From: xiong@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Bo Xiong)
Subject: FWD: CND Books & Journals Review, October 4, 1992
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 07:57:24 GMT

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                             October 4, 1992

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1. Revolution is No Free Lunch --
   "Hunger Trilogy"  by Wang Ruowang ................................... 79

2. Homecoming Harassment --
   "East Wind, West Wind"  by Fang Xiangshu & Trevor Hay ............... 18

3. Chamber Tryst --
   "The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the
    Western Wing"  by Wang Shifu ....................................... 83

4. "Private Business in China"  by Willy Kraus ......................... 29
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. Revolution is No Free Lunch --
   "Hunger Trilogy"  by Wang Ruowang ................................... 79
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From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts & Society 5/12/91
Review written by Marie Gottschalk

"Hunger Trilogy" by Wang Ruowang
Translated by Kyna Rubin with Ira Kasoff.
M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York. US$19.95

The physical and psychological trials that Wang Juntao, Chen Ziming and
other lesser-known Chinese dissidents are now undergoing at the hands of
China's penal system are no mystery to Chinese intellectuals. Many educated
Chinese have either experienced the barbarity of prison life firsthand or by
reading "Hunger Trilogy", an autobiographical novella describing writer Wang
Ruowang's personal encounters with hunger and captivity, and his eventual
disillusionment with the Chinese Communist Party.

"Hunger Trilogy", which some Chinese compare to Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag
Archipelago", is finally available in English. It was written in 1979 and
published in 1980 in China. Despite the loosening of official controls on
literature following the Cultural Revolution, few dared at that time to
tackle such a sensitive issue as the treatment of prisoners or to conclude
that perhaps the prisons of the Kuomingtang (KMT) had been relatively more
humane than those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This book was distinct in other ways as well. Although written at the height
of the "literature of the wounded" (shanghen wenxue) movement, "Hunger
Trilogy", unlike much of that literature, does not dwell exclusively on the
suffering inflicted during the Cultural Revolution and is not overly
melodramatic.

Covering the period from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, it attempts "to
show the evolution of a Chinese national ideal (read political party) in
which the author has always believed, and to share the very personal
transformation of Chinese intellectuals in their relationship to that
ideal," explains Kyna Rubin in her fine introduction. Thus we see a "young,
bold, idealistic CCP fighting its way against the KMT (part 1), the Japanese
(part 2), and, at last, it own internal enemies (part 3)."

IN a 1986 interview, Wang explained why he wrote "Hunger Trilogy: "At the
time, I swore to those who had died in prison that if I ever got out of
there alive, I would spend the rest of my life struggling with that bunch of
inhumane pseudo-Marxists."

He kept his promise. During the 1980s, Wang wrote numerous articles about
China's contemporary social, economic and political problems. In 1987 he was
expelled from the Party for his alleged role in inciting that winter's
student unrest. Shortly after the 1989 military crackdown in Tiananmen
Square, Wang was arrested. Imprisoned for over a year during which he was
denied contact with his family. Wang, now in his 70s, was finally released
in October 1990.

"Hunger Trilogy" is a vivid, searing account of Wang's three confrontations
with "extraordinary hunger, the kind of hunger that makes you wish for
death." It is as much about starvation of the spirit as of the body, as we
see Chinese intellectuals deprived not only of their food, but, over the
decades, of the idealism that fuelled their ardent commitment to the CCP.

Wang does not dominate the trilogy, but is rather a sensitive, ever-present
cameraman who faithfully records the scene and occasionally turns the lens
on himself. While his cellmates respond in nearly identical ways to lack of
food, they have quite varied responses to the loss of their idealism,
including suicide, cynicism, scepticism and resignation.

In part 1, Wang is sentenced at the age of 16 to 10 years in prison for his
underground activities on behalf of the CCP. Sobbing, he is thrown into a
KMT jail cell that is "pitch black and seemingly without hope." He survives
because of the support and encouragement of his fellow prisoners, who stage
a five-day hunger strike and succeed in forcing the authorities to improve
prison conditions.

In part 3, Wang is imprisoned by the communists during the Cultural
Revolution. He and his 16 cellmates try to relieve their unrelenting hunger
by "spiritual dining," and exercise in which each of them describes in
glorious detail, right down to "the sound of oil popping in the wok," how to
prepare a famous dish or snack. They also chase down edible insects, but
find few.

Wang considers organising a hunger strike to protest the intolerable prison
conditions, but quickly abandons the idea once he realises that the
prisoners are but ants in the eyes of their CCP captors. "If you fasted, they
just saved on food. If a few prisoners died, those 'revolutionaries'
wouldn't raise an eyebrow!" he concludes.

Not all the prisoners become cynics, however. Old Zhou, maliciously denied
medicine ordered by the prison doctor and supplied by his family, dies in
prison of hepatitis, his blind loyalty to the party intact as he lies on his
deathbed.

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2. Homecoming Harassment --
   "East Wind, West Wind"  by Fang Xiangshu & Trevor Hay ............... 18
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: The Weekend Australian Review 9/27/92

"East Wind, West Wind"  by Fang Xiangshu & Trevor Hay
Penguin 268pp, Aus$14.95

Fang Xiangshu, a Chinese academic, returned to China from Melbourne in 1986
to find himself thrown into the most complex and challenging situation.
Campus jealousies and competing ideologies were only to be expected, but as
one newly returned from the decadent West he was under intense suspicion in
a country tightening the reins in the lead-up to the 1989 crackdown on
civil liberties and the Tiananmen massacre.

Somehow managing to maintain his sense of the ridiculous and his hope,
despite separation from his wife, withdrawal of privileges including the
right to travel, and other form of harassment, Fang finally managed to
return to Australia. In some ways it was like walking through a mirror - his
friend Trevor Hay was facing court battles over a violent encounter with the
Melbourne police. The struggle for permanent residency was not to prove
simple either. This personal story with its wider resonances is told with
wit and insight.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Chamber Tryst --
   "The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the
    Western Wing"  by Wang Shifu ....................................... 83
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 6/26/92
Review written by: John Minford

"The Moon and the Zither: The Story of the
Western Wing"  by Wang Shifu. Edited and
translated by Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema.
University of California Press, Berkeley.  US$34.95

The Chinese have been passionate theatre-goers for centuries, and since its
beginnings in the bustling cities of the Song dynasty (11th to 12th
centuries), the Chinese music-theatre has gone through many transformations.
As anyone knows who has watched one of the many varieties still alive today,
it is above all an expressive and impressive art of spectacle and
performance.

Although music, together with movement and mime, costume and make-up, have
always constituted the heart of Chinese theatre, the stage has also produced
a number of literary masterpieces, including a corpus of 167 plays that
survive from the Mongol dynasty (13th century). These are essentially
libretti that owe their survival to the quality of their lyrics.

Chinese lyric verse - written to be sung to fixed metrical patterns and
tunes - has been the despair of many an English translator. Whereas in
standard Chinese verse the imagistic content carries across well into
English, and in ballad verse the story still moves by its pathos, in the
lyric it is above all the lilt of the phrase, the music, that counts; and
music is the first thing to go in translation. Even Arthur Waley, the most
brilliant and musical translator of Chinese verse this century, steered
clear of the lyric.

Of all Chinese dramatic texts, the 13th-century five-play cycle "The Western
Chamber" is widely acknowledged to be the masterpiece. It is one of those
plays that everyone has to know about (because it is referred to so often),
and whose very name conjures up a world of amorous intrigue, sexual passion,
poetry and romance, a world severely frowned upon (in theory) by generations
of Confucian puritans. In Chinese novels, it is the book which lovers
secretly read (and guiltily hide). "They were reading 'The Western Chamber'
together" means "they were, or were about to become, lovers." The play has
very little plot: boy meets girl while both are staying in a monastery. Its
power lies almost entirely in its magical poetry, its highly sensual and
evocative atmosphere - to use the words of David Hawkes, "the scenes in
which one seems almost to brush the glistening dew and to sense the hushed
strangeness of a moonlight night."

Over the years several translators have tried their hand at the play. S. I.
Hsiung, himself very much a Chinese man of theatre, followed up the runaway
success of his "Lady Precious Stream" on the London stage with a version of
"Western Chamber" in 1935, which has deservedly been reprinted several
times. This new version, published with a richly illustrated and informative
appendix by Yao Dajun, is by two of the world's leading authorities on
medieval Chinese drama, and brings to the task indefatigable scholarship and
a laudable determination to debowdlerise the text. They restore with great
zest the erotic innuendos, many of which prudish editors had allowed to
disappear over the years.

Stylistically, the translators have striven for fidelity to the shifting
registers of the language of the original. This is a worthy goal. Hsiung's
version is certainly bland by comparison. But the goal must surely be
achieved within the context of an overall poetic style that conveys the
spirit of the original, whereas Stephen West and Wilt Idema have set a tone
that is to a large extent bereft of poetry altogether. They are at their
best with the bawdy element. There is plenty of "clouds-and-rain" (sex), but
the "wind-and-moon" (romantic passion) is strangely absent. This limitation
in no way detracts from the usefulness of their work to an understanding of
the text; but it prevents it from taking that vital step (for a literary
translation) of representing the original experience whole to the new world
of English readers. That is the great risk that any translator of poetry
surely has to take. And the translator of an opera libretto must in some
fashion contrive to make the arias sing, even in a barbarian tongue.

In both their translation and commentary, West and Idema stress the
sexuality of the play. In many ways this emphasis is easy to justify. And
besides, it is fun to be reminded that the mon's bald pate IS (in some
sense) a glans penis, and that the monastery (indeed any enclosed space,
cave, grotto, or chamber) IS the vagina. It is true that the entire bastion
of traditional Chinese literature from its building blocks, YIN and YANG,
upwards, lends itself to interpretation in terms of sexual symbolism. But at
the same time the Chinese "language of flowers," at least as it occurs in
this play, is used in a subtle and poetic way to weave a sensual and erotic
tapestry, to create a literary masterpiece, not a piece of pornography.
There is a world of difference between the delights of this play and the
unadulterated filth of the late-Ming pornography industry. The undoubted
bawdiness of parts of "Western Chamber" does not detract from, but indeed
enhances, the poetry of the whole - as is of course the case with
Shakespeare.

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4. "Private Business in China"  by Willy Kraus ......................... 29
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From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 6/18/92
Review written by: Elizabeth Cheng

"Private Business in China" by Willy Kraus.
Hurst & Company, London.  US$50

This book provides well-researched material on the rapid growth of China's
private economy and the dilemma it presents to Marxist ideologues in the
country. Perhaps, not wishing to upset the many hardliners who still view
China's economic reforms as a betrayal of Marxism, reformers have generally
underplayed the burgeoning influence of private enterprise on the economy.

Just the mere presence of the thousands of karaoke bars, snack shops and
restaurants that lie the streets of China's rich coastal cities is testimony
enough to the spread of private entrepreneurism. Not to mention the many
marble-trimmed apartment blocks that are changing the rural landscape of the
south.

Based on published Chinese data, Kraus computes that the private sector -
which includes much of the rural economy - in 1989 already accounted for 69%
of China's total employment. This raises the question of whether the state
sector can still maintain its economic dominance - a fundamental condition
for Chinese socialism - given its declining profitability, mounting debts
and fading potential as a source of jobs.

Given the revival of socialist rhetoric after 4 June 1989 private business
must have felt threatened, and with good reason, if past experience is any
guide. Mixed signals from a leadership that remains torn between a
sentimental attachment to Marxist dogma and a pragmatic commitment to
improve living standards only add to a sense of insecurity. Many leaders
still take the view that individual business must be subordinated to the
public economy to avoid a swing towards capitalism.

Originally written in German, the book could have been more pithily
translated, with closer attention paid to sentence construction.

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Forwarded to SCC by Bo Xiong in Chicago
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