Things My Kids Are Learning in China
And other travel thoughts.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
August 7, 2001 8:45 a.m.

hings my kids know that they didn't know before coming to China.

• They are beautiful and fascinating to several hundred million people.
• Ice cream can be made from red beans. Jell-o can be made from grass.
• China is a real big country, and the edges are — in more senses than one — a long way from the middle.
• You don't have to sit down to do Number One.
• Their family is not limited to Mom and Dad. It extends further in space and time than they ever imagined.
• There are Tom and Jerry episodes (T & J are great favorites in China) that they will never, never see in the U.S. — the ones that show black people in a comical light.
• Two adults can ride in comfort on an ordinary bicycle.
• It is possible to organize a civilization in which nothing ever gets done without a preliminary half hour of yelling and shoving.
• Dogs, snakes and tortoises are good to eat. Or at any rate, they are liable to turn up on your plate at a restaurant with Mom and Dad urging you to try them. Adults are so gross.
• There are places in the world where you can surf 25 channels of TV without finding anything you can understand.

When the news about the success of Beijing's Olympics bid came through, firecrackers were let off in the streets of Changchun. This woke Ultimate Grandpa, who asked what was going on. They told him. "Ah!" he said, joyful but a bit sleep-fuddled. "That means America recognizes us!" What leverage we have with these people! How carelessly we use it!

There are few things more depressing than watching Chinese TV "news." This is not news in any real sense of course: it is, as Vladimir Nabokov used to say of Soviet literature, "advertisements for a firm of slave-traders."

There is, for example, the ludicrous cult of Jiang Zemin, China's current president, a featureless functionary with the brain of an assistant sub-postmaster and the charisma of an ashtray. Every effort is made to show Jiang as being in apostolic succession from Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiao-ping. (Mao's actual chosen successor, Hua Guo-feng, has been airbrushed out of the official Party histories, along with other recent but inconvenient Party leaders like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.) Jiang's Thoughts — they currently center on something named "the Three Represents", which nobody can explain to me because nobody gives a flying foo-yung about them — pop up as little public-service ads, backed by solemn music, in between TV programs.

Writing about Russia in the Brezhnev years, Hedrick Smith noted that back in the Forties, when Stalin's voice was broadcast over the loudspeakers in public places, everyone stopped to listen, because they were afraid not to. When Khrushchev broadcast in the Fifties, people did not stop, but they still listened, because he occasionally said something interesting. When Brezhnev broadcast, however, he was talking to himself — people just paid no attention. China is now thoroughly Brezhnevized in that sense. Ask a Chinese person for a Mao quote, and they can produce half a dozen without thinking: "Take class struggle as the key," "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun," "Revolution is not a dinner party," and so on. Ask them for a Deng quote and, after a moment's thought, they give you either "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice," or else "To get rich is glorious." (The well-known Dengism "Seek truth from facts" is actually a classical tag from the Han Dynasty.) Now ask them to quote something from Jiang Zemin. Puzzled frowns, then laughter. Nobody can think of anything.

George Orwell said, during WWII, that he didn't mind people dropping bombs on him as much as he minded the prospect that the lies of the bomb-droppers might prevail and truth be forgotten. Living in China, one sees exactly what he meant. Recently, for example, it was the 50th anniversary of, to quote from the TV news programs, "the peaceful liberation of Tibet" — that is, of the moment when Mao's armies invaded and occupied that nation, bringing to her all the horrors of Chinese-style Leninism: slave-labor camps, man-made famines, the annihilation of language, religion and culture, the terrible long Calvary that Tibet endured in the second half of the twentieth century. There was, of course, no mention of all that on TV, only pictures of happy Tibetans in colorful costumes, celebrating their good fortune at having been "liberated" from the burden of governing themselves.

Now, TV news everywhere is heavily doctored, of course. You would never know from watching U.S. network news that, for example, black Americans and nonblack Americans in the generality dislike each other, and go to great pains to avoid living in each other's neighborhoods. In the U.S., however, there are at least some news and opinion outlets that contradict the official lies. An American who wants to hear non-official versions of his nation's history and current condition can do so with very little difficulty. A Chinese person who wishes to seek out the truth about, say, the Tiananmen Square incident, or the state of public opinion in Tibet, has a much harder row to hoe, even if he has access to the Internet. To begin with, he must master a foreign language — there is little on these topics in Chinese (though a new breed of young Taiwanese journalists is doing some brilliant work in this area).