From: jxg601@huxley.anu.edu.au (J. Gao)
Newsgroups: aus.culture.china
Subject: CND: Books & Journals Review, Tue, 10/13/1992
Date: 13 Oct 92 06:43:12 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12
Summary: CND
Keywords: CND

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                             October 13, 1992

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1. "Quelling the People" by Timothy Brook .............................. 90

2. "Art and Revolution in Modern China"  by Ralph Croizier ............. 20

3. The Nightmare of the Red Chamber --
   "New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
    Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin ............ 110

4.  Forbidden Fruits -- Exhibition of the Sacred Art of Tibet, London .. 50
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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. "Quelling the People" by Timothy Brook .............................. 90
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
Source: The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 10/3/92
Review by: Charles Foran

"Quelling the People: The military suppression of the
Beijing democracy movement." by Timothy Brook
Publisher: Lester Publishing. 265 pages $C 26.95

It's in the details that Tiananmen finally becomes clear.

In late May 1989, the Beijing campus where I was living was electric with
rumors of an argument between moderate leader Zhao Zhiyang and his
intransigent boss.  The conversation, alleged to have occurred two days
before martial law was declared was pithy.  "I have the Army behind me,"
Deng boasted.  "But I have the people behind me," Zhao answered.

"Then you have nothing," retorted Deng.

Some quality of distillation in the exchange led many observers to suspect
it was apocryphal.  Whatever its verisimilitude, for those millions of
Beijingers who heard the rumor the message was one of menace and
confrontation and potential crackdown.

Timothy Brook includes the argument in his admirable recreation of the
Tiananmen massacre.  Deng Xiaoping indeed had the army behind him.  A the
subtitle of "Quelling the People" suggests, a largely lawful, entirely
pacific protest movement was suppressed by a brutal military operation.
June 4, 1989 was not a police action, nor an over-zealous response by a
nervous authority; it was a concerted attempt by the dominant faction in
the Chinese government to frighten people out of thinking by killing them in
large numbers.

The clarity of the position in "Quelling the People" is most welcome.  The
first half of the book is devoted to outlining how the Chinese capital came
to be surrounded by 150,000 soldiers. Brook, a University of Toronto
historian, is a scrupulous researcher; using interviews, Chinese and Western
media reports, published and unpublished accounts, along with some
obligatory speculation, he reconstructs the massive troop build-up ordered
by Deng for an attack on the square.

The exegesis of the military campaign is revelatory: a tale of confusion,
ineptitude, and dissent within the army.  It is also dry reading, a problem
the author acknowledges during a discussion of the divisions that were
deployed.

But  "Quelling the People" is actually groundbreaking in its focus in these
particulars.  For example, tanks thundered past our college gates the night
of the massacre, but I could never get a straight answer about the invaders.
Brook tells me which army it was, how they ended up on that road, and who
resisted them. This kind of detail - the skirmishes were minor - serves to
reinforce both the scale and ferocity of the assault.

The book comes to life during the siege.  Again, simply by presenting the
weeks preceding June 4 as a military siege of a disobedient city, Brook
makes an important point.  Armies are not normally ordered to storm their
own capital, especially when the nation's rulers are safely housed within a
kilometre of the supposed centre of anarchy.  There was, in other words, an
artificiality to the "turmoil."  The fury of Beijingers was in part a
reaction to their sense of being manipulated.

Finally, "Quelling the People" offers a meticulous account of the massacre.
While Brook has more company here - dozens of versions have been published -
his retelling is notable both for its clarity and the evidence that the
operation was a bloody-minded fiasco.  Numerous misperceptions about June 4
are corrected, and a strong case for the valor and restraint of the Beijing
population is put forth.

Brook is equally adamant about reversing the casualty count. The
international press, he notes, gradually lowered its estimate from thousands
to hundreds in the months following the crackdown, largely to avoid
appearing hysterical.  Yet, as his informal survey of Beijing hospitals
suggests, the number was far higher.  What "Quelling the People" settles on,
as did the American journalist Edward Gargan in "China's Fate", is the
original Red Cross figure of 2,600.  (The organization was forced to retract
afterwards.)  Such jostling may seem macabre, but, as Brook argues: "The
quantity of killing matters most to those who died and those who mourned
them."

Ironically, the statement belies a reluctance to factor biography into the
equation.  Even granting the book's fact-oriented approach, it still would
have benefited from more attention to the key individuals involved.  The
non-presence of the student leaders is acceptable, given the focus on the
military.  But the absence of Deng Xiaoping or President Yang Shangkun as
anything but shadows inhibits "Quelling the People".  Who these men are, and
how they think is vital to understanding why they acted as they did.

Brook closes on a curious chapter on China as a victim of economic
imperialism and "the capitalist world system".  Until this point , he has
remained cool and steady, wisely eschewing generalizations.  This abrupt
plunge into murky, and highly contentious, abstractions feels pat, almost
tacked-on. His ideas certainly need a lengthier and more considered
presentation to be compelling.  They may even belong to a different book.

[Charles Foran is the author of "Sketches in Winter: A Beijing Postscript",
which has been short-listed in this year's QSPELL competition for English
Quebec literature]

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2. "Art and Revolution in Modern China"  by Ralph Croizier ............. 20
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Jian Liu
Source: Choice Book Reviews
Reviewed by: James Caswell

"Art and Revolution in Modern China"
by Ralph Croizier  
Published date: 1988, California; 
224 pages ISBN 0-520-05909-3  US$35.00 

Modern Chinese painting has often suffered a bad press or simple neglect,
and this is not entirely undeserved as Chinese artists have found it
difficult to escape the inertia of their own long tradition and to cope with
foreign ideas.  Many dilemmas remain, and this is reflected in some
scholarly bewilderment and in the paucity of significant books to date on
the subject.  Croizier's study is the first to find a clear path through
part of it, this by focusing upon a single school and examining the issues
have finally "failed" in their revolutionary aims, but the effort to give
painting new purpose was laudable and the implications remain significant on
several levels. Croizier clearly reveals these in a rich tapestry of people,
places, causes, events, and visual results. Although the connoisseur may not
be drawn to this study (or to the 83 lackluster illustrations), any academic
library will be because it tells more about a nation and the struggles of
artists than does the singular masterpiece.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. The Nightmare of the Red Chamber --
   "New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
    Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin ............ 110
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review  6/11/92
Review written by: Jonathan Mirsky

"New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
 Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin
Times Books, New York.  US$30

Long ago the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Leninist view that
dissenting literature is particularly subversive because its "sugar coated
bullets" invisibly slide past readers' defences. Another invisible weapon in
the current "smokeless warfare" designed to bring down Chinese socialism
through foreign-inspired "peaceful evolution" is "spiritual pollution".

During the past seven or eight years Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin, experts
on modern Chinese intellectual history at the Australian National
University, have exposed more clearly than anyone the party's crude concepts
- such as "spiritual pollution" - of how literature works, and have shown
how implacably the cultural commissars labour to wreck art.

"New Ghosts, Old Dreams", Barme and Jaivin's startlingly original collection
of largely unorthodox fiction, essays, poems, and filmscripts, concentrates
on the past five years, but also uses flashbacks of the Taoist sages of
antiquity to take us behind the party's increasingly rickety stage sets.

Take, for example, "A Sexy Lady," a 1988 interview with an army nurse by the
journalists Dai Qing and Luo Ke. It is well known that China has a rich
tradition of pornography, and it is equally well known that the party's
elderly leaders, here as elsewhere modelling themselves not on Mao Thought
but on Mao Deed, have consumed women one third their age - while forbidding
public discussion of sex.

Inevitably, therefore, any bit of sex bolted into mediocre Chinese novels
like "Half of Man is Woman" causes a sensation in China and abroad. "The
Sexy Lady" and Wang Shuo's novella "Hot and Cold, Measure for Measure,"
abstracted here by Barme and Jaivin, reveal a lot, in explicit terms, about
sexual exploitation. The sexy lady uses men, is used by them and like most
such people has an unhappy time. The young hoodlum in "Hot and Cold" seduces
and abandons a young woman who becomes a prostitute and kills herself. He
learns nothing from this - a great sin in China, where Mao dictated in 1944,
while still a guerilla leader, that above all literature must have a
didactic, optimistic function. And in 1988 the literary hack Zhang Mingduo -
one virtue of this book is its inclusion of criticism of the literature
presented - found "A Sexy Lady" especially repulsive because "the portrayal
of moral depravity among military and medical workers undermines the
people's trust in them." The story was banned the following year, after
Tiananmen, when Dai Qing was imprisoned. The editors comment dryly: "Little
did he (Zhang Mingduo) know that violence, not sex, would be undoing of the
PLA's reputation."

"New Ghosts, Old Dreams" is the successor to "Seeds of Fire; Chinese Voices
of Conscience" the wonderful collection of early and mid-1980s dissident
literature first assembled in 1986 by Barme and John Minford. Although the
1989 edition of "Seeds" contains references to Tiananmen, it seems in
retrospect to have reflected a more relaxed era, with greater room for sugar
coated bullets and smokeless warfare, though critics like Liu Binyan and
playwrite Wu Zuguang were already under party attack. But in that
pre-massacre era it was possible for Wu, whose much grimmer voice is heard
again in "New Ghosts", to write that he had agreed to quit the party, rather
than wait for expulsion, because he felt sorry that Hu Quaomu, the party's
venerable literary hatchet-man, had to climb many flights of steps to tell
him to resign.

Many of the earlier book's contributors reappear, with essays, poems and
stories written just before, during or after Tiananmen, their themes
contained within imaginative categories that, for example, relate party
constraints to footbinding.

Here again is the young literary critic Liu Xiaobo, who emerged as one of
the hardest-hitters in the square, was convicted after the massacre of
issuing "counter-revolutionary propaganda," and finally discharged for
persuading the students not to use weapons on the night of the massacre.

Liu derides Chinese intellectuals for their paltry analysis and for mourning
the death of party boss Hu Yaobang - "an air of servitude normally seen only
in the relation between loyal mandarins and their emperor" - instead of
concentrating on the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng who, Liu notes,
called for the abolition of the authoritarian system itself - and in whom
the Tiananmen demonstrators explicitly denies any interest.

"New Ghosts" introduces the young conservative He Xin, whom the party likes
to quote when it goes after "bourgeois liberals". His best piece is a letter
to the leadership analysing the causes of the tiananmen demonstrations which
had only recently begun. Ignoring the customary projection of "a tiny
handful of trouble makers," He observes: "There is widespread
dissatisfaction among students and spontaneous demands for speeding up
political reform," and warns that "Civil War, military coups, and popular
uprisings in China for decades to come are now far from unthinkable." To
deal with the problem, He emphasises that the party must address its own
corruption. In another essay he is blunter still: the network of national
corruption, he says, "is like a massive and invisible mafia-like
organisation enmeshing the whole of China."

Two of the most moving inclusions are among the shortest. The ancient Ba
Jin, whose novels were considered subversive in the 1930s, wrote to the
Tiananmen demonstrators: "Seventy years have passed, and we are still a
backward country. I believe the students' demands are completely reasonable.
What they are doing today is completing the task we were unable to finish."
The equally venerable writer, Bing Xin, wrote a beautiful calligraphed
couplet three days before the killings: "The students love the nation; I
love the students."

"New Ghosts" is sad but ultimately encouraging. One may disagree with the
editors' statement that "democracy was not one of the movement's strongest
points." This may have been true in the square itself; but if Tiananmen,
like 4 May 1919, was more than a specific time and place, some of the most
stirring statements in "New Ghosts" show that the Chinese people, despite
what they often say about themselves, deserve more than the post Deng New
Authoritarianism.

The now-exiled Bei Dao, for example, describing himself as "a poet with no
interest in politics," insisted in early 1989 that: "Capitalism has no
monopoly on the protection of human rights and freedom of speech; they are
the standard of any modern civilised society." And one week before the
declaration of martial law in Peking, on 19-20 May, some of China's most
eminent intellectuals disputed "the excuse that China's situation is unique
and therefore that democracy, freedom, human rights, and rule by law are
irrelevant."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.  Forbidden Fruits -- Exhibition of the Sacred Art of Tibet, London .. 50
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
Source: The Economist  9/26/92, abridged by CND

None of the 160 sculptures and paintings in the exhibition, "Wisdom and
Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet", at Londion's Royal Academy (until
December 13th), comes directly from Tibet.

Thirty of the exhibits in London, collected by a Russian explorer early this
century, come on loan from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  Others come
from American collectors who have acquired artworks secreted out of the
country by Tibetan refugees.

The artworks are meditative and devotional, infused with Buddhist
spirituality.  And, like the art of the great European cathedrals, Buddhist
art is anonymous, highly schematic, and strikes universal chords.  A stock
Buddhist iconography of essential themes and forms has existed for
centuries, from which the monk-artist can draw, and from which he must not
deviate in a single particular.

Many of the statues (mostly bronzes or gilt brass) and paintings here of the
seated Buddha are either uniform or very similar in detail. His right hand,
for example, often gestures downwards to Mother Earth, while the left curves
upwards in contemplation.  Stylistically, they vary immensely, with
influences, at different periods, from neighboring Chinese, Mongolian and
Indian art.  Famed for its inaccessibility, Tibet has in fact been on some
of the great Asian trade routes.

Some of the statues are exceedingly ornate, set with precious stones; others
have a squat simplicity and smooth finish.  The earliest tend to be the most
raw and immediate in execution and feeling. The beatific stillness of these
Buddhas (and other enlightened beings, including rulers and teachers) is
evoked not only through enigmatic, smiling features, but also through
perfectly harmonious bodies.

Some of the most extraordinary images include an 18th century sculpture of
the thousand armed goddess, Tara; and a silk embroidery of the terrifying
buffalo-headed Tama, Lord of Death, trampling on a bull, which in turn is
seen raping a dying human being.  Buddhism acknowledges the darker aspects
of the psyche, which it believes can be harnessed in the fierce battle for
enlightenment.

The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, now in exile in India once
summed up the sacred power of art: "It's best to use a small Buddha image as
the focus of concentration; it plants a good seed for your own future
Buddhahood.  But make sure you have a well-made Buddha image; if you
meditate a lot on a crooked Buddha image, there's a danger you will one day
become a crooked Buddha!"  At which point he burst into gales of laughter, a
typically Buddhist way of recognizing the truth.

[The picture of an exquisitely finely detailed Buddha statue has the caption
(typical Economist dry wit) "Lent by the Hermitage"]

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