Beijing

I set foot in China for the first time on 29 August 1979, two days after the assassination of the British Queen’s uncle Lord Mountbatten, news of which had been announced by a very emotive and matronly chief flight attendant on the British Airways flight that brought me to Hong Kong. After thirty-six hours in Hong Kong stocking up on consumer durables such as a cassette-radio player and an electric fan - commodities then rare in mainland China - I crossed the Border at Shenzhen, then an insignificant border town, with the others of my cohort of a dozen or so British Council scholars. On the last day of August, after two sweltering days spent in the Canton-Peking express – we were still not accustomed despite our sinological training to speak of Guangzhou and Beijing – I got off the train for the first time in dozens of times that were to come at Peking’s main station.

This was the beginning of my China decade, which began with my witnessing the suppression of the Peking Spring and the Democracy Wall that both concretized and symbolized a moment of relatively free political expression manipulated with a Machiavellian agility by the bridge-playing Deng Xiaoping.

Symbolically, that decade ended for me in May 1990, when I returned to the scenes of the débâcle of the 1989 democracy movement. 1990 marked the end of a period still marked by intellectual, cultural and political dissension and contestation, and a shift towards the dominance of the economic in what was to become China’s great consumerist moment that continues up to today.

I describe this moment as my China decade, but it was period that coincided almost uncannily with a decade of intellectual and political debate and struggle that we may tentatively fix between the very end of 1978 and either the dramatic and fatal events of 1989, or the early 1990s when Deng Xiaoping relaunched his economic reforms that led to the consumerist-dominated economic model with which China is doted today.

As an undergraduate at SOAS (the London School of Oriental and African Studies) my training had focused equally on modern and pre-modern literary studies. I had specialized in poetry both “classical” and modern whose practitioners when released from their Cultural Revolution reclusion, exclusion and exile which had lasted in some cases – as with the former friend and comrade of Pablo Neruda, Ai Qing 艾青– for twenty years. In 1979, the official end of the Cultural Revolution had been fixed to coincide with the designation of the Gang of Four in October1976, but its mood lingered on and mingled with that of the phoney Peking Spring of 1979. Many writers and intellectuals were not in fact “rehabilitated” , that is given back their limited freedom to exist and perhaps write again until the 1980s. Those who did take up their pens again soon showed themselves to be out of touch with new realities; the contemporary writerly representatives of the intellectual class were now the former disappointed Red Guards whose eyes had shed their scales of utopian Maoist belief during their years of their enforced encampment in the reality of China’s countryside – after Mao had regained and consolidated his grip on power – the unruly yet faithful urban youngsters he had called on to overturn the bureaucratic order were dispatched to far-flung corners of China’s still desperately backward countryside where they were supposed to learn from the peasants. A number of such youngsters started to write most of their short poems which were far removed from the eulogizing efforts of official writers on the Maoist payroll. These writers I would not meet in the flesh until 1985 but I would come to know their work through samizdat publications such as the flagship literary magazine Jintian – Today adverts for which I saw stuck to lampposts in the late summer of 1979, and whose pages could still be perused for free on the walls of the Avenue of Eternal Peace, Chang’an jie. But my main interest still lay in uncovering the traces of writers who had pioneered China’s modernist moment back in the 1930s and 1940s before all literary efforts were channelled into Mao’s propaganda machine. At that time little was known of what had happened to such writers, many had perished, and in the late 1970s and well into the 1980s their work was still unavailable and still contested and controversial.

Let me be clear, I write not of anti-communist or self-declared critics of the regime, but of progressive women and men who had campaigned against oppression and greed and in favour of greater equality for China’s people, only to find themselves the targets of often vindictive and violent accusations of entertaining bourgeois and right-wing ideas and manners.

It was to these individuals and their stories that I was attracted. For the first time since the founding of the PRC it was becoming possible to track down, correspond with and even meet writers many assumed dead, and who for most Chinese were certainly as good as.

That was the beginning of my decade. The end straddled and encompassed that instant when I rode in the early hours of a May morning in a friend’s car – still a rare possession for a citizen of Peking in 1990 – down the avenue dividing the Gate of Heavenly Peace from the Square of the same name and felt the vibrations of the tires against the bumpy, bevelled surface left by the passage of tanks 11 months before. Three days later I was in Stockholm for a meeting of exiled writers who were seeking to revive the Today magazine. I realize that was the end of an era. It is that era bracketed by these defining moments that this book will recount.

AI QING

[Ai Qing: representative of liberal communist wing of 1930s-1940s Chinese writers (see Ding Ling) who were happy to be alive and once more in the limelight. But history and writerly concerns (Bei Dao - Red Guard generation) had moved on. Return of the old guard (victims of red guards) v. former red guards, Bei Dao, 今天的；Democracy Wall.

When I arrived in China in 1979, the poet Ai Qing had resumed his position as prince of China’s poets.

While studying modern Chinese poetry at SOAS, I was one of only two students specialized in Chinese poetry, one of the more colourful lyricist I came across was Ai Qing. While we were not encouraged to stray beyond the period ending in 1949 with the founding of the PRC, I was curious to see what became of the poetic production of this liberal communist writer who had once been criticized by Mao at Yan’an. Ai Qing wrote a simple yet attractive poetry focussed on the social injustices of his time. Having studied applied art in France, he returned to China and launched himself into a career as a poet. It was the time of the Japanese occupation, and many of his poems dealt with the harsh life of poor peasants and their struggle against social inequality, and the nation’s struggle against the foreign invader, Japan.

But once new China was established, it was practically unthinkable to continue in such a critical vein. Many poets and writers gave up and turned to academic disciplines such as archaeology, or contented themselves with editing and translating tasks. But Ai Qing found a way to continue with his poems of social critique by writing about the injustices in the capitalist world. He was enabled to do so by his rare trips abroad.

What I discovered in the university's library stacks where establishment Chinese poetry journals of the 1950s were kept was that not only had Ai Qing visited Latin America, but that he had become very close to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. An avid reader of Spanish and Latin American poetry, which had rekindled my interest in poetic writing after my childhood revulsion for the genre caused by enforced rote learning of the English poetry of Walter de la Mare and W.B. Yeats, my failure to absorb and regurgitate these sombre, joyless English-language classics led to routine Friday afternoon sessions of corporal punishment. French and Spanish poetry as I learnt those languages, and much of the learning process took place in the deciphering o poems, seemed in contrast like an infusion of illumination and excitement. It was Ai Qing recurring attraction to French symbolism that had initially warmed me to the Chinese poet. And now I found that he had also been a friend of Pablo Neruda whose early love poems and later on his national epic Canto general I had read well before tuning to the study of Chinese.

Ai Qing’s acquaintance with the Chilean communist senator and poet Neruda commenced with the Latin American poet’s first visit to China in 1951 in the early years of the nascent People’s Republic. The early 1950s constituted the honeymoon of the post WW2 communist bloc. Stalin’s empire had been inflated by the recognition of the Baltic Stats and soviet occupation of what would become the USSR’s Eastern European satellites. The orthodox, that is to say Stalinist, international communist alliance had as 1949 now been bolstered by the conquest of the world’s most populous state, China.

Neruda visited China, then, during the heyday of the Sino-Soviet alliance, a “friendship” that would turn sour after Khrushchev’s accession to power, and result in soured relations and ultimately the breaking away of Mao’s Communist Party from the Soviet-controlled communist bloc. A member of the World Peace Council, the main reason for Neruda’s presence in China in 1951 was to present the Lenin Peace Prize communist world’s equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, to Madame Sun Yat-sen; the presence of the widow of the founder of modern China.- she was appointed Vice-President of the Chinese state – on mainland soil was a major political triumph for new China in its continuing struggle for legitimacy in a Cold War world in which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government refuged on Taiwan was still recognized as sovereign not only by the USA, but by Western Europe, and the United Nations.

Neruda recited a eulogy in praise of Song Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) in the very heart of the Chinese state, Zhongnanhai. The event was witnessed by another, then young, Chinese poet later turned literary critic, Xu Chi who in 1984 would write the preface to the re-edition of a Chinese selection of the Chilean’s poems - the first re-impression since its initial publication in 1951.

But it was the poet Ai Qing who was assigned to act as host to the delegation and the two French speaking poets became friends. A few years later, Neruda invited Ai Qing to attend his fiftieth birthday celebrations on Isla Negra in Southern Chile, where Neruda’s legendary and fantastical house was located. To honour the Chilean writer and politician, Ai Qing wrote a long poem dedicated to the poet but also to the house that evidently fascinated the younger Chinese poet; at the time Ai Qing was still only in his early forties. The house is meticulously and passionately described and even illustrated in a style reminiscent of Lorca’s with simple line drawings in the first printed version of the poem.

The house at Isla Negra was ransacked by the Chilean army shortly after the 11 September 1973 CIA-backed coup d’état, and it would lay abandoned and fenced off for many years before being restored in the post-Pinochet era.

As a young sinologist in my last undergraduate year at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I translated the poem first into English and then into Spanish with a Chilean friend. The plan was to publish the poem in a Venezuelan literary journal, called Araucaria. Shortly after arriving in China, during the autumn of 1979, I wrote what now seems a naively hagiographic introduction to the poem. “Without doubt Neruda is the greatest poet in the Spanish language this century,”I wrote. I might not be so adamant thirty years later.

The last line of the text was added by my Chilean collaborator Hernán Rosenkrantz, a wonderful literary craftsman himself, who I suspect was excusing the plainness and insouciance - hallmarks of Ai Qing’s poetic style - of the Chinese original, when he wrote that the “simplicity and charm of the [Chinese] original is impossible to translate with justice into the English.”

Poets and the Sea

A celebration in poetry of the fiftieth birthday of Pablo Neruda as seen by the Chinese poet Ai Qing.

The poem here translated springs from the meeting of two great and distinguished poets, both fiercely individualistic yet both adhered to a vigorous political ideology, a nationalist-nuanced communism. Although apparently so different, a close look at the poetry of the Chinese poet Ai Qing and at that of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda reveals the unity of purpose common to these two modern poets.

Both witnessed the suffering of humanity, the cruelty of oppression and the futile spilling of blood. Neruda experienced the tearing apart of Spain during the Civil War, and the assassination of the poet and friend Federico Garcia Lorca affected him so deeply that it constituted one of the main reasons which led to his joining the Chilean Communist Party. Ai Qing had lived through the vagaries and traumas of China’s recent history, the carving up and subsequent domination of China by the major imperialist powers of the age, the assassination of left-wing intellectuals, the Japanese invasion and war, the suffering and privations of the people, and finally the civil war and the birth of ‘New China’.

Both saw communism as a liberating force. Both were original and imaginative writers, striving to create a new poetry. Ai Qing sought a new synthesis and poetic voice for the Chinese people who for centuries had been denied their cultural heritage. Yet the literature of the past was deemed inappropriate. Ai Qing wrote a poetry for all, drawn from his own individual expression and his own aesthetic experience. But Ai Qing’s individualism was seen as a dispensable luxury by the Chinese leaders of the late Fifties; they preferred a more direct and realistic, and even adulatory literature. Ai Qing was accused, at about the time he penned the poem translated here , of “bourgeois individualism”, and at the end of the decade his literary career was cut short. Since the fall of the “Gang of Four”, however, he has been ‘rehabilitated’ and promoted as one of the nation’s great literary figures.

Neruda, too, was forging a new kind of poetic expression for a new country on which he bestowed a new epic and historical verse. He wrote on the greatness of the ancient pre-Colombian civilizations, devastated by the Spanish invasion, the struggle against colonialism and for national independence, the creative energy of the people and their fight for the dignity of the Chilean nation.

As with Ai Qing, Neruda was not without disappointments: the betrayal of corrupt politicians, such as Gonzalez Videla (a supposedly progressive President of Chile), the orders for his arrest, the years of exile, the revelations of the excesses of Stalin’s regime, the assassination and silencing of his friends, such as Lorca and Ai Qing himself. But the greatest tragedy of all was the killing of his friend, the steadfast President of Chile, Dr. Salvador Allende in 1973; the termination of a peaceful and democratic revolution. Ten days later Neruda died while the military sacked his home, the same fantastic house which is described by Ai Qing in this poem.

Without doubt Neruda is the greatest poet in the Spanish language this century, as was recognized by the world when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Although Ai Qing, little known outside his own country, has not produced such an impact, he has nevertheless brought a human quality to his country’s verse, a form which is otherwise anti-aesthetic, sterile and conformist. In the work of Ai Qing there lies a potential impetus for the new generations of Chinese poets. Most influential perhaps would be……..his sense of human compassion and longing for social justice, not in the shape of a cold ideology but as emotion wrought in the lines of his verse.

The poem describes the celebration of the fiftieth birthday of Pablo Neruda in July 1954, an occasion when great writers from the world over, such as Ilya Ehrenburg (USSR), Deda and Kutvalek (Czechoslovakia) and eminent friends and writers from around Latin America, all came together in his house at Isla Negra, a tranquil and little frequented retreat by the sea. It is not surprising that the house seemed a place of magic to the visitors, an island sited in a mythological ocean in which floated collections of shells, antique guns, forgotten ships, and ships' prows figureheads. This house and the occasion thrilled Ai Qing to the extent that he was inspired to write the following poem of which the simplicity and charm of the original is impossible to translate with justice into the English.

ON A CHILEAN PROMONTORY

To Pablo Neruda

May the goddess of the seafaring

You love the sea, as I too love the sea

Pablo’s house

The house is on earth

Are you a captain?

On the mahogany table

The house described by Ai Qing had been purchased for Neruda by his publisher from a socialist sea-captain in 1939, so that the poet would have the tranquillity to write his epic nation-building poem Canto general.^ⁱ

But the house had become much more than a writer's hideaway as Ai Qing could see. And here the Chinese poet is groping towards a description of the indescribable. The house Isla Negra, was not just an island in name, it was an island of dreams, of reveries, it was the concretized poetry of Neruda's everyday life – an everyday life infused with traces and mementoes of the sea he looked out on each passing day.

wrote the young Situationist theorist Ivan Chtcheglov in October 1953. The hacienda was a metaphor for a utopian constructed living space, hat would challenge the functionalism of post-World War two urban planning. As this poem written in 1954 poem affirms, Neruda had in fact already built his hacienda, his utopia, his dream palace.

Such islands of autonomy and poetic potential would later be described by Hakim Bey as Temporary Autonomous Zones, as pirate utopias :

“The sea-rovers and corsairs of the 18th century created an 'information network' that spanned the globe....Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, if only for a short but merry life.”

The establishment poet Ai Qing could hardly be described as a pirate, but he had glimpsed here at Isla Negra, where poets were welcomed, where their names were carved into the wooden beams, the fabric of the house, an island utopia where life was lived poetically, and an island mentality that was an eternity away from the monolithic continental imaginary that Mao was constructing in China.

When Neruda returned to China for the second and last time he saw Ai Qing only briefly, on a pleasure boat as they plied the Yangzi gorges together. Ai Qing had been criticized for his bourgeois tendencies and was a target of the Anti-Rightist campaign that was then in full swing. Ai Qing had been an obvious candidate for the labelling as a “rightist”. At the wartime forum on Literature and Art which took place at the CP revolutionary base of Yan’an the poet had hastily, naively and openly disagreed with the orthodoxy concerning freedom the writer’s freedom of expression. He did so in Yan’an’s Liberation Daily’s literary supplement edited by the early feminist and woman writer Ding Ling, who also expressed a dissent born of her disillusion with the Yan’an experiment. In 1942 on 8^th March, to mark Women’s Day, Ding Ling wrote an editorial in the Communist Party organ’s literary supplement to draw attention to the lot of women in areas under Communist control. Ai Qing shortly afterwards contributed to what effectively was little more than a spate of mild criticism of party policy. His article was entitled “Understand Authors, Respect Authors”. Subsequently, in May, Mao summonsed all “literary workers” to a conference that would set down the rules to be observed by those engaged in literary production; a rigid policy that would remain effective for the following four decades. In a passage doubtlessly aimed at Ding Ling, Ai Qing and their comrades Mao warned :

An ideological struggle is already under way in literary and art circles in Yan'an, and it is most necessary. Intellectuals of petty-bourgeois origin always stubbornly try in all sorts of ways, including literary and artistic ways, to project themselves and spread their views, and they want the Party and the world to be remoulded in their own image. In the circumstances it is our duty to jolt these "comrades" and tell them sharply, "That won't work! The proletariat cannot accommodate itself to you; to yield to you would actually be to yield to the big landlord class and the big bourgeoisie and to run the risk of undermining our Party and our country."^ⁱⁱ

Ai Qing was not singled out for punishment at the time, but his participation in this expression of mild dissent was not forgotten. In the anti-rightist persecution of 1957, which followed the invidious Hundred Flowers Campaign that encouraged intellectuals to voice their concerns, Ai Qing, because of his 1942 collaboration with Ding Ling at Yan’an was condemned as an anti-party conspirator, expelled from the Party and deprived of the right to write. In 1961 Ai Qing would be banished to the border region of Xinjiang, or Chinese Turkestan. In a sense he was fortunate. He was absent from the capital when the Cultural Revolution commenced in 1966, and was spared the excesses of the aggressive Red Guards who hunted to death the likes of the novelist Lao She. People, including myself, were convinced Ai Qing was dead. He reappeared in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and was permitted to start writing once more in 1978.

Neruda spoke warmly of Ai Qing in his memoirs where he recounts, to his regret, not being able to see more of his friend during his 1957 trip and how his enquiries about the Chinese poet went unanswered. They would never meet or correspond again. In 1984, Xu Chi would recount in the preface to Neruda’s anthology in Chinese, how in 1957 at a seminar attended by other poets in Peking, Neruda left the room and started hunting vainly for Ai Qing.

“After that he did not return to China”, writes Xu Chi, “I only heard that, on a Chilean promontory, he would often turn towards the ocean and shout out the name of a Chinese poet.” Neruda’s exile – he had fled Chile when the Communist Party was proscribed – had ended in 1952.

His sojourn on an Italian island was dramatized in the 1995 Michael Radford film Il Postino (The Postman) in which Philippe Noiret was cast as the Chilean poet. Ai Qing’s banishment was yet to come, but he was already in purdah. When Ai Qing was re-rehabilitated, in 1978 and able to talk to the outside world, Neruda was long dead. Xu Chi went on to be a socialist literary theoretician, and would publish an influential book on literature and modernization in 1981.^ⁱⁱⁱ

In 1996, Xu Chi took his own life, and thus joined the ranks of the quarter of a million officially recognized annual suicides in China. The death of Xu Chi, born in 1914, has been explained as the act of a poet touched and inspired by madness. But at the age of 82 did he not as an ailing and ageing man, simply, have the right to quite simply put an end to his days? One much younger poet of the post-CR generation who certainly was touched by madness was Gu Cheng. He would make a spectacular impact on the new Chinese poetry and would quickly be picked up and translated by foreign sinologists and translators during the 1980s.

When Ai Qing reappeared on the literary stage in China, it was the start of the “long decade”. The political atmosphere in China and in the world had changed. Ai Qing was quick to understand the new geopolitical situation and in his new poetry signalled the new realties.

Had his old friend Pablo Neruda still been alive, the two poets would have found one another separated by an ideological gulf. The Sino-soviet split had occurred at the beginning of the 1960s. China was now opposed not only to American imperialism but also to “Soviet imperialist hegemony”. Later in the 1970s, China’s diplomats nimbly exploited the irreconcilable rift between the American and Soviet Cold War governments.

What is more, towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, China started to moderate its encouragement of Third World Maoist insurgents in favour of a policy of support for Third World States in general whatever their political complexion? This led often to China compacting with ideologically opposed bedfellows.

Nevertheless, links with Chile’s Left were cordial, and the soon-to-be President Salvador Allende was indeed the head of the Chilean-Chinese friendship organization. New China was eulogized, romanticized in the Chilean Left’s imaginary. Ai Qing was very warmly received during his visit there, a reception that inspired this poem:

On this Side of the World

On this side of the World

And yet after the 11^th September 1973 coup d’état, to the amazement of many, the Chinese kept open their embassy in Santiago, and refused to assist former friends seeking refuge. China had few embassies in Latin America, most Latin American states still recognizing the Republic of China on Taiwan, and the decision was evidently taken to maintain its presence even after the CIA-inspired coup. After all, as official Chinese rhetoric had it, Latin America was America’s backyard or houyuan. By the time, Ai Qing re-emerged and embarked on his first foreign journey in more than twenty years, China’s quirky, independent foreign policy machine was already well-oiled. But whereas in his 1950s trip to Eastern Europe he had praised the Stalinist order, he now sang of the need to support the “Free World” struggle against Soviet hegemony. This is marked with vivid contrast by two poems separated by three decades.

On his way to visit Pablo Neruda in Chile, Ai Qing passed through Eastern Europe. At the time of Ai Qing’s trip, in July 1954, Vienna was still a divided city, as Berlin was, and was to remain until 1989. like Berlin, Vienna was divided into four military zones, each occupied by one of the four wartime allies, France, Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union. This was the Vienna of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, the black and white Cold War scenario inhabited by spies and black marketers such as the anti-heroic Harry Lime, which entered the Western imaginary through the spectacular photography and zither music of Carol Reed’s 1949 film in which Orson Welles loomed large. Ai Qing, viewing Vienna from the Soviet occupied zone, describes it as agonizing in its division. In a series of tropes he illustrates the fragmentation from which he perceives Vienna’s suffering: “beautiful and yet in pain”. The positive half of this city, the lyrics specify quite clearly, is that occupied by the Soviets: “Freedom should resemble apples-/Bright red and whole as one.”

How much of such political correctness here is the intent of the author, and how much the price to be paid for being able to write and publish at all?

Vienna

Vienna, although you are beautiful

On 15th August 1979, as I was preparing to leave for China, the People’s Daily [人民日报 1979年 8月 15日，星期三第第六版] published a selection of poems composed by Ai Qing during his recent late Spring trip to Germany. Twenty-five years after he visited Eastern Europe he was now visiting Western Europe. Twenty-five years after writing the poem bemoaning Vienna’s division, and extolling redness of the half-apple that was the Soviet-controlled Vienna, Ai Qing wrote the “Wall”. The Wall in question is, of course, the Berlin Wall dividing the three western zones (again French, British and American – West Berlin- from the Eastern Soviet-occupied zone.

The Wall would stand for another decade, until the example set by China’s democracy movement in 1989, would inspire those in the Soviet Union’s Eastern Europe satellite to challenge and bring down the order put I place by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the end of World War Two.

Ai Qing, just as China’s foreign policy, had now switched allegiances. The Chinese Communist Party woud say that it was the Soviet Union that had objectively changed its own ideological stance. Nevertheless, the Wall inspired another poem on political division. In the same straightforward language, with even simpler metaphors than in his 1954 poem, Ai Qing points to the Wall’s inability to obstruct “thoughts freer than the wind”. The thoughts in question are those of the people of East Germany, the GDR, and of the Soviet bloc in general.

The Wall

A wall, like a knife

But such eulogizing in praise of freedom followed a similar pattern to his 1950s poems. That is to say that the foreignness of his subject-matter, the fact that the poems were composed during trips outside China allowed Ai Qing greater licence. In the poems contemporaneous with these poems composed abroad Ai Qing followed carefully the ideological developments of what after all was still a Marxist-Leninist regime modelled on Stalinist practice, witness his poems in the flagship poetry journal 诗刊 in 1978 (11) one of his first post-banishment publications 钢都赞. “The Wall” was written at a moment when China’s leadership had made clear in most spectacular fashion its defiance of Soviet power. At the time Soviet influence in Asia, in South-East Asia and in Afghanistan was dominant.

But this was also a moment that coincided with the Sino-US honeymoon. On 16 December 1978 a Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the PRC and the USA was issued. The full normalization of relations that China and the US had been moving toward since the day when Nixon set foot in China in 1972, was finally consummated on 1January 1979. Deng Xiaoping, at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter, visited the USA between 29 January and 4 February. During Deng’s stay in the USA, the Chinese army started a military build up along its border with Vietnam. Having donned a ten-gallon hat in the USA, Deng returned to China and in the manner of John Wayne invaded Vietnam. The Soviet Union had signed a treaty of friendship with Vietnam in 1978, and the East European and joint trading COMECON admitted Vietnam to its ranks. At the end of December Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea, an on 17 January entered Phnom Penh and toppled China-supported Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge government.

China retaliated by launching its own invasion at dawn on 17 February 1979. It was strictly a land invasion. N air power was deployed. On 5 March China declared it primitive expedition over, and fully withdrew on 16 March. Perhaps China had taught Vietnam a lesson, but its Communist neighbour did not withdraw from Cambodia. The United States stood by, but then so did the Soviet Union. China thus could be said to demonstrate that alliances with the USSR were worth little, that the Soviet Union was just another paper tiger. But it had also been demonstrated that the PLA was desperately on need of overhauling and modernizing, and that the Vietnamese army, battle-hardened was still an effective fighting force. The fact is that the ruthless and murderous dictator Pol Pot had been removed from power. The Khmer Rouge regime had gone further ideologically than even the Cultural Revolution. Millions had been forced out of their “bourgeois existence” in the towns, many to die in the killing fields. While Pol Pot was a strategic ally, ideologically he seemed far removed from the reformist ideology that was gaining ground in China. While Pol Pot like Mao had persecuted the intelligentsia, Deng needed the intellectual class and courted it.

Five days before the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam, America’s first ambassador to the PRC, Leonard Woodcock, a former automobile union leader, took his functions in Peking, young American scholars had already started arriving, among them were those who would become my classmates at Peking University.

These years between the death of Mao and the closing down of the Democracy Wall, constituted a time of foundation-laying, a consolidation of Deng Xiaoping’s power base, a time for purging the bitterness caused by the Cultural Revolution, but also a time for re-establishing the limits beyond which those who challenged or contested China’s central authority be they foreign powers (the USSR and Vietnam, or the USA and Taiwan) or internal dissenters should not go. Thus the Peking Spring was necessary, but it was also necessary to bring it to an end.

A new historiography was being laid down. The Cultural Revolution was a universally bad thing and the Mao regime had been wrong to crush the 1975 Tiananmen demonstration mourning the passing of Zhou Enlai always considered by the intellectuals as their natural ally. Those who took part in this symbolic penultimate act of the Cultural Revolution period were now heroes and it was not only dissident poets such as Bei Dao who wrote poems in their honour, the grandee of Chinese poetry himself Ai Qing also composed a long effusive eulogy, which was published at the height of the Peking Spring in the December 1978 issue of Shikan (诗刊).

That poem marked the party’s rewriting of recent political history. But another poem by Ai Qing published in the November issue of the same journal still lands the old economic, industrial model and the stakhanovian model workers such as the “Iron Man” who had throughout the Cultural Revolution been the objects of worker-poet eulogies.

To this day, even in this post-Deng consumer-oriented economy, China’s regnant authority still clings to such outmoded methods of encouraging higher productivity [Wen Jiabao 2003 at Daqing], and this despite Deng Xiaoping’s call to “seek truth from facts”, in other words to adopt objective, scientific ways of working instead of relying on Maoist voluntarist methods that relied on subjective will.

Exactly a year after the publication of Ai Qing’s poem eulogizing Daqing’s oilfield, there was a major industrial accident when the Bohai No.2 oil platform capsized. The workers and managers had been exhorted to shift the position of the platform in too brief a period of time and to do so by “learning from Daqing”. Seventy-two people lost their lives, and the economic loss, not to mention the loss of face, was enormous.

Ai Qing’s 1978 poems were however also in keeping with the new economism of the regime. China had to compensate for lost time in its bid to become a modernized, industrialized power. Poems in praise f steel and petroleum production, rather than poems romantically concerned with nature and the environment conformed explicitly with the ideological ethos of the day.

The week I arrived in Peking in 1979, the flyers were being posted for the fifth and most recent issue of the dissident literary magazine Jintian whose English subtitle Today accompanied the Chinese in large font capital letters. The journal had been founded at the very end of 1978, the first issue was pasted on Democracy Wall on 23^rd December 1978. The magazine now both publicized in mimeographed samizdat format and also pasted on Democracy Wall was in its ninth month of existence the first time I glimpsed it amidst the dozens of other unofficial magazines and various dazibao. In the spring of 1979 after the publication of the second issue, the first readers’, contributors’ and editors’ seminar or workshop (zuotanhui 座談會) was held at Peking Normal University 北京師範大學, where Chen Maiping陳邁平, one of the co-editors was a student. The meeting coincided with the publication of the second issu which now was given over to poetry. A week later on 8^th April 1979, the first Jintian sponsored poetry reading took place. In the nine issues of the magazine a total of 87 poems would be published, and it would be this poetry, deemed “obscure” menglong 朦朧 by the establishment, that would make Today notorious with conventional readers and celebrated among its much more youthful readership. The month of June saw the publication of Today’s fourth issue. Towards the end of September a second gathering of readers and contributors took place at a popular meeting spot, the Purple Bamboo Garden, near Peking Zoo, in the north-west of the city and in close proximity to a number of the capital’s top universities. I was not aware of that meeting, but word soon spread on the Peking University campus of the Stars Exhibition. The Stars or Xingxing were a group of avant-garde, or modernist, painters and sculptors who were affiliated, at least in spirit with the Today group. Needless to say, logistically, their work was much harder to share with the people of China, than the literary production of the Today group. The exhibition opened on 27^th September in a public park provocatively near the state’s premier art museum, the Meishuguan 美術館. It was now mid-Autumn and the days were still warm and the early evenings . Peking did not yet suffer the appalling pollution problems of today and on a good day, from downtown Peking the purple sheened Western Hills were clearly visible. It was on such a day that I cycled downtown to see what all the fuss was about. The museum was situated at a major junction at the top end of what is still the capital’s main shopping street Wangfujing 王府井.

Paintings had been attached to the iron railings to the east of the China Art Gallery. However I arrived too late. Earlier that day, the 2^nd September, the Pubic Security Bureau had arrived and declared the exhibition over, and the next day an official announcement declared it illegal. On 1^st October, China’s national day the artists organized a protest march from the western end of Democracy Wall at Xidan to the Party’s municipal headquarters; a protest that was to result in exhibition space being allotted to the group.

I remember that day distinctly. It rained . I walked down the entire length of the Democracy Wall. I recall having lunch in an underground café – it literally was since the café that served soviet-style potato salad learned from the Russians in the 1950s was run out of a now defunct bomb shelter under the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. The café along with the Wall were soon to disappear. In mid-November 1979, on the day Democracy Wall was closed down, exhibition space was given to young unofficial artists who had until then hung up their works on the wall of Beijing’s main boulevard. The first legitimate Stars exhibition was held in a studio in Beihai Park, Beijing. The exhibition ran from 23 November to 2 December and this time I along with a quarter of a million others had time to see it. Several members of the Xingxing Group would become celebrities. Most would move abroad. Those who fared best were those who stayed in China. The only one of the group I knew well was Shao Fei, the poet and Today editor’s Bei Dao’s partner, she would go on to be a major recognized painter in her native Beijing, we would become friends in 1985. Years later in 1987, I would arrange for her to hold an exhibition at Liverpool’s Acorn Gallery while she accompanied Bei Dao who was spending a year at Durham University. Shao Fei was bored in England as she would be later in the USA, and missed Beijing. To Western eyes there was little that was new or daring in this “experimental” art. The painting were very and were in the main in a post-impressionist abstract expressionist mode. But in the context of official Chinese Western-style, soviet inspired painting Xingxing’s output was daring and provocative. Some was blatantly political but even those writers ideology foregrounded the politicalness of their work in contrast to official production. Towards the end of November a major literature and arts conference was convened in Beijing. Many authors, artists and performers who had been silenced and punished for decades were suddenly re-habilitated. It was the return of the old guard of official writers.

Arriving in China in the autumn of 1979, my concern was as much with what had become of the older generation of writers and intellectuals such as Ai Qing whose poetry and life had interested me. Unlike his predecessors in the 1919 May 4^th Movement he had been attracted more by French and other Latin cultures than by the Anglophone cultural universe; while emanating from those centres of power (Britain and the USA) that oppressed China militarily and economically, English-speaking literary culture, in part as a result of their physical presence in China and in part for reasons of linguistic accessibility, was hegemonic amongst even left-leaning intellectuals. That is not to say that Ai Qing was only influenced by the time he spent in France. In his work traces of the style and structural form of America’s ancestral poet Walt Whitman, and of the revolutionary Russian Mayakovsky, are to be found alongside those of Verhaeren and Apollinaire. But Ai Qing’s poetry had become stale and formulaic, the poet of political conscience now become little more than a tribune for political propaganda. Cut off from both social and cultural life for two decades, perhaps he was simply grateful to be able to exist once more.

The other Francophile and hispanophile poet I had studied was Dai Wangshu戴望舒. Dai had died in 1950, in the first year of New China’s existence. A poet with left-wing sympathies, he had nevertheless been politically criticized for his lack of orthodoxy and his failure to toe the line that favoured proletarian literary production. He had however won favour through his ardent anticipation, at least at the level of propaganda, in the war of resistance against Japan, and had spent time in gaol in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. In 1979, however, his poetry was still unavailable, and his poems still subject to political critique in official literary magazines. Many of the arguments against the new poetry that circulated via Today, would be expressed vicariously in criticsims of the lyrics of the long-dead Dai Wangshu.

Since Dai was dead, and little was known now of his life and work, I was hoping to track down those who had known him.

The convention of old writers and artists scheduled for October 1979 was the source of much optimism. While not all writers had been “rehabilitated”, most had, and at least it would be possible to see who was still alive.

I had some limited access to the mass gathering thanks to my acquaintance with a Shanghai-based Peking Opera star, named Li Ruru. In the summer of 1979, she had participated in a tour of England in the first post-Cultural Revolution foreign performance of traditional Chinese opera. She had performed little however. The ethos of the Cultural Revolution was still predominant and she was under political scrutiny . The concern was that her performances would emphasize her personal ability at the expense of the collective.

What protected her somewhat was her recent marriage to the celebrated playwright Cao Yu 曹禺. Both had been married before, and neither was young anymore, but it seemed nevertheless an alliance of affection rather than convenience.

On the first day of the conference I was allowed after registering with the guards to visit Li Ruru in her room in the official attached to conference centre just south of Peking zoo. During the conversation, Cao Yu came into the room. He walked with the help of a cane. It was impressive to be confronted by a man whose work I had studied in detail- a figure from the pages of literary and political history, from another age.

Cao Yu’s first major play had been produced in 1935. Thunderstorm or Leiyu and his latest before being sent into the wilderness, in 1962, Gall and the Sword (劍胆篇). Thunderstorm (雷雨) was a highly politically controversial play tackling social injustice, the Chinese family system and the struggle to achieve individual agency. Persecuted and hound during the Cultural Revolution, at one time he could walk only with the aid of crutches, he was the only surviving member of the Union of Chinese Dramatists, the others having perished. Now in 1979, Cao Yu had been rehabilitated, appointed Director of Peking’s People’s Art Theatre, Vice-President of the Union of Chinese Dramatists and given a political function as a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s Parliament.

This propulsion of Cao Yu back int a “rightful” frontline of literary dignitaries was part of the post-Cultural Revolution CCP’s attempt to re-establish order, the order.

But this first revolutionary generation, whose main literary production occurred in the 1930s and 1940sno longer had the ability or status to negotiate in a literary mode the dissatisfactions and desires of the new post-Mao generation, the generation of disappointed, crest-fallen Red Guards. To the half-century discrepancy in their ages could be added an ideological gulf.

The old intellectuals returned from their camps in the countryside or their exile in distant provinces were overjoyed to be back. But the young dissenting writers were unwilling to accept this hegemony. Apart from the likes of Cao Yu and Ai Qing, there was an intermediate generation which included the novelist and future Minister of Culture, Wang Meng, and the reportage writer Liu Binyan who would soon once again be on the party’s liste of bêtes noires.

Wang Meng, born in 1934, and thus 45 at the time of the conference, experimented with literary form and became known for his stream of consciousness technique. However, on the ideological level, Wang Meng’s work did not really menace the Communist order. Several years later I would attend a gathering of foreigners and Chinese at the Friendship Hotel where Wang Meng would explain his understanding of the place of creative writing in a socialist system. Wang Meng had been associated after the fall of the Gang of Four with the literature of reaction that came to be known as ‘Scar Literature’ or the ‘Literature of the Wounded’ during the period 1977-1978. The label shangzhen wenxue was inspired by one of the typical stories of his time called “The Wounded” by the youthful author Lu Xinhua.

Most of the ‘Wounded Literature’ writers were like Lu, young authors who had been sent down to the countryside. The authorities first allowed and then encouraged this literature of lament and recrimination. ‘Scar Literature’ was useful to Deng Xiaoping, as an integral part of a controlled expression of discontent. But the literary mode, a realist mode, challenged. Experimentation was the presence of the dissident young writers and artists except perhaps for the older novelist Wang Meng.

Liu Binyan, born in 1925, a decade older than Wang Meng , had joined the communist underground before in 1943, but his writing which always had a critical, interrogative edge, soon drew a negative response from New China’s authorities. His position might be described as that of a critical reforming communist, rather than an outright opponent. In 1956, he published two pieces of reportage critical of the bureaucracy that had emerged in New China’s early years. “ 在桥梁工地上” “At the bridge-construction site” and “ 本报内部消息” “Our Newspaper’s Inside Story”. As a consequence durinf the same 1957 anti-rightist campaign that saw Ding Ling and Ai Qing criticized, Liu was a rightist and dispatched to be reformed through manual labour in the countryside. In January 1988, he would be expelled from the CCP, having lost his status of journalist and his job on the People’s Daily and thus effectively silenced. He would succeed in leaving China a year or so before the 1989 Democracy Movement took place. At the 1979 conference he was at the height of his popularity having just published Between Man and Beast(人妖之间) Liu’s firt publication in twenty-two years. Over the subsequent seven years he would publish almost thirty reportages and during the administration’s more liberal moments even won several awards. But his remained a dissenting yet loyal communist rather than a dissident, his opinions ranging little from that of the reforming wing of the party. In late 1989, I would meet him at a gathering in Edinburgh. I recall asking him his thoughts on the Tibet question. He was most uncomfortable, and after saying that Tibet already enjoyed autonomous status (Tibet’s official administrative title is “Tibet Autonomous Region), he made his excuses, got up and left. Of course, there is autonomy and then there is autonomy.

After the fourth representative conference of China’s literary and art workers, which fixed the literary and artistic landscape for the immediate future, Democracy Wall was closed down and the unofficial underground literary was less in evidence. Ordinary people desired a period of normalcy, albeit such a condition would soon be seen as illusory.

I settled into my first winter in Beijing. The week days I spent at the University. Occasionally, at weekends, I, lke other foreign students, would try to visit by train those towns and places of interest that were open to foreigners. At the time most of China was closed off to foreigners-even the suburbs of Peking. It was on one such weekend visit to the city of Tianjin that I put the finishing touch to my introduction to Ai Qing’s poem about Neruda. Tianjin was still showing not just signs of devastation resulting from the 1976 earthquake, there was not just traces, temporary housing, brick-built shack had invaded the pavements and the streets, the old foreign concession buildings looming up behind them fissured, arched, whole floors exposed to the elements and draped in khaki tarpaulins. There was an old corner café, a little like the old pre-World War Two Lyon's cafés in England with wood-panelled walls, called Kiesling’s. There you could get coffee and simulacra of German cakes. It was far from a culinary delight but given the physical context of a wintry, stil devasted urban landscape, it was nonetheless exotic.

But such weekends were occasional. Entertainment was home-made. It was very difficult to visit Chinese friends’ homes. They had to get permission to invite and host you, had to repeat before and after the visit the circumstances and the contents of our conversations. Nevertheless, as foreign students we were privileged foreigners, not so much in terms of living conditions, the diplomats and journalists were much better off, but in the sense that we enjoyed a real proximity with Chinese people.

I had a number of Chinese friends, and one who was very close who had spent ten years labouring in the countryside because his mother and father had been branded rightists. The stories he told me about the long winter that had been the Cultural Revolution constituted an in-depth education in the history of Communist China’s darkest hour, and illustrated once again the brutality and barbary the twentieth-century was capable of producing.

The privileged access foreign students had to Chinese society also made us of interest to journalists and dipolamtes (several of whom were without doubt spies).

I got to know several. One in particular, Nigel Wade would invite a group of students to his apartment on Friday evenings. Often we would sleep over, since the University was a cold hour and a half away by bicycle from the downtown foreigners' compound.

The next morning I would sometimes accompany him on his sorties around Peking. He needed someone to interpret or translate-he was a good journalist, but had no Chinese. The government allocated him an official interpreter-translator who would scan the Chinese newspapers for him everyday, but such assistance had its obvious limits. I recall one Saturday accompanying him to Peking’s main shopping street, Wangfujing, where the Beijing Department Store, now one of the three or four pre-Liberation buildings to have survived the 1990s massive redevelopement of the area, had put on display in one of its windows a colour TV set and some other consumer durables. They were not for sale. This display was simply to accustom would-be consumers to the idea that they might be. In fact, televisions, at least monochrome sets, would soon become common currency in major cities. But at the end of 1979, they were still a luxury. During 1980, I remember seeing sheets of tinted transparent plastic (pink, green, blue, yellow) for sale - these were supposed to transform black and white TV images into coloured ones – instant colour TV.

If I mention Nigel Wade, it is not simply so as to detail the modus operandi of a foreign correspondent in Beijing. Wade was more that an ordinary jobbing journalist, he had attained fame, or perhaps notoriety, amongst the foreign press corps for having scooped the Gang of Four story. The foreign press had been informed by the autorities of the imminence of whoat would become known as the “fall of the Gang of Four”, but had put up an embargo on the news being published. The “fall” in effect was a coup d’état organized by Hua Guofeng, the Prime Minister who had succeeded Zhou Enlai on 3^rd February 1976 after the latter’s demise on 8 January 1976. The coup was directed against Mao’s widow who dominated the party in some regions of China, such as Shanghai and Shandong, but not the army. Hua himself would later be toppled after his usefulness to Deng Xiaping and his faction had expired.

On 29 March 1979, Wei Jingshen, the 29 year-old editor of Tansuo (Exploration 探索) a major Democracy Movement political journal, was arrested. Born into a militant communist family, he had been an active Red Guard at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He later on got a job in Peking Zoo, and then served several years in the army. At the beginning of the Democracy Movement (DM) in autumn of 1978, Wei wrote a tract entitled the “Fifth Modernization” which was posted in two parts on DM in December 1978 and republished in Tansuo in January 1979. A third part of the text appeared in the second issue of Tansuo. Wei’s fifth modernization was a call for “political modernization” including a shift to a democratic system, to be added to the government’s modernization project embracing the four modernizations in the domains of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and the military. Wei was not sparing in his criticism of the system and its leaders. His polemical text having the system and the leadership concludes that the Cultural Revolution far from being a reactionary and wholly negative revolution, had been an occasion for the people to demonstrate their discontent, and predicts a bloody, yet victorious conclusion to the popular struggle for democracy.

Is the struggle for democracy what the Chinese people really want? The Cultural Revolution was the first occasion for them to demonstrate their strength, and all reactionary forces trembled before them. Because the people had then no clear orientation and the democratic forces did not play the main role in the struggle, the majority of them were brought over by the autocratic tyrant, led astray, divided, slandered, and finally violently suppressed. Thus these forces came to an end. The people then had a blind faith in their leaders who were autocrats and careerists; therefore, they became a tool and a sacrificial lamb for the tyrants or potential tyrants.

Today, twelve years later, the people have finally learned where their goal lies. They have a clear orientation, and they have a real leader. This leader is the democratic banner, which is now taken on a new significance. Xidan Democracy Wall has become the first battlefield in the people's fight against reactionaries. The struggle will certainly be victorious, though there will still be bloodshed and suffering. Liberation (about which there has been so much talk) will surely be attained. However much we may be covertly plotted against, the democratic banner cannot be obscured by the miasmal mists. Let us unite under this great and real banner and march toward modernization for the sake of the people's peace, happiness, rights and freedom!

Wei’s frequentation of foreign journalists provided the excuse for the autorities to arrest and ultimately condemn him and inflict an exemplary sentence. The New China News Agency announced the beginning of Wei Jingsheng’s trial on 15 October 1979. The next day, sounding the death-knoll of the Peking Spring and Democracy Wall which would be replaced by a bicycle park six weeks later, the tribunal condemned Wei (in camera) to fifteen years’ imprisonment. The charge was “counter-revolutionary activities”, a catch-all phrase for many types of dissent, and “passing on military secrets to a foreigner.” It is true that he had been a lowly soldier, but doubtful that he had access to anything the West might consider secret.

This then was the autumn of 1979, while the “literary and art workers” of the old establishment were laughing and celebrating their new found freedom to work, write and perform , on the other side of town the new generations’ protestations and demonstrations were being firmly suppressed. By the end of 1979 a mood of morosity had enveloped the DM. The year 1980 would see even the less blatantly political journals, such as Today, closed down. Wei Jingshen was released on 14 September 1993, only to be re-arrested on April Fool’s Day 1994 and condemned anew in November 1995 to fourteen years imprisonment for “attempting to overthrow the government”. Two years later he was freed on health grounds and expelled from China.

Nigel Wade, having to content himself with stories about China’s latent desires for consumerism; would leave Peking in 1980 for Moscow., where the Olympic Games had been held without the participation of the USA, the Americans having withdrawn in protest against the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. While doubtless Carter was chagrined and embarrassed by the turn the human rights issue had taken in 1979, the first year of full diplomatic relations between China and the USA, China’s alliance with the Americans could only be strengthened by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Christmas Day 1979.

While China’s incursion into Vietnam ten months earlier was meant to demonstrate its intention of contesting and rebutting of Soviet influence in the region, the USSR’s occupation of the central Asian state, that borders both the Soviet Union and the PC, indicated that the Soviet Communist bureaucracy was just as determined not to relinquish its claim to hegemony over the Eurasian land mass.

ii Mao Tse-tung, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Peking : Foreign Languages Press, 1967, p. 38. 延安文艺界现在已经展开了思想斗争，这是很必要的。小资产阶级出身的人们总是经过种种方法，也经过文学艺术的方法，顽强地表现他们自己，宣传他们自己的主张，要求人们按照小资产阶级知识分子的面貌来改造党，改造世界。在这种情形下，我们的工作，就是要向他们大喝一声，说：“同志”们，你们那一套是不行的，无产阶级是不能迁就你们的，依了你们，实际上就是依了大地主大资产阶级，就有亡党亡国的危险。

iii现代化与现代派 (Modernization and modernism)

The Long Decade

Introductory sketch

1979

AI QING

Poets and the Sea

ON A CHILEAN PROMONTORY

To Pablo Neruda

May the goddess of the seafaring

You love the sea, as I too love the sea

Pablo’s house

The house is on earth

Are you a captain?

On the mahogany table

On this Side of the World

On this side of the World

Vienna

Vienna, although you are beautiful

The Wall

A wall, like a knife