible. There should be interaction and a conjunction of interests, especially between the United States and China. But I don’t think it should mean that the US government should abandon its own values. It must continue this apparently fruitless human rights dialogue, at which they talk past each other once every one or two years. I think there should be a relationship but it should be a critical relationship on both sides. If China has no hesitation about criticizing the United States, why should the United States have any hesitation about criticizing China?
Political Ideology
HAQ: Current Chinese leaders are no longer just passively dealing with the United States and other foreign influences in China. They are now making efforts to expand China’s influence overseas through an activist foreign policy. One example is the Confucius Institutes being established in many countries to promote Chinese language and culture.
RMF: Professor Joseph Nye, my former colleague in the Harvard Government Department, must be very proud, because the 75-million strong CCP bought the idea of “soft power”. They think the Confucius Institutes will be a way to get “soft power”. I think it’s actually significant that they can’t really deal with Confucius and Confucianism. That is shown recently by the fact that they erected a statue of Confucius in front of the new Museum of National History in Tiananmen Square and then, after a few weeks, someone decided that it was absurd to have Confucius catty-corner from the picture of Chairman Mao and right opposite the tomb of Chairman Mao. So they hid the statue inside the Museum.
Confucius Institutes are doubtless doing a lot for a number of poorer and less well endowed universities in the sense that Chinese language is being taught in some places where it otherwise might not be taught. There is some concern in the academic community that they will teach not just language but start to teach some propaganda, but so far that has not been so serious. I think the real problem is that, as the Confucius Institutes copy foreign institutes – the British Council, the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institute – they don’t realize that soft culture is absorbed because people want to absorb it, because they are attracted by it. American music and art, for instance, is attractive to people in other parts of the world. In fact, American pop music is attractive in all sorts of countries that had no links with the West in the past at all. But that can’t be forced. And what I think the Chinese government is incorrectly believing is that if you push a Confucius Institute into this country and that country, that somehow people will absorb Chinese culture and be respectful of China. This may apply in a few countries, especially in developing countries where China serves as an extraordinary example of what might be done. But I think that the West felt that soft power is based upon respect for the country whose soft power is being offered. Until China has some form of a more plural regime, I don’t think China’s soft power is going to be significant.
HAQ: But one could look at Confucius Institutes from another angle. Maybe the CCP is seeking to establish another ideology for itself and its own legitimacy.
RMF: How can the CCP suddenly totally forswear Marxism-Leninism? Can Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping come into the Politburo Standing Committee one day and say: “I’ve had a great idea! Let’s become Confucians!”? They’d look absurd. The whole legitimacy of the institution would disappear. The academics would start writing articles and say: “Under Confucius, you could have all sorts of different ideas.”
HAQ: What about blending new ideas into Marxism-Leninism? Like the “harmonious society”?
RMF: I think the idea of the “harmonious society” may have some links to Chinese history and to what Chinese thinkers have thought about. There have been two ways, traditionally, of bringing about harmony in society: the Legalist way, which wants to make sure that everyone obeys orders and metes out strong punishments if they don’t; and the Confucian way, which wants to ensure that there is benevolent rule and that everyone is benevolent in copying it. But there is no question in my mind that Confucianism in a sort of low-key, little tradition, popular version, prevails not only in China among the great mass of the people, but even in Chinese communities that have been abroad for generations. That is to say, the idea of filial piety, not in the extraordinary way that Confucius thought it should be exercised, but the idea of respect for the aging and respect for parents – that persists. And other Confucian ideas persist in people’s minds, I’m sure. But the idea of having a full-blown Confucian ideology – you’d have to say it’s a “Confucian Communist Party”. I’m not sure how they’d do it. It’s like if the General Secretary came in one day and said: “Let’s not try Confucianism. Let’s try democracy!” He’d be out.
HAQ: Some people think that Marxism and Communism in China today are kind of a joke. Are questions of political ideology still relevant for the CCP?
RMF: I didn’t realize people thought Marxism and Communism were a joke. It is certainly not an ideology that rules people’s lives in the way that it used to do but it is part of the legitimacy of the Party. Very frayed legitimacy now – but you can’t abandon it. It is not as important as Chairman Mao perhaps. But if you say: “Hey, we’ve tried this Marxism-Leninism, it’s done us alright for 60 years. Now we’re going to try something slightly different”, I think that you cannot take a piece out of the mosaic of the Chinese political system and not worry that the whole thing will fall apart. And that’s the point about the CCP at the moment: they’ve done their reform, economic advances are incredible, but you don’t want to move anything political because you don’t know what’s going to happen once you do it.
China’s Political Trajectory in Comparative Perspective
HAQ: You are also an expert on the Soviet Union. Do you think China could be another Soviet Union, declining and then falling apart? Or will it be like Taiwan and South Korea, democratizing as a result of economic reforms?
RMF: I don’t think China will go the Taiwan route. The reason I think it was possible for Taiwan – whose Nationalist Party was trained along Leninist lines by the Russians, of course – to go the route it did toward democracy was because in its origins it had always said it would end up with democracy. Sun Yat-sen had said there would be a “period of tutelage”, which was a long period of tutelage, but in the founding of the Nationalist Party there was the idea of genuine democracy at the end. So no one was betraying anything by bringing it in.
Secondly, the Nationalist Party was a Leninist party but without Leninism. It never had an ideology that bound its members together in the way that Leninism bound the CCP together. So it was much easier, especially with the influence of the United States, and a lot of people educated in the United States, for Jiang Jingguo to say that democracy was now going to be allowed. There was no ideological objection, and there was no real institutional objection. The Nationalist Party, of course, was extremely worried and it had a right to be worried because it lost power for eight years and may lose power again. But the leader of the Party, the son of the old leader, had the prestige to be able to say: “Now it is time for tutelage to end”. But no one in the CCP has that prestige now.
HAQ: Maybe Deng Xiaoping was the last figure that had the ability to do this.
RMF: You’re absolutely right. Deng is what I would describe as a “Janus figure”. He looked forward economically and backward politically. And that’s why he did what he did in 1989. He could have done political reform but he did not want to. If you have someone like Deng Xiaoping an his other colleagues, who were there when he started the reform program in 1979, they’d been in the Party since they were young people, since their teens or early twenties. It was a victorious time, and it was a ruling party. To disavow that would have been very difficult. And remember, it was only when he was in his last ten or fifteen years that Zhao Ziyang began to feel that democracy was the only way to go. The same can be said for Hu Yaobang. So it’s very difficult for those predispositions to change.
In the case of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, who ruled from 1964 until his death in 1981-82, you had a situation of growing corruption, paralysis, and economic failure. You also had the challenge of Star Wars that required massive military expenditure [to balance the United States]. Gorbachev came in and had a mandate for reform. He was actually elected by the Politburo and by the Central Committee, which no Chinese leader has yet achieved. He had a mandate for reform and was actually trying to strengthen the Soviet Communist Party, to bring it into the modern era and make it an engine of growth like Deng Xiaoping did the CCP. But what he did was to undermine the whole situation. He wanted a more democratic Communist society but that’s a contradiction in terms. You cannot have one. And so he brought down the whole system. I think the Politburo in China actually had a film made to learn from the Soviet example. I think they have very much absorbed this lesson, so they will avoid this trajectory.
A second reason China will not follow the Soviet Union is that, even in the years of the Five-Year Plans prior to the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, China was doing well. The Five-Year Plan system and total state control system was not good for economic growth, but as far as it did allow economic growth, the Chinese did well. The Chinese have always been a better-organized society than Russia because they were Chinese, not because of Communism. They were able to overcome the Five-Year Plan system to some extent. What you have had in the thirty years of reform is the growth of enormously capable economic officials. They don’t always make the right decisions, but no one always makes the right decisions. Although they have squashed private enterprise more than they should have done, in regard to private loans etc., private enterprise has still flourished, and state enterprise has flourished to some extent. So I think that the Chinese just have a better governing record. And that’s partly because they established a governing system 2,000 years ago and over the centuries they’ve learned certain lessons. So obviously China today is nothing like the China of the Han Dynasty, but there had been a tradition for how governments rule in China that they have brought into the modern era.
The Importance of Center-Local Relations
HAQ: So the CCP is applying the sophisticated methods of control today as other governments have in the past?
RMF: I think the problem for the CCP, apart from the ones I’ve already mentioned, like corruption, the lack of a charismatic leader, the lack of an ideology to bind Party and society together, is the fact that it’s a nation of 1.3 billion people, and a nation that’s in development. Development is a very unsettling process anywhere. Things are moving, things are changing all the time, and the government has to keep on top of that, and that’s very difficult. The instinct is to suppress it, as with the Internet, and the government has in fact recently set up a new agency for this purpose. My own feeling is that, with 1.3 billion people, a centralized rule of the type that the CCP had been used to is perhaps too inflexible. Forget ideology, forget whether it’s a good system or not – 1.3 billion people is a very big country. I think there needs to be a much greater devolution of power – whether under the Communists or any other regime – to the local level, so that you still have a national market and national defense and so on, but the provinces that are dynamic, like Zhejiang and Guangdong, can go ahead and show other provinces how to do it.
I think that the CCP, however, feels that it is the sole leader of the country; that it has to be the sole leader throughout the country; and moreover, that CCP officials in charge throughout the country have to answer to the center. As people throughout the country become even more developed and sophisticated, that will be something that people will object to. Not so much that people can’t make money, because people can make money; and more that they are hamstrung by central directives that make sense in one province but perhaps not in another.
The Study of Chinese Politics in the United States
HAQ: How would you characterize the development of studies on Chinese politics in the United States since John King Fairbank?
RMF: Well, what has happened since John K. Fairbank died, but even long before he died, really starts with the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. That really scared the United States and they passed the Defense Education Act that poured money into the study of Russia and China, and generally into the study of foreign countries that might pose a threat to the United States. Since then, particularly since the Opening Up and Reform era, but even before then when Fairbank was still in charge, there has been an enormous growth in China studies in the United States. It has been helped by the fact that in this country there is an enormous sympathy for China. This started well before the Communists came to power, with the missionaries who came back and started preaching in their home churches about how they wanted to help them and so on. There was a good relationship in the minds of Americans about China. So I think what Fairbank was propagating was that: “We should study China. It’s an important country that we ought to know more about.” That has caught on. Fairbank’s mission is accomplished.
[Although Fairbank] was a historian and his students were all historians, he was interested and felt it important to have the social sciences represented in the study of China as well. It was he who got money from the Ford Foundation for a post in sociology and a post in economics at Harvard. What has happened in the decades since those posts were established in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been enormous growth of people in various disciplines, so that people [who study China] no longer have to be part of a sort of area study group. They are in their departments. So we here in the Government Department have three tenured faculty working on China. Many other universities now have two or three tenured faculty in political science working on China. Many universities or colleges that have no big China school or library still have maybe a China political scientist and a China historian, because they feel that China is important. So China studies in the United States have grown enormously.
Now, in my days as a graduate student here, the accepted doctrine purveyed by Professor Reischauer was that undergraduates should not learn Chinese or Japanese, because they did not have a firm enough grasp of their own culture before they were drowned in these enormous cultures of China or Japan. That may have been a sensible idea but it has long been abandoned. Many Americans now have their kids taught Chinese in grade school and in high school, so that many incoming students at Harvard and other universities already know very good Chinese. They mostly speak but some can read it too.
So I think what you have now in the United States is a growing population – and I see Fairbank as a prophet of this – who have gone from great universities, and smaller colleges too, into business, journalism, government, the law, and all kinds of occupations with a knowledge of China. Their minds have been opened to China. So in their daily work, they may do nothing on China, but if something happens with regards to China, their training at high school or university alerts them to their knowledge and they remember what China is about. And that’s very important because the relationship between China and the United States is critical for the next century. In order for it to be a successful relationship, the more people understand the Chinese, the better.
To some extent, of course, some of this understanding of China will be filtered through a dislike or lack of understanding of the Communist system. Equally, the Chinese have many people learning English and studying in the United States, whose knowledge of this country may be filtered through a belief that their own system is better. So there will still be continuing misunderstandings. But I think the way the peoples of the two countries have interacted is one of the hopeful signs for the future. It doesn’t mean that there will not be international disputes between the two countries while the systems are different. But it means that there will be at least an educated population, a top layer that understands China, when these problems occur.
The State of Chinese Academia
HAQ: What is your assessment of Chinese intellectuals in the post-Tiananmen era?
RMF: The story I tell with reference to this is that, in January 1989, at my invitation as Director of the Fairbank Center, Wang Ruoshui, the former deputy chief editor of the People’s Daily [China’s leading Party-run newspaper], came to the Fairbank Center for two or three weeks. We asked him about the situation among students in China. He said that he had a friend working as a professor at Peking University who had told him that the students at the university were interested in only two things: mahjong [a Chinese board game] and tofu. Three or four months later, that professor was proven totally wrong. The students had ideals that they expressed in the Tiananmen movement.
I think it’s very difficult to say on the basis of today, when China’s intellectuals are either dissident like Ai Weiwei and attack the government, or just doing their work in academia or in think tanks and seem very acquiescent, that the students don’t seem to be very politically active except for wanting to get into the Party and get on with life. On that basis, you might say that the situation has changed totally. But I don’t believe that students or young people don’t have idealism in them somewhere. It may be buried very deep for all sorts of reasons; yet a spark can ignite that idealism as it did in 1989. Of this I have no doubt. What it would be, I have no idea.
I think that what you have in China today are some very brilliant scholars, some of whom we have helped to train over here. Some of them have not gone back but that’s the early generation in the 1980s. Now they mostly go back. My impression is that some will go back with their minds open but some will not because they are worried about having their minds opened. They stick together with other Chinese students and they watch each other. But I think that even so, they’ll all go back with more knowledge of America than when they came and they may appreciate some of the things they were able to do here when they return home. Who knows?
For the most part, Chinese students who come here see their country increasingly economically powerful and respected for that power in the world. It’s exciting, I’m sure, to go back to help to increase that economic power and perhaps to do something politically. So I think that Chinese intellectuals today are accepting of the regime because they have a place in it. If they’ve come to the West to study they may even have a better place. They have more prestige if they’ve been to a prestigious school here.
From what I gather, there are problems with academia in China. There is plagiarism, there is still rote learning to some extent, corruption – all the usual problems. So despite all the money that is being poured into Peking University, Qinghua University, and others, universities still face great problems. I am sure they will eventually be sorted out – the real problem, of course, is that in the last analysis you cannot have a political scientist in China fully and freely able to analyze his own country. Most political scientists in most countries analyze their own country. The biggest part of a political science department in the United States is normally an American section. But in China, it is very difficult for political scientists to analyze the politics of China and not offend someone. I think Chinese academia has a proud tradition and a millennia-old history of learning and respectful scholarship. Many Chinese scholars are doing very good work. I think what Chinese scholars are looking for, of course, just as Chinese literary scholars are looking for the first Nobel prize winner for literature – well, there has been one, but he wasn’t living in China, so he was disavowed – Chinese scientists are also looking for their first Nobel Prize winner. That will give a big boost to Chinese academia and intellectual life.
HAQ: It is commonly accepted that we can learn lessons from history. But in China, there are still limits placed on scholarship of the Maoist period, especially the Cultural Revolution. What negative results does this have?
RMF: Well, the negative result is not so much academic. I have lectured on the Cultural Revolution at Fudan University in what I was told was the first course on the subject in the country, and studies certainly exist. The 1981 Resolution told everyone the Party’s position about what happened until the end of the Cultural Revolution, so people have written a great deal about that period and pushed the limits.
What is problematic about writing about events post-1981 is that those leaders are still around. Some have died – but Jiang Zemin is still around, and Hu Jintao will be around when Xi Jinping takes over. So I think the problem is that no one dares to write about the current leadership in any analytical way.
When the students came here in the 1980s, they came from a China that had been so disrupted by the Cultural Revolution that they were open to all ideas. They wanted to explore all sorts of ideas to understand what had gone wrong in China. Nowadays, the students who are coming are younger. They are coming from a successful country. They were born after the Great Famine, after the Cultural Revolution, after Tiananmen, and they come with a not incomprehensible position of: “Why should I learn about China from foreigners? Is this foreigner going to slander Chairman Mao? Will I be corrupted by learning about China from a foreigner?” And so the people today have the opportunity to learn about the Cultural Revolution and the opportunity to learn about the Great Famine, either from teachers or from books, but will they take it? It’s not clear. Some will. Some will grab the opportunity. But others will feel that it might be better to just leave history to the Party and not worry about it.
Part II: Reflections on an Eventful Life and Career
Family and Childhood
Harvard Asia Quarterly: Could you begin by telling us a bit about your family and upbringing?
Roderick MacFarquhar: My father was a member of the Indian Civil Service and so went out to India in his mid- to late twenties. He was the first person in his family to have gone to university – actually, the first and last person of his generation to have gone to university – and probably the first to leave Scotland. I once asked him why he’d joined the Indian Civil Service – because he’d grown up in Inverness, which is the capital of the Scottish highlands but is not a particularly bustling, cosmopolitan city. None of his family had ever been outside Scotland – and he said it was because the pension was good! This was in the 1920s. The British government being traditionally very mean, the pension was still the same when he retired in 1947, and was still the same until the ICS former members fought for and obtained a reconsideration some time later, I think, in the 1950s or 1960s. My mother was a member of one of those British families, not unusual in those days, who had lived in India for two or three generations, at least on one side. My parents met in what is now a Pakistani airbase town, Sarghoda, where my father was stationed. They got married in 1929.
My father was in the Indian Civil Service in the Punjab Cadre, which was one of the best cadres to be in. He passed in second, so he had his choice of province. And then he moved to the central government in Delhi in, I think, 1940 or 1941. In 1947, he resigned from the ICS, which was really a rather bold thing to do: he had a son at private school in Scotland; he had no private money; and he had no big friends in Britain who would be likely to employ him. So there he was at the age of forty-three, retiring with no obvious job prospects, and it was a very bold move.
But fortunately, he and my mother used to play bridge with the man who’d just become the prime minister of Pakistan, along with his wife and my father telegrammed him to offer his services to help with the refugee problem. Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister, sent a telegram back saying: “Come!” When he came, he was told: “We’ll handle the refugees and we’ll put you into something you’re better equipped to deal with.” So he was made Secretary for education and commerce.
He stayed in Pakistan for several years. But after Liaquat was assassinated, he could see that Pakistani politics were on a bad trajectory, so he joined the United Nations Technical Assistance Board, only to be sent back to Pakistan! In 1955, he was transferred to Bangkok to take responsibility for UN aid to countries like Japan, South Korea, and South Vietnam. In 1960, the UN Secretary General brought him to New York to help create a civil service for the former Belgian Congo, which was in chaos. Thereafter he became undersecretary for personnel and retired in 1968. That’s the family.
HAQ: And your upbringing?
RMF: I grew up in India for my first, I suppose, seven years. And then was sent – as was common in those days (I know it sounds barbaric to Americans) – back to England for what we call prep school, which was really grade school by American standards, but private and boarding. I was there for three years, and then was evacuated to India as the British situation in World War II was getting very alarming. I was evacuated to India in 1940. Of course, very soon after the Japanese were hammering at the gates of India, so it looked like I’d gone from the frying pan into the fire. But the good thing about that evacuation was that I spent more time with my parents than would be normal for a British kid of people serving in India. Normally I would have gone at seven and really not seen much of them until seventeen or eighteen. But I had those years and then I went back to boarding school again, this time to the equivalent of high school. I spent about four years with them in India. In all I spent about eleven years growing up in India.
HAQ: You went back to Britain in 1944?
RMF: Yes. We went by boat and we arrived in Glasgow, where there was a lot of shipping activity going on. In fact, we arrived just before June 6… just before D-Day. And I went straight to school.
HAQ: Did you see any of the effects of the war?
RMF: Not really. I was in my prep school north of Edinburgh, and saw some German planes over there in 1939-40 bombing the local naval base before I was evacuated. My public school [high school] was in Edinburgh, and there was really no bombing as I remember during the last days of the war. I arrived back in 1944, and the Germans were far too busy defending themselves; except for, of course the V-1s, which we called “doodlebugs,” which were slow-flying rockets with a “fut-fut-fut-fut” engine sound. When the engine stopped, you ducked because it was coming down. The V-2, of course, was a straight rocket, and if you heard it you were alive and if you didn’t you were dead! My mother was in London at the time – that’s one of the places that got most hit – and she was a fairly fearless person. She used to go on the roof of the apartment building that she was living in and watch the V1s as they came over. But Edinburgh was fairly safe.
HAQ: May I ask you about your father’s knighthood?
RMF: Sure. My father got an honor from the British government – he was Commander of the British Empire – for his services in India. But he was knighted as a result of the Pakistani government’s appraisal of the value of his work in Pakistan. Every year – I don’t know if it’s still the custom, but I think it is – Commonwealth countries can recommend citizens to the Prime Minister, to the Queen ultimately, for honor. And so my father was honored.
I didn’t go to the palace with him to get his knighthood but he took his mother, which I think was appropriate. She remembered when my father first went out to India, that her husband, my grandfather, had said: “You know, I think one day Alec will end up as a ‘sir’.” Turned out to be right, and I think he was right to take his mother.
Higher Education
HAQ: Did you stay on for university in England after that?
RMF: Well, first I did my military service and then I went to Oxford. The school I went to in Scotland was called Fettes, in Edinburgh. It was known, of course, by Fettesians as “the Eton of Scotland.” It’s noteworthy now because it’s where former Prime Minister Tony Blair went to school. And the amusing thing is when I went back there a few years back, there were Chinese pupils there. I asked them how they’d got there, and one of them said his parents were fairly illiterate people who’d made money in Shenzhen, and that some alumnus or someone from Fettes had come round saying: “If the place was good enough for Tony Blair, it’s good enough for you.” So he and a few other Chinese had ended up at Fettes. Indeed, there are now at least two British private schools that have campuses in China.
HAQ: Did you have a major at Oxford?
RMF: Yes. Mine had been history at school, because, as you may know, in the English system you are made to specialize – stupidly in my view – very young, but that’s just the way it is. So I was working on history and geography from about the age of fifteen or fourteen. But when I went to Oxford, I went into a program called PPE, politics, philosophy, and economics. My intention was to specialize in philosophy, but at that time Oxford was in the grips of linguistic philosophy, which meant that after a term of logic, I could pick the holes in all my friends’ arguments and utterances. I became very unpopular as a result, but it wasn’t the kind of philosophy I thought I was going to learn about. It wasn’t the big questions or the big answers, whether from the Greeks, or the Germans, or the British. So I didn’t specialize in philosophy, I specialized in politics and what could be called the historical papers under the politics aegis.
I’d already decided before I graduated that I would go into politics, and for politics, you need a career, of course. Very few people can get straight into politics. And in Britain at that time – I think still today – most Conservatives became lawyers. And in fact the House of Commons timetable in those days – it’s now been changed – was specially calibrated for lawyers because in the old days, members of Parliament were never paid, and so the lawyers would go to the courts in the morning and Parliament would start at two o’clock in the afternoon. But I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and anyway I wasn’t a Conservative. Most Labor politicians (very few were lawyers) but most of them were probably either union leaders or teachers, usually at high school level, and I didn’t want to do that either.
It seemed to me that journalism was a good career as a backup to politics, and perhaps something that you could do while you were in politics. In fact, I didn’t do very much because there was no time. But the problem about journalism in Britain in those days was the union rule that in order to get into one of the national papers you had to spend three years in the provinces covering hatches, matches and dispatches. You couldn’t go straight to London and try to get a job because the union would say: “No, it’s Buggins’ turn. He can do that job.”
So the alternative obviously was to know something that Buggins didn’t know. India would have been an obvious thing to have studied, but there were too many people in Britain who knew about India, of course. The empire had only recently ended and there were lots of people who had come back. So I decided there wasn’t much value added in that. There had been a revolution recently in China and during my studies I read a couple of books on China, actually written by professors who were here at Harvard. And I decided that knowing about China would be something that newspapers would value in the very near future, so I decided to learn about China.
China to me was a means to get into journalism, which was a means to getting into Parliament, so it was a means to a means to an end. When I came here, the incoming class was very small; I think there were only about five or six of us my year. I remember the first seminar that Fairbank gave us. He described how he had been a Rhodes scholar, that he had been a historian of Britain while he was an undergraduate, and he went over to further his studies at Oxford, began to be drawn into British colonial policy, became interested in the China trade, heard that archives would be opened in Beijing, dashed off to China and started to learn Chinese. He commented that China has a way of taking you over, to which I said under my breath: “Not me.” And it’s the only time I’ve actually been wrong!
HAQ: When did you study China at Harvard?
RMF: I went to see the professor of Chinese at Oxford because I knew nothing about the American system. I’d read these two books, but I knew nothing about the American system or where to go. I knew that there wasn’t very much going on in the modern field in Britain, just few classical scholars in Oxford, Cambridge, and in London. So I went to the professor of Chinese at Oxford, who had to be American because his name was Homer Dubbs, and Professor Dubbs. Once he grasped that I didn’t want to be his student – because he’d obviously gone to Oxford to have no students and to get on with his translation of the Han History – Professor Dubbs became very helpful and he said Yale was the place to go just for language because they had been training the military during the war. They had their own Romanization system. I didn’t know what Romanization systems there were, of course. At Harvard, he said, Professor Fairbank had recently started an MA program in which you could not only learn language, but could also study the politics, the economics, and the history of China. So it became clear that since I’d read these two books written by Harvard professors – in particular I was impressed by Benjamin Schwartz’s first book Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao – I decided to come here. And so I did, only to find that Professor Schwartz was actually in Japan my first year. Fortunately, he came back my second year. So I did the MA, and I thought about staying on for the Ph.D. But I decided to stick to my original plan. I decided to do one extra thing: I had taken Japanese my second year as well as Chinese, and I decided to go to Japan to teach English and to improve my Japanese. And I wrote to the authorities and said I would like to teach English and they said, “Your degree is in economics. You will teach economics.” I knew I knew much more about English literature than I knew about economics, so I said, “No, I will teach English.” So they said, “No, you will teach economics.” The end result was that I didn’t go to Japan, unfortunately, and I’ve often thought that had I gone and taught economics I might have stopped the Japanese economic miracle in its tracks before it even got going!
But I went straight back to England and a senior journalist I’d sought advice from when he was foreign editor of The Economist had advised me before I went to America that when I came back, I should go to some place like Singapore and get on the Straits Times and get a feel of the Far East, and then come back to Britain. I was thinking about that and I went to see him, and he was now the deputy editor of a major daily paper, The Daily Telegraph, and instead of sending me off to Singapore, he hired me as a China specialist to work with the paper’s Soviet specialist. So I was very lucky – except for the salary, which was the equivalent then of about thirty dollars a week. I was very lucky because working with the Soviet specialist taught me a lot about the Soviet system, which of course was very helpful in my study of China. Immediately I had to start thinking about the differences but it showed the kind of system that the Chinese were busy copying at that stage.
Military Service
HAQ: What drew you to military service?
RMF: Nothing drew me to it. Everyone had to do it. Absolutely compulsory. It was called national service. And unlike here, where I think it was called selective service, you couldn’t get out of it. Everyone had to do it and you normally did it when you left your school. So at the age of eighteen you went into the army. When I went in, it was for only eighteen months. This was another place where I experienced the class system because – we all went in as privates, of course, because we all had six weeks of basic training. My first six weeks of basic training, I was in a barracks with seventeen other lads and sixteen of them spoke with a Glasgow accent which I couldn’t understand, and the seventeenth was an Englishman, also with a Scots accent but at least I could understand him. What I immediately realized was that the people who would be selected for what was called a “Wawzbee” – a War Office Selection Board (WOSB) – to see whether or not you were good enough to go on to officer training – were almost always public school boys [the US equivalent of a private school]. So the class system went from the schools into the military as well.
Anyway, so I did get to officer cadet school. I had always felt that the Middle East was very exotic, because going to and from India you go through the Suez Canal. There’s desert, and there’s palm trees, and there’s a camel or two. It all looked very glamorous. So I opted on going to a tank regiment because it was based in the Suez Canal zone, then run by Britain. I arrived about Christmas 1949 and spent most of the time on the Suez Canal, and for a couple of months I had my own troop of four tanks in Aqaba in Jordan opposite the Israeli town of Eilat. We were there with an infantry battalion to defend Jordan, which was sort of a British protectorate at the time, against the Israelis. Fortunately for me, the Israelis did not attack while I was there.
During this time the Korean War broke out, and I went to my Colonel and said that I wanted to volunteer to serve in the Korean War. He didn’t laugh at me but he persuaded me out of it. “You can volunteer,” he said, “But you’ll be sent back to England, and you will not be sent out to Korea. You’ll spend your time in England and frankly, soldiering in England is very boring (as I confirmed a few months later when I had to do it for about a month). So don’t do it, because you won’t get to Korea.” I don’t know if he was just telling me the truth about domestic soldiering – that was certainly true – or just simply trying to save my life. Either way I didn’t go. And after that point, for people who went in, they had to serve for two years because of the Korean War. But I just went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1950.
HAQ: Did anything interesting happen in Egypt?
RMF: Yes. There were many exercises we had to carry out, of course, in the Canal Zone. We were not just polishing our tanks every day. And one of them was a sort of trek, a night trek across the desert. As we were about to start, the adjutant came up to me and said I was to be leading the column. So I got into a jeep, I think it was, to lead the tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles across the desert to get to a certain point by daybreak, or before if possible. So I started to guide the column by means of the stars. Until halfway through the night I realized that the stars were moving around and the earth was moving relative to the stars! And that’s when I realized I was probably going round in a circle. So after a little while more pondering about this big mistake I’d made, I decided to call a halt because I didn’t know where I was, and in the morning the adjutant came up to me and congratulated me on getting exactly where I had to get. My suspicion was he didn’t know where we had to get to either! But anyway it worked out okay.
On Soviet and Chinese Communism
HAQ: How did you see the Soviet threat in the 1950s?
RMF: I don’t know if you’ve heard of The New Statesman. It still exists and it was sort of the moderate left wing magazine of the day which one read. I got to know the legendary editor and his legendary wife, Kingsley Martin and Dorothy Woodman, quite well. And Dorothy Woodman once said I think she was right, to a certain extent – that your generation has been totally ruined by reading Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, which I had indeed read. I think she was right, to a certain extent. Darkness at Noon is a very scathing denunciation of the Communist system by an intellectual who had been a Communist, so he knew it from the inside. And what she meant by that was of course that none of us, frankly, had any time for the Soviet Union. And she, having been brought up in the thirties in the days of the United Front with the Soviet Union was very distressed at the Cold War, and so on. But my generation had nothing but suspicion of the Soviet Union. Indeed, when I came back to England to work at the Daily Telegraph with the Soviet specialist, that solidified my view, because the specialist was himself an ex-Communist. In fact he had been seen as a future leader of the British Communist Party, but he married a Czech woman and she dissuaded him of any love for Communism he may have once had. So my suspicions about and antagonism to the Soviet Union were fairly strong throughout the Cold War.
But in here, at Harvard, the views on China were very different. Of course, down in Congress, there was great suspicion about China. And Fairbank had been hauled up in front of a committee – I don’t remember which one now – and because he’d been very friendly with a Chinese academic who was now back in China. Ironically at the same time in China that academic was being pulled over the coals for being friendly with Fairbank. But the view of China here was much more friendly in the sense that people who, like Fairbank, served in China during the war had been disgusted by the corruption in the Chiang Kai-shek government. The “vibes” that came off of the faculty here were that the Communists had to be better than Chiang Kai-shek because he was terrible. So one studied the Chinese Communists as people who were trying to do something for China in a good way, to try to bring prosperity and development to the country. And I remember there was an economist who was teaching China at the time and he taught how they brought inflation under control in the early years of the Communist regime. So I wouldn’t say that we were encouraged to be pro-Communist China, but we were in effect influenced to think reasonably well of China compared with the Soviet Union.
It was while I was here that the first purge took place in China. No one could quite understand it. There were no political scientists writing about China to explain it in those days. That was the purge of Gao Gang in 1953-54, revealed finally in 1955. But on the whole, what impressed me was the difference between the way the Chinese leadership had remained solid, united for many years, with the exception of this Gao Gang episode. Years later I wrote an article about it. He had been one of the original Long March people; whereas the Soviet leadership of course had been purged and purged and purged again. So one was favorably impressed by the Chinese. I think someone once said that the problem about specialists on Russia and China was that all the original Soviet specialists tended to be either Russian or Eastern European exiles who hated Soviet Communism and the Soviet Union, whereas most of the specialists of China were so impressed with Chinese culture and by the way that the Chinese Communists did things differently that they were prepared to give Chinese Communism a hearing.
It was when I went back to England and started working on the Daily Telegraph that I had to review a book that came out in 1955. It was Richard Walker, Chinese Communism: The First Five Years, as I recall. Walker was strongly anti-Communist and later became an ambassador to South Korea under a Republican administration, and this book detailed all the campaigns of the first five years: the counter-revolutionary campaign, land reform, all these campaigns. He totted up a figure of people who might have been killed. This figure didn’t seem credible, but may have been nearer to the mark than what people thought. I remember writing this review and, unbeknownst to me, the features editor seized it to put it on the op-ed page. He gave it the title, without my knowing, “China’s Black Record.” Years later I told Richard Walker, once when we were in Taiwan together, that I think that that article was the reason why for years the Chinese legation in London kept telling me that they hadn’t heard from Beijing about my application for a visa.
HAQ: Did you find that there was anti-Communist sentiment in the United States in that period?
RMF: Oh yes. Well obviously, in the early fifties… I was here in fifty-three to fifty-five. In fact the great event of my final year, just before exams, unfortunately, was the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were riveting. And of course McCarthy had been riding high until the Army-McCarthy hearings. And actually, Joseph Welch, who was the counsel for the Army, who had taken on McCarthy and attacked him on occasion, in his gentle Bostonian manner, came and talked to us at Sander’s Theater about the hearings. He made a very interesting analysis. He said, you know, there were these two microphones, a thin one and a bulbous one on the table. One of them was communicating round the table and the other one was communicating to the listening public. And he said Senator McCarthy never actually grasped the difference between the two microphones, so he kept talking to the microphone that was broadcasting to the outside world and the people sitting round the table couldn’t hear him because he wasn’t speaking into the bulbous mike. The result was that when they would say, “What did you say?” he would start shouting, so the people in the radio audience heard this man shouting all the time, and that I think was a factor, at least certainly Welch thought it was a factor in the demise of his reputation in the aftermath of the Army-McCarthy hearings.
There was a lot of anti-Communism. There wasn’t any McCarthy-style anti-Communism, as far as I knew, here at Harvard, particularly. Richard Walker believed that the reason he was denied tenure at Yale was because he was too right wing. He ended up at the University of South Carolina and they established a China specialty there.
At that time you have to realize that there were really two major China centers. There were places doing China elsewhere, of course, but the two major centers were Harvard, which was seen as sort of a left wing bastion and rather pro-Chinese Communist, and the University of Washington, Seattle, where people like George Taylor, who was a British immigrant, and Karl August Wittfogel, a German immigrant, were very anti-Communist. Karl August Wittfogel was a great scholar and was of course a former German Communist. The former Communists were the most anti-Communist. There was a famous story that was told about him, and years later I had it confirmed by someone who was there. Wittfogel was also connected with Columbia and one day he was walking on Broadway, near the Columbia campus with a Japanologist colleague, Herbert Passin, who confirmed this story. Another colleague came toward them and Karl August, in his courtly German way, said, “Good afternoon!” And the man just walked by without saying anything. And Karl August turned to our mutual friend and said, “Herb, did you see that? He cut me dead!” And Herbert Passin said to him, “Well Karl August, maybe that’s because you denounced him in front of a Senate committee the other day.” And he said, “But Herb, that was political, not personal!”
The anti-Communist group at the University of Washington, Seattle, had some brilliant scholars: in addition to Witfogel and Taylor, there were Helmut Wilhelm and Franz Michael, and they were all anti-Soviet. But here – I don’t think there was anyone pro-Soviet around here [at Harvard]. But the attitude toward China at least, if not sympathetic, was more tolerant. I think the point about Fairbank which one has to grasp is that he was not a Communist, as was sometimes alleged (I think in Taiwan). He was someone who wanted the best for China, and he thought that what Chiang Kai-shek had been able to accomplish was not the best for China and he thought the Communists couldn’t do worse. But what he was really interested in was something quite different: there was this great culture – Chinese culture and Chinese history – and he wanted Americans to know about it because he thought it was important. So his real mission was not to persuade anyone of the virtues of Chinese Communism, his real mission was to persuade Americans of the virtues of knowing about China. And of course, after his thesis was published, all his other works were basically addressed to the general public and were very persuasive. The U.S. in China, which was published sometime in the late forties, was a much-read book, very well written and much read, and went through a number of editions. I think he had great influence on stirring up interest in China in this country.
On the Press
HAQ: As an old press-man, what do you think about the press today?
RMF: I don’t really have many views on the press today. I regret the fact that it seems to be disappearing. I know that my son and daughter tend to read everything online, they don’t buy newspapers any longer. Why bother when you can read online? I think actually that’s why peoples’ eyesight is not as good as it used to be, because they tend to read online and it’s not so good for the eyesight. So I regret that newspapers are closing down because I’m of the generation that loves to learn the news from reading… well, you know, maybe television from time to time as well, but mainly reading in the morning.
In Britain, the newspapers have gone down. The Times [of London] I think has been dumbed down by Rupert Murdoch’s ownership, and goodness knows what he will do to the Wall Street Journal. I don’t read it regularly, so I won’t be affected. But The New York Times I think has maintained its standards, on the whole, though it’s clearly adjusted to a new world: there’re many more “featurey” type stories on the front page than there are straight news stories, so that’s a tiny bit dumbed down. But I think the standards at the Washington Post – I don’t read the Washington Post unless I’m in Washington – but it’s basically a local paper with very good foreign news. But I think that newspapers are going to see me out anyway. Probably will see you out too.
Monty
HAQ: Will you tell us how you met Field Marshal Montgomery?
RMF: I was working for a Conservative newspaper, the Daily Telegraph in London, as their China specialist. Because it was a Conservative newspaper, I suppose, when Field Marshal Montgomery had arranged a trip to China, he decided that that was the best place to consult for some kind of briefing before he went. So I turned up as the person who had to give him the briefing and I duly went to his house in the country by train. He met me at the station in, I think, his Jaguar, but I can’t remember. What I do remember is that his eyes were very blue and his tie was very blue to accentuate it. We had a very pleasant lunch and I gave him a briefing. I suggested that one of the key questions was to find out what the succession to the chairman was. And I said, “If you ask Mao, ‘Who will be your successor?” He’ll almost certainly say ‘Liu Shaoqi.’ And I think what you need to say then is, ‘And who will succeed him?’”
And to his credit, Monty actually did meet Mao and ask him these questions. In fact, before he met Mao, we now know from the ambassador who was accompanying him around China, that Montgomery kept on mentioning the question of succession, and so the ambassador had warned Mao in advance that he would be asked this question. Mao had said, “Yes, but we don’t really think in these ways.” Actually a very revealing utterance in itself, since Liu Shaoqi had at that time been almost twenty years in the number two slot behind Mao.
Anyway, Monty met Mao and he asked his question, and Mao duly replied, “Liu Shaoqi.” Then Monty asked the second question, “Who would follow Liu Shaoqi?” Well, the official Chinese account says that Mao answered, “I’ll be dead by then, so I won’t care. They’ll have to sort it out for themselves,” or words to that effect. But two very, very clued in Chinese Party historians years later put in an article saying Mao had said Liu Shaoqi’s successor would be Deng Xiaoping. This would have been, had it been broadcast at all, sensational because it would have been totally against the “order of battle” in the Politburo Standing Committee in which Zhou Enlai was the natural successor to Liu Shaoqi.
So these Party historians told me later that they’d made a mistake. Now I found it very hard to believe that Party historians as well plugged in as they would make a mistake. On the other hand, one knows from interpreters of Chinese leaders that there is a certain protocol: that if a leader – Mao or Zhou Enlai or Liu Shaoqi or whoever – says something that is not the Party line, that is something different, that before they translate it, they have to check with the speaker, in this case Mao: “Did you really mean to say that Deng Xiaoping was the successor to Liu Shaoqi?” And my suspicion is, because I don’t think these Party historians would be likely to get these things wrong, is that maybe he then rethought what he’d said because he’d “put the cat among the pigeons” if he said “Deng Xiaoping.” So then he said this about, “I’ll be dead, I don’t care,” and so on. And of course Monty would be unaware what was happening since neither he nor his British escort knew Chinese. Unfortunately, I couldn’t follow up with this. Monty came back to England and wrote a couple of very interesting articles for the London Sunday Times but he wouldn’t see me, I don’t know why.
HAQ: Was he still in the service at that time?
RMF: No, no, no. He’d retired long since. One thing I remember: I had to write up a short piece for my paper about his trip report in the Sunday Times, and I selected what I considered the most egregious, almost absurd, remark that he’d made. Maybe this is why Monty wouldn’t see me, because Monty said, “Mao’s the kind of man I’d go in the jungle with.” And so I quoted this. Maybe when it was just put baldly like that, in the way that I did, maybe Monty took offense.
The Vietnam War
HAQ: Can I ask you about the Vietnam War?
RMF: The Vietnam War was not so big a deal in England, and Harold Wilson – who was the prime minister, then – in the 1960s resisted President Johnson’s desire for British troops to be there. I think the story is that Pres. Johnston said, “Just send a pipe band.” Just a presence. Harold Wilson knew that it was not a good idea from a Labor Party point of view, and there was not much support, I think, among the Conservatives.
There was a famous debate at the Oxford Union, the foreign minister was asked up and he made a brilliant case not so much supporting the Vietnam War, but routing the critics of the Vietnam War. But because Britain wasn’t involved, unlike say Iraq today or Afghanistan, it wasn’t such a big issue. It was an issue in the Left, but not one that was likely to change one’s likelihood of getting elected.
HAQ: In the sixties, the U.S. had Students for a Democratic Society. Was there anything like that in Britain?
RMF: No, not as far as I know. The Left Movement in America started with the Freedom Riders down in the South in the early sixties. That led into the bust at Berkeley – the free speech movement at Berkeley. And that in turn gave birth to the Students for a Democratic Society. And of course out of them came the extremist group who were the Weathermen. Now they were, in origin, protesting about race, but as the Vietnam War developed, they were protesting about the war. And since the British were not involved in the Vietnam War, and since generally what we were involved in (NATO) people didn’t argue about it, it was sort of a fact of life that you had to be a member of NATO to protect Europe against Russia. No one really quarreled with that, except on the left wing of the Labor Party where people were either closet Communists or what we used to call in those days “fellow travelers”. There were always leftwing students, but someone at the School of Oriental and African Studies once told me that what got the students most riled up was the price of tea at the canteen at the university. Politics in Britain in the sixties were rather low temperature. There were alarms and excursions of course, but if there was an equivalent to the SDS, I didn’t know about it. I was no longer a student, of course, but I don’t think there was.
What did emerge in the mid-fifties, after the Hungarian Revolt, was a group around a new magazine that was called The New Left Review. I remember going to a couple of the early meetings. That brought together ex-Communists and fellow travelers, and also people on the Left who never had been Communists but felt that the right wing of the Labor Party was not strong enough on the kind of goals that the Labor Party should adopt. The New Left Review had many younger people around it. I mean one of the people who gravitated to it was Tariq Ali, who now is a venerable figure, who was a Pakistani of a very good family. His father was an editor and Tariq went to Oxford and became quite famous.
During 1968, there were the big so-called “events”, les événements, in France. The students and workers seemed to be rallying to strike together, especially around the Renault works. Then there was a student movement in Britain and people like Tariq Ali joined up with Danny Cohn Bendit from France and other student leaders from Europe. I remember the BBC put them all together on a program once. There was a sort of international left wing student movement that I suppose would be the equivalent of the SDS, but it had different motivations. After the strike elements had been quieted in France, it was possible to analyze what was happening and see that really there were different reasons for the students being left wing in different countries.
In Germany, apparently, much of the agitation was by young faculty members. In those days, a single professor in each department dominated the German faculty, and he was there for life. He had your career in his hands and you couldn’t become a professor. So the younger faculty led that agitation.
In France the gripe was about the massive classes. They would sit in these vast classes and the professor would lecture and then they’d never see him again. And in Britain, we didn’t have that problem, so students might be left wing, but it wasn’t because of their own condition, particularly. By that time, because of Labor Party policy, there had been a revolution in the kind of people who went to universities. There were grants for people who normally wouldn’t have gone anywhere near a university. Most students were reasonably satisfied with the way they were treated in Britain, apart from a few firebrands in the National Union of Students, so you never had a student movement of the SDS type. There was a Young Communist League, but the British Communist Party was not really much to talk about.
Politics
HAQ: How did you come to support Labor?
RMF: Oh, that was purely an intellectual decision. There are many people in England, and I met many of them during my time in the Labor Party, especially if they’re working class people, for whom the party was almost a living creature. And it was their be-all and end-all. I met many of them during my time in the Labor Party. That made for very strong loyalty to the party, of course. For me, who had grown up abroad mainly, and apart from that when I was at boarding school and cut off – or when I was at Oxford, which is also a different way of being cut off – I had no real knowledge of the Labor Party. What happened was that at school when I was reading political stuff, it seemed to me obvious that the capitalist system under which Britain had not prospered during the thirties, was unfair and that one should adopt a more egalitarian system like the Labor Party promised. And what occurred to me was that people argued that state-controlled industry didn’t know how to manage itself and couldn’t make profits and so on. But at that time British industry was doing so badly that my thought was they couldn’t do any worse under state control. And at least it would be on behalf of people in general.
My father didn’t have a private education. He went up in the state system by scholarships. But he had put me down for a private school because it was a very good school. Despite the private education, or perhaps because of it, and also during my service in the army and particularly at officer cadet school, I really became conscious about class differences. In Scotland and at my school they were less obvious. When one came into contact, through officer cadet school, with people from English public schools, it was very clear what the class system was like. That solidified my view that in fact private education really needed to be reformed. Classes weren’t formed on the basis of money so much, although money obviously helped, but they were formed on the basis of education: how you spoke. One of the most troubling things that happened to me when I first arrived here in America was that I could not immediately tell what class someone was from by their accent. And I didn’t realize that this was what was troubling me. I just found myself uneasy when speaking with someone new. And it was only after a few weeks that I realized what was making me uneasy, because normally I’m not uneasy meeting people. That horrified me and confirmed me in the view that this system of differentiation by education and accent is something that had to be greatly modified. So that was another reason – the failure of British business in the post-war and pre-war periods and therefore the need for economic reform and the divisiveness of the educational system – which led me to think in terms of supporting labor.
HAQ: Would you tell me about your first run for office?
RMF: I was a candidate in 1966. I had planned to get involved in politics by about the age of thirty, but I was having such an interesting time with China and journalism. Then in 1959 I was chosen as editor of the China Quarterly, and that became very interesting too. So I didn’t really try to get a seat until 1964, which would have been alright – still in my early thirties – but I had been badly advised. I was at the time in television, and an MP who was a friend of mine advised me at the time that I could easily get what’s called in Britain a “safe seat”. So I only tried for safe seats. And the problem with the Labor Party – it’s not a problem, it’s the way the party works – is that you have to prove that you’re “red” as well as “expert”. The redness is much more important than the expertise. I just looked like an expert assuming I could take over a safe seat. Now the Conservative Party was very different because people like Christopher Chataway, a world-class runner, he got a seat immediately. But in the Labor Party, it’s your red heart that you’re supposed to demonstrate, and so I didn’t get a seat in the 1964 election. I then decided to ignore the advice I had been given and do what is normally how you get in, and that is to fight a losing seat. It’s proving you’re red. You know, you’re prepared to stand against all the odds. So I stood for a Conservative-held seat in London in the 1966 general election. I loved campaigning. It’s just wonderful to campaign. You have to enthuse your supporters, and the problem is you lose sight of the fact that it’s a safe Conservative seat and you’re never going to win it… because you think somehow you’re going to win it. But I lost as I had expected.
The 1968 election was very different. This was a by-election. There were four by-elections on the same day. What had happened is that a young MP had died in a constituency called Meriden. It was right in the middle of England. I looked it up and saw that it was what we call in England a “marginal seat”, that’s to say it could go either way: the majority for Labor at the 1964 election or the 1966 election had not been very big, so it could go either way, and I didn’t want to run for it so I didn’t put my name in for it. What happened was that someone called me up from the constituency and said, “Would I allow my name to go forward?” And I said, “No.” “Would I come up to face a local party which would then nominate me for the constituency party?” And I said, “No,” because I didn’t want to run. And then the person, who was very persistent, said, “Would you allow us to put your name forward even if you don’t come up?” And I said to myself, “It’s a bit ungracious to say no to such a handsome offer. They’re never going to offer it to me if I don’t turn up.” But unfortunately for me, they put forward my name, got it shortlisted, and the first time I was in the constituency was the day I was selected to run as candidate in the by-election. I remember my wife was in tears because obviously the Labor Party was in a very grave situation at the time, as it tended to be in the 1960s, and it was clear I was going to lose. All four of these by-elections were held the same day, and we all lost by swings of something like twenty percent. They were massive defeats in those four elections.
By that time, it was getting difficult for somebody like me to get a seat because the Labor Party at that time was very anti-European and I was pro-European, pro-Britain going into Europe. So I didn’t get a seat in the 1970 election, but in 1972 I was chosen despite being pro-European. And then I got in in the first of the two 1974 elections.
[…]
HAQ: Any thoughts on politics in the United States today?
RMF: Well, it’s sad – only what I read in the papers, of course – the atmosphere in Congress, both in the House and the Senate, has now become so partisan. It never was in the old days, I gather. You know, there were people who made it partisan: the old Southern Democrats used to and then of course McCarthy and people like that. But basically you could be friends with people across the aisle, so to speak, which I gather is now almost impossible; certainly when you’re actually sitting in the Congress and voting. So that partisan anger is a pity, not just because I think Obama is a president with a good vision, who actually is middle-of-the-road. Many left-wing supporters of the Democratic Party thought he was something he wasn’t. If they had read his speeches and his body language properly, they would have known that he was a centrist and a conciliator. And you can only be a conciliator from the center. You can’t conciliate from the left. He’s a conciliator from the middle and unfortunately – I think there is racism in this, unfortunately – he has been demonized by the right. And that’s an enormous pity, but like many presidents he is more popular abroad than he is at home. I think abroad people are still wary. He made a brilliant speech in Cairo early on, but now with all the turmoil in the Middle East… We yet have to see whether or not the United States ends up in a better place than before. But initially at least, the Europeans were very enthusiastic about Obama, and I think he’s had an effect. America is no longer less popular than China abroad, so that’s an Obama effect.
But what he has found, however, is that there comes a time when the conciliation has to stop. You have to show the steel in your spine. And I think he’s found that he has to do that if there’s any chance of him winning a second term. So he’s got to show steel. In foreign policy, I think his visit to China was a disaster, the way it was conducted; much too low key, much too pandering, and I think he will change that. But particularly at home, he’s just got to push things through. I think he finally showed the necessary steel in taking the very risky, very brave decision to send in the Seals to take Osama bin Laden. That one might think was a defining moment of the Obama presidency.
[…]
Family Life
HAQ: In 1964, you married Emily Jane Cohen.
RMF: Yes, December 23. I met her in London. Her father and Irving Kristol’s father were somehow related not very distantly, but distantly enough for me not to quite grasp what their relationship was. It was inter-generational, I think. Anyway Emily, when she graduated from Wellesley came to London looking for a job. She went to see Irving Kristol, this distant relative, who was then editing Encounter. And I had just been appointed editor of the China Quarterly and we knew each other. He said that I would probably be needing a secretary. Emily wanted to be a journalist, but she was realistic enough to know that in those days, women journalists had a really tough row to hoe if they wanted to work anywhere other than the women’s pages of British papers. So she came to see me and to see if there was a job opening, and of course there was. I needed some kind of secretary or assistant I told her what the salary would be, and when I picked her up off the floor and gave her a glass of sherry to cheer her up, she accepted the job. She worked for me, and then went back to the United States and joined this program – the Regional Studies East Asia Program – and learned Chinese. And she did that because her attempts to get into journalism in America were thwarted by the fact that she was a woman. She was told that she would not get a job because she was a woman. If she had been a man, she’d have gotten a job. So she decided to do what I had done, which was to get a special knowledge so that people would, well, need her.
Then we met again on the lawn of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was the new Prime Minister after the death of Nehru. Emily had gone to Taiwan for a year after her MA in order to improve her language. Her spoken Chinese was better than mine. Then she was traveling around the world back to America, and we met, as I say, on Shastri’s lawn when he became Prime Minister. I made a couple of BBC films with him at the time for the BBC. Then she came to London, one thing led to another, and we got married at the end of 1964. So the meeting in India was sort of a catalyst. That was in June 1964 and we got married in December.
HAQ: I understand you were married by a Supreme Court justice.
RMF: Yes, we were. We were married by a judge Irving Saypol who it turned out had been the prosecutor in the Rosenberg trial. And I said to my mother-in-law, “Did you have to get someone who was so notorious?” And she said, “If you choose to get married at Christmas, the only judges who are not in Florida and are holding the fort are Jews, and this is the person who was available.
[…]
HAQ: Your son Rory…
RMF: My son Rory is ABD [all but dissertation]: he’s passed his generals here in government. He’s a specialist on Russia, a fluent Russian speaker and, until last year, he was the representative in Russia of Goldman Sachs. But as of now he works for the US Treasury, a poacher turned gamekeeper!
[…]
HAQ: And your daughter…
RMF: My daughter Larissa works for the New Yorker, but she has taken a year’s leave, give or take, because she’s got a big advance from Penguin to write a book and a fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Current Projects
HAQ: You’re currently working on a project that took you to South Asia. Could you talk a bit about it?
RMF: Yes. I’m asking myself the question: Why is it the two most populous agrarian civilizations, India and China, turned out so differently? I may not be able to find the answer to it. It may be a bust, maybe a long article, or it might turn into a book. I’m not looking at things like their relative growth rates today, though that might be something that would come out of it. I want to look back in time. I went to a dig in India in January where they are excavating an Indus Valley civilization site, which prevailed from about 2500 BC to about 1900 BC. I’m trying to look back at ancient history and see why the Chinese went one route and the Indians went another route, whereas they both could have gone the same route. They both had the problem of how to control a sizable and growing rural population. How do you do it? And they found different ways to institute control. And I’m interested to know why they differed. And, as I say, I may not be able to find out an exact answer, but I’m having fun trying to find out.
The problem is, as compared to all my other work that has been personally researched – this will be heavily researched too – I’m not going to become, at this stage in my career, an archeologist. I’m not going to learn Sanskrit; so most of my work will be based on other people’s scholarship. But there are some brilliant scholars, on both ancient India and ancient China, so I hope to learn from their wisdom.
About the Interviewee
Roderick MacFarquhar is a long-time China hand and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Mao era. He is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, The Sino-Soviet Dispute, China under Mao, Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971, and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. MacFarquhar was the founding editor of The China Quarterly. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of Parliament. |
|
发表于 2012-2-25 17:15:39