Beyond Confucius and Kung Fu

A varied landscape, countless dialects, and traces of a "decadent" past

Ever since the first Yankee clipper set sail for Canton in 1784, China has held a compelling fascination for Americans. Traders and other early visitors to the Celestial Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage and the fanatical archcriminal Dr. Fu Manchu.

As China opens up again after 30 years of isolation, thousands of American visitors will have the opportunity of testing some of these timeworn images against the reality.

China's numbers defy the imagination: one-fourth of the world's people inhabit a mere 7% of its land area, a country 76,400 sq. mi. larger than the U.S. Although no accurate census has been taken in 25 years, demographers think that sometime around the middle of 1978 the total population surpassed 1 billion. Approximately 85% of these people live in rural areas. Nonetheless, China still has 13 of the 50 most populous cities in the world. Metropolitan Shanghai, with an estimated 12 million inhabitants, has about half a million more people than Tokyo.

The great majority of the people are ethnic Chinese, or Han, as they have termed themselves since the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). In addition, there are 54 separate national minorities, totaling 40 million. These include 1.7 million Mongols, who were once ruled by Genghis Khan, 1.3 million mountain-dwelling Tibetans, 500,000 Kazakh and 65,000 Kirgiz nomads, 7 million Thai-speaking Chuang, a scattering of Miao and Puyi peasants in the southwestern provinces, and caste-conscious Yi clans in Szechwan. Despite Peking's efforts to promote Mandarin as China's common language, the country still has countless spoken dialects.

Most of China's varied landscape is inhospitable to human life. The three largest border regions (Sinkiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia) that constitute nearly 40% of China's land mass support only 2% of the population. In the west and northwest are immense stretches of desolation, including the sere, uninhabited stretches of desert and the frozen reaches of Tibet. To the north is the wheat and millet zone, a land of brown, eroded hills, broad turbulent rivers, and tens of thousands of dusty mud-walled villages. Rainfall is so irregular and water so scarce that for thousands of years peasants of these villages, armed with picks and shovels, have fought one another over rights to the flow of a tiny stream or canal. Summers bring searing heat; the harsh winds of fall and winter spread stinging particles of yellow dust from the Gobi, a desert as empty as Africa's Sahara.

By comparison with the forbidding north, the huge stretches of riceland in the south are luxuriant and subtropical. Rainfall is abundant. Flooded paddy fields curve around river valleys or climb in intricate contoured patterns up one hill and down another. In central China's Szechwan province, where Teng Hsiao-p'ing was born, the Yangtze River cuts through lofty limestone mountains, cascades through a series of spectacular gorges into the rich farm land of the Red Basin, finally emptying into the East China Sea at Shanghai.

Although basically agrarian and inward-looking, China has 11,250 miles of coastline and numerous large ports. Well before Columbus was born, the Chinese were sending their ships around southeast Asia. In the early 15th century a celebrated eunuch of the Sung court, Cheng Ho, led a series of seafaring expeditions across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Africa.

The essential fact about the geography of China is that it obliges most of its people to live on the great alluvial plains of the south and east, which provide barely one-third of an acre of cultivable land per person and crop yields per acre far lower than in the U.S. or Europe. Indeed, China has been trapped for centuries in a classic Malthusian crunch. Periods of peace and prosperity lead to a growth of population. Then, inevitably, floods or drought reduce the slender food supply, leading to the famines that have afflicted the people as regularly as wars and rebellions in China's 3,000 years of recorded history.

It is scarcely surprising that a nationwide preoccupation with food has led to an obsession with cuisine. China is matched only by France as producer of the culinary marvels of the world. Lightly cooked to save fuel, Chinese dishes make use of every available food. The great chefs of Canton make even pig ears, fish lips, dog chops and snake chowder taste delicious.

Nearly 40% of the Chinese people--400 million of them--are under 18 years of age. That stunning fact points to one notable failure of the Peking government: its inability to lower the birth rate despite contraception campaigns, restrictions on marriage (no younger than 28 for men, 25 for women in urban areas), and pressure to limit families to two children. The peasants in particular have been uncooperative. The bone-wearying life on rural communes obliges people to retire at dusk, especially since even homes with electricity may be only lucky enough to get one 25-watt light bulb a year. Moreover, peasants calculate that additional children will earn the family extra work points, translatable into meat, soap and other strictly rationed items.

Compounding the problem, according to a broadcast from Kwangtung province this month, are party administrators on the communes who have set a bad example. On one big farm, for instance, a top official has just sired his seventh child. As a result, the broadcast charged, the birth rate for the entire commune had soared to 30 births per thousand this year, as compared with an average of 22 for the rest of the country.

In the cities, however, the marriage restrictions are more severely enforced; many single workers live in segregated dormitories. Opportunities for courtship are limited, although, now that the rigors of the Cultural Revolution have subsided, young couples are once again allowed to stroll hand in hand in the streets or even cuddle on benches. Secluded areas of public parks are increasingly used for after-dark trysts.

Still, the official moralistic ethic--it might almost be called Puritan--prevails. China's leaders inveigh against the licentious life-style of the imperial past. When Mao's widow Chiang Ch'ing first came under attack, she was frequently portrayed as a latter-day Empress Wu Tse-t'ien, whose career began in the 7th century as a 13-year-old court concubine and ended in an orgy of sex and assassination. Another execrated royal personage is the 8th century Emperor Hsuean Tsung, who was hopelessly enamored of a shapely concubine, Yang Kuei-fei. With characteristic Chinese panache, he built a summer palace for her with 16 bathing pools, where the lady was wont to wash her statuesque limbs under the Emperor's besotted gaze.

Mao's overriding ambition was to rid China of all traces of its decadent past, while at the same time transforming the Chinese national character. His instrument was a vast totalitarian party and police apparatus that reaches into every facet of daily life, that controls what a Chinese can read, where he can travel, how he should live. Despite the omnipresence of this Orwellian machinery, many practices of the feudal past are observed. In the privacy of their homes, there are many peasant families who still pray to Kuan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and burn incense to their ancestors. Ouija boards are regularly consulted to foretell the future. On the communes, matchmakers arrange marriages and would-be bridegrooms pay traditional bride prices, although now with a socialist tinge: an industrious girl who earns many work points (on which salaries in communes are based) brings a better price than a more indolent maiden. Even in the supposedly sophisticated cities, people often visit abandoned temples to pray for the success of some endeavor.

As Sinologists eagerly point out, comprehending China's present is impossible without knowing China's past. For example, the dramatic change from the inward-looking policies of Mao's last years to Teng's Great Leap Outward can be seen as merely the latest chapter in a 100-year-old struggle between xenophobic conservatives and Westernizing pragmatists. Reaching further back into history, China has regularly alternated cycles of philistine authoritarianism with eras of great learning and reform.

Even the characters in these recurrent historical dramas seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to one another. There are strong parallels between Mao and China's first emperor, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who took power in the 3rd century B.C. Contemptuous of the scholarly bureaucrats who were trying to persuade China's feudal despots to rule according to Confucius' ethical principles, the first emperor ordered 460 scholars buried alive, and burned all books that did not deal with practical subjects like agriculture and divination. Some 2,200 years later, Mao placed a ban on Confucius and subjected the entire Chinese intelligentsia to his own strict controls and often fearful punishments while condemning many of their books to the incinerator.

Other analogies abound. Ch'in Shih Huang Ti was the first leader to unify all China. As a barrier to invasion from the north, the Emperor built the 2,400-mile-long Great Wall of China--a project that cost the lives of up to 1 million slave laborers. Mao's own efforts to forcibly mobilize China's masses to "move mountains" are comparable. The Chairman's rampaging Red Guards resembled nothing so much as the rabid young "Boxers" of 1900, unleashed by the Empress Dowager, Tz'u-hsi, in order to rid China of evil foreign influences.

There are also striking similarities between Teng's Four Modernizations program and the aspirations of a group of officials who pioneered the so-called self-strengthening movement 100 years ago. Seeking to remedy China's backwardness, the self-strengtheners sent students abroad, absorbed Western technical literature, built modern arsenals and railroads. One celebrated self-strengthener, Feng Kuei-fen, asked the rhetorical question: "Why are the Western powers small yet strong, while China is large yet weak?" His answer: "China had spiritual greatness but the foreigners had the practical know-how." "Use the instruments of the foreign barbarians without adopting their ways," he exhorted. In the past few months China has revived a similar slogan: MAKE FOREIGN THINGS SERVE CHINA. -

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