Arriving at Orville’s place takes you through a scenic drive on the Berkeley Hills. Quintessential to the Bay Area, driving on the steep, winding roads feels like the slow climbing of a rollercoaster. At the summit, glimpses of the Golden Gates Bridge peek through the misty clouds. On a clear day, the urban sprawl of San Francisco, Berkeley and Albany unfolds beneath you; even on a rainy day, the charming neighbourhoods with Berkeley Bungalows more than make up for the long drive from Palo Alto.
Orville Schell will be familiar to our returning readers. We have featured him twice before, once on his experience in the 60s, and again in the 80s. A veteran journalist and currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society, Orville has given us insight into how foreign China watchers navigated the challenges of the Cold War and how China’s gradual shift from socialism in the 1980s.
In this issue, we explore Orville’s experience in the Vietnam War – a transformative event for an entire generation of Americans and a key moment that shaped his consciousness as a China scholar. Orville, as someone deeply embedded in the American China-watching community, sheds light on the often-overlooked impact of the Vietnam War on Western perceptions of China.
A brief hiatus in the summer has recharged Peking Hotel well. We now have a new and brilliant editing team, so it’s not just myself sifting through mountains of tapes anymore (hurray!). We will aim to release a new episode every two weeks, and your continued interest is our best accountability measure :)
I thank my wonderful editors Yiwen Lu and Caiwei Chen for their support.
Enjoy!
Leo
The issue below is a transcript of the interview between Leo He and Orville Schell, edited for brevity and clarity.
For quick navigation to the specific sections:
The Cultural Revolution and Simon Leys’s Tragedy
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
Jerry Brown, Restaurant Reviews and A Break from Asia
The Impenetrability of Communist China
Mao’s Death and Enduring Legacy
The Psyche Of Vietnam War
After getting kicked out by the Indonesian Communists, you went to Berkeley for PhD but didn’t stay there all the way.
I stayed through my orals. I was writing a dissertation about John Service*, who was running the library in Berkeley. He was one of the three or four foreigners up in Yan’an during the Chongqing days, a very nice guy who got beat up by the McCarthy period. Soon after, I went to China and started writing in Vietnam for magazines, including The Atlantic. That's when I wrote Cage for the Innocents.
(* An American diplomat who served in the Foreign Service in China before and during World War II)
You were constantly flying to Vietnam, sometimes in military planes, watching General Olsen dropping bombs whenever they saw a hut on the land. I've heard about the Vietnam War, but I was shocked by your vivid account of what happened. What was it like for you witnessing all that in the plane and the Generals talking, ‘let's just bomb here, bomb there’ as if human lives were nothing?
It was surreal. I only wrote a few articles; you could read my brother's book, The Military Half. They declared that Vietnam was divided into four battle corps. The first corps is called I-Corps, which is at the top just below North Vietnam. Almost the whole province was a ‘free fire zone’, which meant artillery firing around the clock. It didn't matter who was there. It was like Gaza: they said, ‘we told people to get out; if they don't get out, they must be unfriendly.’ So these forward air controllers - which I went up with - would fly around looking for any human activity: a garden, a hole in the ground, anything. If someone worked in a field, they would call in the fighter bombers and bomb it. That was pretty savage.
My brother and I once went together, but he had come down early and spent a week or two in air control planes. He met me at the Saigon Airport and said, ‘Oh my god, where's my notebook?’ He lost all of his notes from his two-week trip. And I said, ‘God, Jonathan, what are you going to do? What are we going to do?’ And he said, ‘We’re going back.’
So we did. When he returned from Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked him to come to the Pentagon, put him in the basement, and said, ‘Write down everything you saw’. The interesting thing happened many years later when he received a call. Someone called Jonathan and said they found his Vietnam notebook in the CIA archive. We used to stay in these military bases or the officer's clubs, and he would just leave stuff. The military got it and sent it to the CIA, but they did not want to return it to Jonathan. Maybe they just figured: we got it, why should we give it back?
Why did the Pentagon call him in, though?
Because the White House Science Advisor then – the ex-President of MIT – was a friend of our parents. He told McNamara that Jonathan and I had been down there and seen things McNamara needed to know about. To McNamara's credit, he did this. Years later, when I was at Berkeley, I invited him to Berkeley for a conversation. I found him repentant about what he'd done. He was smart, not a bad man, but boy, he made some big mistakes.
The Vietnam War experience is such a resounding moment in the formative years of a generation of China specialists.
We distrusted our government. And that had the unfortunate effect of making us more willing to wonder if China had some answer. Since we were so against our government, the tendency was to think, well, okay, China's against our government; maybe they have some answers. But since we couldn't go there, we lived in our projections. I don't think I ever thought China was the milk of human kindness, but I had a deep and abiding sense of upset over the Vietnam War. Everybody felt it, especially for people who'd been there.
I even turned in my draft card. I have a letter from Hubert Humphrey - the Vice President of America - calling me a traitor. I remember going to the church to give the minister the draft card, and saying, ‘I'm not going to the war.’ They sent it to the White House, and Hubert Humphrey wrote, ‘Dear Mr. Schell, I consider it a rare privilege to be a United States citizen. The privilege is to rely on obligations. When our nation requires the services of its young men, I think it's their duty to respond. We cannot be selective, supporting one law of one's country and denying another. The Selective Service Act is the law of the land. To refuse induction under the law demonstrates a disregard for that law. I have no difficulty in answering your letter. I will sign no such statement.’
I read an online account about how you threatened the draft officer when you were being drafted.
I said, ‘Please send me back. You can pay for my trip, pay to keep me there, and I'm going to write articles you will regret the rest of your life.’ And they did not draft me. I went back on my own, not with them.
How did that work? You made your attitude clear but still somehow worked your way into the military.
They didn't know that I had turned my draft card in. I supported the war when I first went to Vietnam in 1961 or 1962; I thought at least the Americans were learning how to fight guerrilla warfare from Edward Lansdale, the British general who had beaten the Chinese communists in Malaya. They had these strategic hamlets moving people and stuff; I thought this was good. But the more I stayed and watched, the more savage it became and the more unjustifiable it seemed to me. It wasn't winning, just killing people.
In those days - and this is McNamara's great fault - the military didn't just take orders from the White House; it also justified the war. Generals like General Westmoreland and Abrams constantly helped with propaganda for the war. It’s not like the military now that doesn't meddle in policy, be professional, do as told, but don't turn into propagandists. But those guys got hooked on it. It was a difficult time in American history.
I could get the anti-communist part, but you need to be effective. You can't just be out killing people. It was so appalling. They had the Seventh Fleet off the coast of Vietnam and fired 24 hours a day into free-fire zones. Just anywhere. It didn't matter where it went. There were fighter bombers and artillery batteries all over the coast, up and down Route 1, lobbing shells, and it wasn't just one circle of free fire zones but the whole damn province with maybe one city and one band on the coast carved out. It was truly genocidal. And where are the people going to go? A lot of them left, but many got stuck. So, that was such a distorting landscape, but also an animating principle of so much that happened in the 60s and 70s in relation to China.
It was distracting, first of all, and it also turned people of my generation so hostile towards our government. Some were very extreme to sympathise with the North Vietnamese and also even China. It was the thing that's now metastasised into post-colonial thought, this idea that America was imposing some colonial order, which didn't seem to have any logic and wasn't winning. And when you got into the war, it was even more horrific than reading about it.
A whole generation of young Americans were asked to join, which they did, and they fought and risked their lives for such a meaningless cause.
50,000 (people) died, for what? In the very beginning, when Americans weren't yet shooting, I thought they were advisors trying to hem off the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh coming down from the North. They had this crazy idea of ‘strategic hamlets’, of putting everybody behind a barricade. And then they go out in the daytime and farm. I went out to a bunch of those. And I thought, well, this is at least something, because, remember, the Domino Theory of Communism, and Mao Zedong had his theory of people's war that they would expand around the world, occupying country after country by moving in from the countryside surrounding the cities.
农村包围城市, right? The villages surrounding the cities.
It was delusional. This is where decent men like McNamara came a cropper. They thought this was going to happen, and maybe it was. But their answer to it ended up being brutal and unsuccessful, and they didn't know how to get out.
“It (the Vietnam War) re-alchemised the notion that a scholar’s job – and even a reporter’s – is to understand the world, not help the government.”
Did it turn you towards China?
Not really. There may have been some small part of me that thinks your friend of your enemy is your enemy. Well, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. But no, I didn't think that China was the answer. I was sceptical but curious to know if there was another way of being in the world besides capitalism, the Vietnam War, and the American Empire. I was not a communist sympathiser, but I wanted to see it. And actually, it turned out it was the Russians that were largely supporting Vietnam. China let the trains come across and was giving some help, but China and Vietnam have never really gotten along, and neither has China and Russia.
It’s only to say that when Americans have wars, they have distorting influences on all these people and geopolitical questions. The Vietnam War distorted the field of Asian studies in a major way, causing upset and internal fighting.
It re-alchemised the notion that a scholar’s job – and even a reporter’s – is to understand the world, not help the government. So because of Vietnam, whereas previously everybody had collaborated and felt perfectly comfortable helping the government, it suddenly became unacceptable. The professors who wanted to work for the CIA, or do counterinsurgency, or advise on Vietnam, and things like that, were looked at askance as traitors. People like Robert Scalapino and Chalmers Johnson at Berkeley, who were deeply involved in U.S. government policy, were looked at as having done something unacceptable.
The Cultural Revolution and Simon Leys’s Tragedy
At the time of the Vietnam War was the Cultural Revolution in China, a brutal and dark moment in Chinese history. It is a good contender for one of the worst events in 20th-century world history.
We did not see it as clearly, and certainly the French existentialists such as Godard and others didn't see it as clearly as we should have. That's why I deeply respect the Belgian writer Simon Leys. He was a cultural attache in the Belgian Embassy and wrote Chinese Shadows. He figured China out before the Cultural Revolution.
I admired people like Simon Leys who saw clearly in the moment when everyone else didn't. They knew there was a steel toe in this boot. Americans - myself included - tend to be idealistic and hopeful. That is the strength of America, but also our naivete and weakness - our inability to comprehend the world’s deep savagery. America’s genius is that it keeps going forward with hope. We don't want to live in despair. The present is so depressing because we may be running out of hope in our own dream, and crazy Trump guys with their big stomachs and hats on backwards, filled with rage. There's no hope, gratitude and very little kindness. All blame, rage, anger. Victim culture is the danger.
But for people like Simon Leys, the great tragedy was that they were right. They knew what was happening, but convincing others of his insight was impossible because others did not have his experience.
You can look at some French television debates between Leys and the left wing; he was dead right, and they were just so wrong. I got some letters from him. His writing was the most extraordinary writing I've ever seen.
And he wrote his book at the same time as your book In The People's Republic.
And he got it much more right than I did. I got criticised by the people who organised my trip, particularly for some scenes where one of these officials gets drunk and makes a fool out of themselves. But I was temperate.
What’s your takeaway from China during that period?
I thought the Americans knew so little about the way it was there. People were hungry to know what the place looked like. What do people do? What do they wear? It was such a terra incognito. Looking at it now, I wish I had been much more sceptical. But the price at that moment of scepticism was very high. I got a tape from Carma Hinton trashing me. She wasn't even on the trip, but she felt it was her family's trip, and I was not sufficiently respectful, too negative and destroying the friendship and the possibilities of further contacts and trips.
So there you were at Berkeley, mingling between Vietnam and the Bay Area. You wrote Modern China with Joe Escherick, your friend from Harvard. I found that book almost a standard word-by-word communist history textbook.
Partially, I don't want to blame it on Joe, but we had taught a course together at Berkeley. That was the height of the Vietnam period. We were writing to give young kids some reasons to try to understand China. But it was one of the more naive things I've written.
And it's a theme repeated by other sinologists new to the field, wanting to get away from the Washington orthodoxy about China and be educated about China. And almost invariably, they turned friendly to the official narrative of the Communist Party.
We didn't have another version; we had nobody there. We had no first-hand experience. And you know, when I finally went to Beijing in 75, the only person I had contact with was the Le Monde correspondent in Cambodia, Alain Bouc, who was a complete Communist running dog. So a lot of these left-wing people — some from Canada, but mostly from France — who could go to China were people who were very sympathetic to Maoism. People like Simon Leys were suspects because he was sitting in Hong Kong reading newspapers.
I have a whole shelf here on China lovers that I want to write an article about. You know, Felix Green, Jan Myrdal, Jack Chen, Alberto Moravia, all of these people who wrote these fawning books on China. I go back and look at them and wonder: how did we get so much so wrong?
The leftist European intellectuals were, in a way, the worst because they had a tradition of socialism. They couldn't quite believe that China's version of socialism was fascism. Americans didn't make that mistake; we were just sort of stupid. We were anti-communist but got sick of it because of the brutal purge of McCarthy.
But the Europeans did have Stalin to teach them a lesson, didn't they?
And they loved him. L'Humanité, the French communist newspaper, was in bed with the Soviet Union to the end. So, there was a long tradition of overlooking stuff in different versions in each country.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
During the Vietnam War, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was founded.
The committee was set up in response to the war, against the U.S. government's policies in Vietnam, and then it metastasised out into a critique of certain China specialists. Some people went on, to my great chagrin, to attack people like Fairbank. Jim Peck, who'd been to Harvard, wrote articles about how Fairbank hadn't appreciated the colonial nature of America. We had a big conference where I invited Fairbank to speak with Owen Lattimore, and we got shouted down.
Owen Lattimore was of course another intellectual who got purged during the McCarthy era.
Unfairly. He's the guy who worked on China border regions in Xinjiang and Mongolia, joining caravans. He spoke Mongolian and was a real sinologist. I can't remember what they were yelling about. I said, well, we can't have a civilised discussion under the circumstances. I had to cancel the whole session, which was heartbreaking.
“Why were we bombing Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam? And as Asian specialists, should people be working for the government, such as advising the CIA?”
Did the committee have an impact on policy, social affairs, or culture?
It certainly had an impact. It grew from this sense that Asian studies failed to reckon with reality in Indochina. That was its animating spirit. Why were we bombing Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam? And as Asian specialists, should people be working for the government, such as advising the CIA?
I suppose the Committee would answer ‘no’, right?
Yes, in those days. Now, people feel differently. The Vietnam War was a huge wound. Even though people might have been anti-communist, which I was, when you saw what was happening initially, it seemed to be just giving new energy.
Did you ever think about going into politics?
Not really. I wouldn’t make a good diplomat, or be good in the White House or the State Department, or put up with the bullshit of running for office. I want to say what I think, and you can't do that in politics.
How would you describe your younger self, actually?
I was a very uncertain young man. I didn't know what I was doing. You go to a big place like Harvard and feel utterly insignificant. And I think the challenge for students is to find good mentors, gain confidence but not arrogance, understand something, and try to do some good work. I think in my early days, everything was way beyond me.
Jerry Brown, Restaurant Reviews and A Break from Asia
When the Vietnam War ended, what did you do?
I took a break when I stopped going to Vietnam before the Tet Offensive. I just didn't want to go back anymore. That’s when I wrote that book about Jerry Brown, the California Governor who ran for president in 1992 and 1976. I still see him. I started pig farming, which turned into a cattle ranch with my partner. I did that for 20 years and wrote a book about ranching and modern meat. I just wanted a break from China and Vietnam.
I almost went to China with Jerry Brown. We were in Japan, then I said, ‘Jerry, you should go to China.’ He said, ‘Well, how do I do that?’ So I contacted the ambassador in Washington, Huang Zhen. I said, ‘I'm here in Japan with the governor of California, and he'd like to go to China tomorrow.’
Just like, what?
And he arranged a visa; we were all set. We took our passports down to the Chinese Embassy. Then, some terrible labour dispute broke out in California, and he had to come home. It must have been 1976 or 1977, after my first trip to China; it could have been incredible. It was very easy because he was such a hotshot, the hottest young politician in America, and every anchor and journalist tried to interview him.
A bit like Gavin Newsom today? How did you know him?
Oh, bigger. Tenth power because he was a former priest in a Catholic seminary, and his father had been governor. He was just very exciting to people.
Since too many wanted to know him, I decided to try a different tactic. I just went to Sacramento and sat in his waiting room for about a month.
A month?
I don't know how long, two weeks or whatever, just watching who came in and went out, talking to the receptionist. Then, he started noticing me and said, ‘What are you doing here.’ We became friends afterwards, and he asked me to stay in his apartment. He had no furniture but a mattress on the floor, and I would just hang out to watch him as he later ran for the presidency and went on campaign trips.
I had one exciting trip with him where I met the ambassador from China. We took the train together, and he was banging on about the ‘Russian bear’, you know, the Chinese hated the Russians who were China’s real enemy then, which bonded the Chinese and Americans in the Nixon-Mao love affair. Otherwise, I had little involvement with China at the time.
So you basically took a break from Asia.
It was like three or four years. I was still doing Pacific News service but wasn't at the university daily. I hadn't quite figured out if I'd ever write a dissertation. I wanted to write a book on Lu Xun and finally wrote a long thing about him, which we didn't include in Wealth and Power. I adore Lu Xun.
That was a kind of an interim, and I moved to the countryside out of Berkeley. I always liked to work with my hands. I worked as a carpenter, building houses, just leading my life. I guess I could have gone in any direction and might never have returned to China if certain things hadn't happened. I used to like the idea of writing one book on China, but I've also written several books that have nothing to do with China.
And you even wrote restaurant reviews.
I got someone to hire me to write restaurant reviews and take my friends out to restaurants. It was something totally different and fun. Then the big moment came after Kissinger and Nixon.
The Impenetrability of Communist China
What were you doing when Kissinger went to China?
I was out in Bolinas tending pigs and cattle and writing my other stuff. I felt to come home a little bit. I built a house that I lived in when my first son was born, then I moved to a pig barn and built a whole ranch and another house where my eldest son now lives. I built the roads, the corrals, the lake, everything. I like working with my hands. And I got preoccupied in this community where I lived, especially environmental issues. We opposed a local residential building project that would have been divided into 50-foot lots, but there wasn't enough water for this. So we organised to stop this.
Then, this trip to China came in 1975. Kissinger paved the way for Zhou Enlai to allow foreigners to visit China on a limited basis. China was creating openings for friendship trips and professional trips.
There was also a trip that Susan Shirk and Paul Pickowitz went on to meet Zhou Enlai in the early 70s.
And there were others. So that turned the switch again for me back to China. I was there for two months, and since I was working for The New Yorker, I had to write something. I tried something simple, recording what I'd seen and heard, no big policy analysis. I did that, and Random House published it.
So your first trip to China in 1975. How did that happen?
it was a Hinton family-organised trip through Zhou Enlai and the Friendship Association. The official idea was to bring youth, but the real idea was to bring lefties; I was a family friend, so I came in that category. Their idea was you had to be ‘friendly.’ You had to love the Communist Party, et cetera. Anyway, I went.
We went to Beijing, Yan’an, Shenyang and Shanghai. It was a Potemkin tour. We were supposed to work in farms and factories in China, but we didn't care. I mean, you know, it was all just pretence. We did some work but were probably more trouble than we were worth.
The idea was, of course, for you to see ‘real China’. Mao had the saying, 工业学大庆,农业学大寨. Industry learns from Daqing, and agriculture learns from Dazhai. The Dazhai commune was a model village, that was unique and not representative of China.
I was aware of that and constantly tried to get off and onto some other train, but it was impossible; I got taken back by the officials. The people I was with were deeply offended by my behaviour. I remember one day in Shanghai, I said, ‘I’m sick.’ So when they all left, I went to get a haircut in the street. When I went to North Korea, I got a haircut too. Whenever I got to a strange place, I do things like that and just see what happens.
I just walked down the street. We stayed at the Haigang Binguan (Haigang Hotel), an old 1930s guest house before the party took over. So I found a barber shop and entered. It created a complete chaos. You know, this white guy comes in, and finally, after many phone calls, not quite knowing what to do, they put me in the chair.
They wanted to know how to cut my hair, and I just said, do what you think is best. I don't remember the whole story except that when I finished, I looked like some Czechoslovakian damn engineer.
You also tried renting a bike in Beijing.
Oh, I did rent a bike in front of the Jianguo Hotel from a little shop opposite. I had a hell of a time renting it. Anyway, I did get a bike and pedaled around a bit. But you didn't know where you were going or looking at. Nobody would talk to you, and everybody was scared of foreigners.
Not the kids, though?
Not the kids, no. But the parents would usually get them in order pretty quickly. It was a very superficial experience, but I had to write something, so I tried to be very simple about it.
I guess that is one of the great tricks of writers: to make superficial experiences profound.
I wish I had been more reflective and skeptical when doing it. It wasn’t my most insightful piece.
I enjoyed reading it and found it touching and intimately recreates the era. The way that you waited in Hong Kong, I mean, you had been waiting for that moment for half of your life. Finally, you took a train to Guangzhou, then a plane to Beijing. The plane back then was still a pretty luxurious form of travel.
It was the first plane they bought from America. There were party cadres and others dressed up for the occasion.
“It reminds you that China has many forces at work, constantly churning and changing things. And it will continue to be that way.”
And you arrived in Beijing, went to the Peking Hotel and were presented with all kinds of communist luxuries that were the complete opposite of what the country had offered to its own people at the time. But as a foreigner, you could see a different side of China. It was shallow only in the sense that there's a different side. But it was not untrue. It was how foreigners were treated and got to experience. I had never seen that side of China, so it was informative in that sense.
Well, for you, it may have been more interesting than for an American who wants to know the real deal, I suppose. I tried to get the real deal. You may remember the scene where there was this beautiful girl at the factory, Xiaofeng. Mao Zedong had come to the Shanghai Dianqichang (Shanghai Electrical Machinery Factory) a couple of years before, and they kept the theatre where he had appeared with a thatched roof; it became a Maoist holy temple. So we went to see a film at this horrendously boring clock factory. I went in, sat down. A lovely young woman came in. It was dark. She couldn't see me and sat down right beside me. I thought, holy shit, what's going on here? This is great. I started to try to talk to her. The next thing I knew, a couple of comrades had come to lift me out of my seat and moved me down about five seats to get me out of her way. That was a perfect representation of the tenaciousness of the people organising foreign trips to keep any foreigner as far away as they could from any kind of real contact with Chinese people. So that was an emblematic moment for me.
And that world never disappeared. It did change, shifted in its form, adapted. There were lows and highs. But right now, we're returning to a separation, an invisible war. There is a heightened guardedness of the system not to reveal reality to foreigners except their preferred facsimile of reality. It was important for me to be in China during that period because I got a sense of the Cultural Revolution and the rules of the game. The study sessions, the separation of foreigners and Chinese, the dos and don'ts, so now I could also gauge the changes against those Cultural Revolution goalposts. As we head back into some other era, it's helpful to have been through these different, contradictory periods. It reminds you that China has many forces at work, constantly churning and changing things. And it will continue to be that way.
Mao’s Death and Enduring Legacy
Soon after your trip, Zhou Enlai and Mao died. What did you think back then?
When everybody poured into the square, I thought, this is interesting. The surface doesn't tell everything. Pouring in the square after Zhou Enlai's death, people were holding banners suggesting innuendos about how Mao Zedong and the Gainer Four were corrupt and holding on to power too much. I didn't know where it would go, but I paid attention.
And then Mao died. I remember writing an introduction to the paperback version of In the People's Republic, which people disagreed about, but I turned out to be right. I should read it to you:
There are few men in the twentieth century who seemed as immortal as Mao Zedong. During his long life of eighty-three years, he not only survived the vicissitudes of a society and revolution, but was in great measure responsible for that revolution. Protest as he might that there was no such thing as individual genius behind social and political movements, only that of the people, he said. His influence on the transformation of China appeared almost superhuman. It has often seemed that Mao had become China.
“The effect of a revolution as deep, powerful, and traumatic as China's is not going to be something society will overcome in less than a century.”
For many people who watched China without a Mao seemed barely conceivable. The endless statues of Mao, the chanting of his name, the posters, the red books, even memorabilia like the red cigarette lighters emblemized with Mao quotes seemed to suggest to onlookers that China might be a country, so firmly anchored by one charismatic personality that he might never survive his demise. The book you are about to read was written just before his death. While in Peking, I often passed the brilliant crimson and gold gates of Zhongnanhai where Mao lived and even then wondered what it would feel like someday for a Chinese to pass by the high walls of this compound, knowing that their chairman Mao no longer lived there. I knew that they would of course feel grief, and probably also no sense of uncertainty and insecurity. For Mao Zedong today, for most Chinese today, there is no memory of China without Mao.
But while I was trying to imagine this Mao-less China, I was stuck in a very forceful way by the fact that even prior to death, Mao had transcended his own personality. He was no passing rock star, no movie idol, or even a John Kennedy who once taken from the midst was gone. For Mao had transformed his being, even his personality, into a series of careful, thought-out, organized ideas. Mao was a thinker as well as a doer. He conceived of the Chinese Revolution, helped it happen, and in the process he thought that Chairman Mao became inculcated in almost every Chinese. The word almost literally became flesh. It seemed clear, even before Mao died, that his death would not erase the way in which he had almost become transubstantiated in his people.
And people later said, well, Deng would change it all. But I don't think so. Anyway, I thought Mao was there forever, at least for a long time. It goes from generation to generation, each with different genetic elements passed on. However, the effect of a revolution as deep, powerful, and traumatic as China's is not going to be something society will overcome in less than a century.
What was the ripple effect of Mao's death in America in the China specialist network?
People thought it was the passing of an era, but more importantly was when Deng started changing things. People thought, OK, that's the end of Mao, the end of the revolution; we’re off on a new track, a clean sheet of paper. Mao himself said, which seems to be the repetitive myth about China, that whenever a new leader comes in, that's a clean sheet of paper. Anything is possible. It could be anything, anywhere. It's a new piece at the bottom of the sheet of paper for them to write something, but the past doesn't go away. And I got criticised because people thought, during the 80s, the past had gone away.
I didn't believe that. Mao told Nixon that, ‘let's forget it.’ Deng told Jimmy Carter, ‘we're past it.’ The past never disappears. The past lives deeply in everything, particularly in revolutionary societies. The trauma is deep. It takes a long, long time to go away. So I am not surprised now, just to jump to the present momentarily, that Xi Jinping is another Mao act.
He's a re-embodiment of the past, at least of some elements of the past. Even though he's also iconoclastic in his own ways, trashing the legacies of Reform and Opening-Up, going backwards on dealing with the West, Taiwan, and the increasing conservatism. But deep down, it's a revolutionary psychic.
There's something deeply embedded in Chinese society, in the genetic, intellectual, spiritual, and psychological body of the Chinese people, that has been deeply influenced not only by the dynastic period but also by Mao for a long time to come. That’s why we may have some hopeful reforms, but there'll be some deeper elements that won't be so easy to disturb, which is why Lu Xun was so depressed. He tried to destroy the past too, then found he was beholden to it, steeped in the language, the culture, the politics, everything. He couldn't escape.
Same for Mao Zedong. Even when he tried to destroy the past, he ended up using metaphors and poetic language rooted in classical culture to trash the classical culture.
So Mao Zedong couldn't destroy China's traditional past. And leaders now can't destroy Mao Zedong's past. Maybe he is not as deep as Confucianism and the rest from the traditional period, but he's not something to be erased easily, as we now see.
Recommended Readings
Simon Leys, 1974, Chinese Shadows, Penguin Books
Jonathan Schell, 1968, The Military Half, Random House
Orville Schell, 1977, In The People’s Republic, Random House
About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China’s reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo’s research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
Real Ideals and False Hopes: Seeing China in the Vietnam War with Orville Schell