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 t's
a funny business, writing. Sometimes you give up days to
crafting a piece, sweat blood over it, research all the background
stuff the way journalists are supposed to, make sure the ideas all
connect, weed out all the superfluous adjectives and adverbs, add
just the right amount of "seasoning" — a pinch of
literary allusion, a sprinkling of historical anecdote, a soupcon
of autobiographical reminiscence — read it out loud to the
wife to make sure you didn't commit to print something like "I
conceded that he had succeeded," finally get the thing into
print, or pixels... And watch it sink like a stone, without a trace
of interest from anyone. Other times you throw something together
at the last minute in the style of the old newspaper hacks —
dragging yourself away to the keyboard from some convivial gathering
at 1 A.M. to meet a 9 A.M. deadline, with half a load tied on and
a head full of unprintable witticisms and unrepeatable gossip from
the evening's company, to stare at the blank screen through a Merlot
fog thinking: What the hell am I going to say about this?
Hasn't it all been said much better already by X and Y and Z? Can't
I let the editors down on an assignment just this once without them
minding too much? Did Heather really say that about Andrew? Death,
where is thy sting? ... And then, when the piece has appeared, watch
with stunned amazement as the letters and e-mails pour in: "Best
thing you've ever done!" "What oft was thought but ne'er
so well expressed!" "Brilliant!" "Surpassed
yourself this time, Derb..."
All of which
is by way of offering a generalized "Thank you" to the
many readers who emailed and even snail-mailed to express appreciation
of the pieces I posted on NRO from China this summer. I have hardly
ever written anything with less care and attention than those China
dispatches. I don't say that with any pride: I try to be conscientious
about writing, even for such a transient medium as the web, and
always give as much time and attention to a piece as I can. It was
just that in China, I couldn't give much of either. I was far from
home and all my usual resources, was deeply involved in the logistics
of moving children, luggage and money around a very large country
not much designed for traveling in, and whose language I speak only
imperfectly,
while simultaneously fulfilling all sorts of obligations —
some of which I only half understood — to an innumerable host
of relatives, friends, ex-students, and ex-colleagues. When I could
break away for half an hour to an Internet cafe (assuming I could
find one) there was no time to do anything but key in random notes
I had jotted down, supplemented with whatever impressions and thoughts
were at the front of my mind in that moment, with very little time
for editing or review.
Amongst other
things, these circumstances played into the phenomenon, first noted
by either Goethe, Pascal, or Cicero (depending on which authority
you consult) of writing a long piece because I had no time to write
a short one. The material that ended up on the noble webmaster's
screen at NRO was therefore much more than he could use, and he
cut it accordingly, not always in a way I would have done myself
if I had had time, which of course I didn't. I've posted the originals,
when they survived, on my
personal website. Anyway, a lot of people liked them, and wrote
me to say so, and I thank those people for their generous words,
and the trouble they took to write.
[I read all
of every e-mail anyone sends me except those from obvious lunatics.
There are way too many to answer, even cursorily, and I am afraid
a generic thank you like this once in a while has to cover most
cases. If I did answer your e-mail it was because either
(a) you said something I thought especially interesting and had
decided to plagiarize for a column, or (b) you asked a question
that I felt required an answer, or (c) you caught me in an idle
moment when I was putting off actual work. The only e-mails I never,
ever respond to are the ones that tell me I'm an idiot. As Woody
Allen said about gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity in movies:
Who needs it? I get enough of that at home.]
Several readers
suggested I write up my China trip as a book. It's a nice thought,
and God knows I have not the slightest, most trifling objection
to having my fugitive journalism bound up between hard covers for
a nice fat advance; but though publishers do some weird things,
they are rarely so far removed from the realms of commercial common
sense as to consider such a proposition seriously. I did mention
it to my literary agent, but he not only didn't play the idea back
over the Net, he let it go right by him without even looking at
it. He knows his business very well, and I can take a hint.
I am in any
case a bit diffident about claiming any authority to comment in
a large general way about China. I have been writing about the place
for 18 years — two novels and numberless articles. I have family
connections there (China is, as my wife says, my "country-in-law")
and am a big fan of classic Chinese literature. I try my best to
"keep up" with the aid of scholarly periodicals like Australian
National University's excellent China Journal. Back in the
1970s, when Americans started to be let into China to look around
after the Kissinger-Nixon thaw, there was a phenomenon called, by
China scholars, "the three-week sinologist." That is,
some dimwit congressman or Hollywood airhead would spend three weeks
in China, then come home and write a book about it. Well, I consider
myself something better than a "three-week sinologist,"
but I am not a true sinologist of any other variety, nor even a
full-time China-beat working journalist like Ian Buruma or Jonathan
Mirsky (to name the two most superb practitioners of that arduous
craft). I just look, listen, read, and then write down my impressions
from time to time. You might therefore want to apply some discounting
to the following remarks.
I came back
from China in August feeling, as I wrote at
the time, that: "The present dictatorship is more firmly
established than I thought before I went to China. The urban middle
classes, who are supposed to be the driving force behind political
reform, do not like the Communists very much, but they do not mind
them very much, either... I cannot see any reason why the Communists
should not go on ruling China and her imperial possessions indefinitely."
The thing that is striking to me now is that this view of things
is, by the standards of current China commentary, rather optimistic.
I have been
reading a lot of stuff recently — stuff of all kinds, from
personal e-mails sent by Chinese friends both in and out of China,
to books like Ian Buruma's Bad
Elements and Gordon Chang's The
Coming Collapse of China — that is more deeply pessimistic
about that country than anything I can remember. I have always hated
the Chinese Communists, and have never been under any illusions
about them. I have also been rather blunt, especially in my novels,
in registering certain reservations about Chinese culture and society,
some features of which I feel work for the communists and against
the best interests of the Chinese people. I have, in short, been
a China pessimist all the years I have been writing about the place.
At least, I have been on the pessimistic side of the median line
of China commentary — that part of China commentary that seems
to me worth taking seriously. Now, for the first time I can recall,
I have the feeling that everyone else is even more pessimistic than
I am. There are still plenty of China gulls around, of course: always
have been, always will be.* Among serious China-watchers, though
— people who know the country well, speak the language, have
watched the place for years — there are no gulls now. For all
I can see, there are no optimists of any kind. For the kind of thing
I mean, see Gordon
Chang's testimony to the U.S.-China Commission on August 2nd.
(Full disclosure: I reviewed Chang's book for the Washington
Times.) Five years ago Chang would have been way out on
a limb with talk like that. Now, to judge from the books and articles
I am reading, and the private responses to my own summer writings,
he's pretty mainstream.
China needs
democracy. China needs democracy. The 20th century taught
us, via an ocean of blood and a mountain of corpses, that nothing
else will do. Without democracy, a country — any country
— is on a slope to disaster. Without democracy, a country cannot
even modernize, except in an incomplete and superficial way. Some
parts of China are physically impressive now: glittering skyscrapers,
air-conditioned malls, broad expressways. It means nothing, just
as the soaring Palaces of Culture erected in Stalin's U.S.S.R. meant
nothing, though they were every bit as physically impressive in
their own time. Few phrases sound harsher or more bitter in Chinese
ears than the phrase dong ya bing fu — "the sick
man of Asia," the phrase applied by fascist Japan to the chaotic
warlord China of the 1920s, the phrase the Japanese used to justify
their imperial "mission" in China, a "mission"
to save the Chinese from themselves. It's not a phrase I would use
lightly, knowing Chinese sensibilities as I do. Yet it is the phrase
that will be most apt for the China of the near future, unless a
miracle happens very soon.
I have seen
somewhere a list of all those nations that got through the 20th
century with their form of government intact and uninterrupted by
revolution or occupation. The list is pitifully short: As I recall
it consists of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden,
Switzerland, and the U.S.A. I wonder what the corresponding list
will look like for the 21st century? This much, at least, I can
guarantee with perfect certainty: China will not be on it.
* "The constitution of their empire is the most excellent the
word has ever seen," burbled Voltaire, an early gull. Of the
period when that remark was made, Lai Ming has the following to
say in his History of Chinese Literature: "The persecution
of Chinese scholars by Manchu emperors was at its severest during
the reigns of Yung Cheng [1723-1736] and Chien Lung [1736-1795],
when an innocent remark about Chinese history could lead to a writer
and his entire clan being put to death if the remark could be construed
to be a slur upon the sovereign."
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