On China

Blood Red Sunset:
A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
By Ma Bo. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Penguin, 1995. 371 pp., $12.95.

In 1968, at the age of 18, Ma Bo heeded the call to go "up to the mountain and down to the countryside" to spread the word of the Lord-in this case, Mao. At the age of 26, he returned to Beijing, a broken man, stripped of his beliefs and disillusioned with the state. "China," he writes, "you cowered beneath the skirts of a witch." It is unclear, in this brutal and moving memoir of the Cultural Revolution and its destruction of belief, who should be blamed for Ma Bo's loss of innocence and ruined youth.

China's Cultural Revolution has come to be seen as a catastrophic attempt to indoctrinate a people through corrupt and destructive means. But Blood Red Sunset is a testimony to the other victims-the believers, the Red Guard, the young men and women who journeyed throughout China (in Ma Bo's case, Inner Mongolia) to deliver the farmers and herdsmen into the firm grasp of Maoist dogma. Ma Bo was not only part of this group of self-proclaimed radical revolutionaries, he was also the embodiment of violence, known for his indiscriminate abuse of the locals and his foul and arrogant mouth.

After two short years on the steppes, Ma Bo is betrayed by his closest friends and realizes that the party takes precedence over personal loyalty. He is falsely accused of counterrevolutionary behavior and sentenced to spend the next six years undergoing "labor reform." He spends so much time in isolation and filth that he loses not only his ability to speak but also his ability to care for himself. His only consolation throughout this nauseatingly brutal treatment is his belief in the party, his love for a young woman who continually shuns him, and his faith that one day, if all is recorded, history will vindicate him.

Ma Bo undergoes no drastic transformation of belief; indeed, he spends most of his time as a prisoner trying to prove his loyalty to those who imprisoned him. But the absence of the expected shift from evil toward good is the genius of this story. Ma Bo's unwillingness to lay blame for the destruction of a nation's youth allows us to draw our own conclusions. The witch is Mao, the skirts the ideology of class struggle. Or is the witch human weakness, our tendency to do harm to one another, and the skirts merely the devil's cowardice-the human vehicle used to carry out his evil?
Claudia Burke

Scarlet Memorial:
Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China
By Zheng Yi. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 199 pp., $32.
I said to myself, indeed, I have stepped into a dark forest full of evil, and I have uncovered a scarlet memorial covered with human blood.
That China's Cultural Revolution was one of the most terrifying periods in world history is not often disputed. But given the Chinese government's strict control over what is said and written about the country, inquiries into exactly how brutal the Cultural Revolution was are likely to be intentionally circumscribed. The "dark forest full of evil" that Zheng Yi steps into in Scarlet Memorial is inhabited by his recent discoveries of the cruelties that characterized the era, particularly those involving the cannibalism practiced by Red Guards and local villagers.

The focus of Zheng's investigation is the Guangxi Autonomous Region in southern China. Vague stories that a massive slaughter occurred there during 1968 persuaded Zheng to visit the area himself in 1986. Digging through archives and speaking with party officials and other locals, some candid and some aloof, he gradually uncovers the gruesome details of the frenzied killings that went on in Guangxi. Anyone believed not to support the "ultraleftist" line of China's Communist Party was brought before the village and publicly "criticized." He or she was then executed and summarily torn apart for consumption. The victim's liver was an especially popular trophy; local lore claimed the human liver gave its consumer courage.

It is an astonishing, almost unbelievable subject, and Zheng's reaction to what he learns is as incredulous and skeptical as that of the reader's. The book reads almost like a travelogue, with Zheng giving detailed descriptions of the people he meets, his interviews, and certainly his shock as he collects evidence indicating that the stories he has heard are true and, moreover, that most of the officials remain unpunished for their actions. The reader is on a journey with Zheng, and the personal nature of the book, the fact that it was written by someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution, provides unprecedented insights into Chinese nationalism under the reign of Mao Zedong.

Ross Terrill writes in the foreword to Scarlet Memorial that Westerners often tend to put China into a "separate exotic category" in terms of politics and culture. Zheng's horrifying disclosures remind us that the ruthlessness and violence toward humankind that the West associates with Auschwitz cannot be separated into categories, but must be dealt with as tragic, universal forces throughout our world.
Emily S. Shartin

Taiwan: Nation-state or Province? 2d ed.
By John F. Copper. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 220 pp., $63, cloth; $19.95, paper.
Whether labeled a nation-state or province, economic superpower or outlaw administration, Taiwan's identity has been historically ambiguous. Dutch, Japanese, and several Chinese regimes ruled the island at various times, but never integrated it, and never entirely rooted out the desire for self-determination. Despite the complexities of its past and the uncertainty of its future, John F. Copper says Taiwan has come into its own, having undergone an against-all-odds "economic miracle" and established democracy. Otherwise, he comes to few conclusions in Taiwan, instead appreciating the island for what it is rather than speculating on what it will become.

Copper divides his book into seven sections: "The Land and the People," "History," "Society and Culture," "Political System," "The Economy," "Foreign and Military Policies," and "The Future." He chronologically traces Taiwan's transformation, usually from the 1600s to the near-present, and frequently draws comparisons between mainland China and Taiwan in order to provide the reader with both sides of the nation-state/province issue.

Those who would like a taste of Taiwanese life will be disappointed by the often dry, reference-book account of the island's people. The chapters that characterize Taiwan's place on the world stage are much stronger, although at times redundant (without much elaboration, Taiwan describes certain events, such as President Jimmy Carter's withdrawal of United States recognition in 1979, several times).

Copper tries to create an unbiased assessment of Taiwan, supplying multiple interpretations more often than strong opinion. Thus, while thoroughly examining the grounds for separation, unification, and the current state of affairs that exists with China, he avoids taking sides and instead concludes that Taiwan is a sovereign state, even though what will be best for it remains undetermined. Perhaps Taiwan would be more engaging if it were less "objective" and appreciative.
Ben Feldman

Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China
By Frank Dikštter. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 233 pp., n.p.
Beginning with the New Culture Movement of 1915 to 1924, a group of Chinese intellectuals started publishing a series of tracts on modern medical science. This "science"-actually a mix of fact and superstition-replaced an already weakened Confucian ethic with one based on dispassionate, scientific examination. The result, says Frank Dikštter, a research fellow at the University of London, was the rise of a sexual culture that stressed procreation, marriage, and strictly defined gender roles.

According to Dikštter, intellectuals used the lure of modernity and the illusion of biological determinism to persuade their fellow Chinese to "advance the race." "Advancement" in this case meant the subservience of women, the absence of sexual activity unrelated to procreation, and the creation of class distinctions based on arbitrarily selected biological attributes, such as penis size and rate of menstrual flow. Since population control was considered vital to national wealth and power, theories of eugenics abounded. By the time Japan invaded in 1934, these "rationalist" intellectuals wielded great cultural influence.

Dikštter uses this narrow study of sexuality to prove a larger point: that the medical knowledge that arose in Republican China originated entirely in the East. Moreover, similar forms of bastardized medical science-such as beliefs in "hereditary syphilis" and "masturbatory insanity"-arose simultaneously in the West. This independent development of knowledge, Dikštter says, should humble those Orientalists who view Chinese history merely as a series of responses to Western intrusion. "The tendency to look for particularities, to ignore commonalities, to idealize otherness is widespread," he warns, "and its consequences for historical research are devastating."

A critique of academic orthodoxy like this is rare. The jargon that clouds Dikštter's writing, however, is more common. When a simple concept such as historical evolution is twisted into "the emergence of a plurality of intertwined modernities," scholarship loses any claim to relevance. When academia functions as a secret society, the consequences for historical research are devastating.
Michael Brus

The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism
By Maurice Meisner. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. 560 pp., $30.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, recently received a Visa card. It is true that it is only a debit card (he has to keep a balance of his own money in his Visa account), but it is a Visa card nonetheless, one of the icons of American capitalism. How a country that once attempted to eradicate all manifestations of capitalism has come to this point is one of the recurring themes in Maurice Meisner's new work.

Meisner explores how Deng fashioned a "bureaucratic capitalism" out of the "socialist democratic" beliefs from which he began. Along the way, Meisner examines the political and economic environment that was Mao's legacy, and Deng's interpretation of the chairman's (and Marx's) writings in shaping this environment to create today's China. Lenin's views, however, have not been reinterpreted, and Meisner's account shows how Deng has used them to make party discipline and control paramount; the Tiananmen crackdown is as much a part of Deng's China as the booming coastal regions that figure so prominently in the Western business press.

The gap between the socialist promise and China's bureaucratic capitalist reality is another recurring theme in this book. Meisner, like the dissident journalist Liu Binyan, laments the spiritual malaise afflicting the Chinese because of this gap. He concludes that it can be eradicated only through a "democratic struggle against the social consequences of capitalism," a struggle whose blueprint is not spelled out.
W. W. F.

Shaping China's Future in World Affairs:
The Role of the United States
By Robert G. Sutter. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 194 pp., $39.85.
Sutter provides a detailed examination of recent Sino-American relations. His clear-eyed, objective account briskly yet cogently summarizes the important political and economic issues that have strained relations between the two countries.
O. E. S.

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