I will shortly be teaching a course on the history of English-speaking countries. I often incorporate songs into my teaching and was thinking of one from Phil Ochs
“You're supporting Chiang Kai Shek, while I'm supporting Mao,
and when I've got something to say, sir, I'm going to say it now.”
But after seeing that movie I think I may choose a different song. And it makes me realize in some ways that there are other parts of the song which seem off-key. He is singing to college administrators about their alleged thought crimes:
“You'd like to be my father, you'd like to be my dad
and give me kisses when I'm good and spank me when I'm bad.”
But in actual fact, the hostility of the singer is obvious, while that of the authority figures being lampooned might well be a projection. It's actually possible to want to act like a father without wanting to infantilize the person you care about. Och's song represents both the best and the worst of the American 60s—on the one hand the resolve to stand by new values, and to search for them outside Western civilization—on the other hand a sneering at the paternal instinct. It is an archetypal representation of the idealism and the readiness to assume the worst about those with other ideals. This hostility towards male authority figures was an artifact of the time, and similar to that of the red guards here in China, who attacked many administrators and authority figures in the middle of the hierarchy, while professing their ultimate loyalty to Chairman Mao. Anyone in a position of responsibility learns that some orders will be obeyed and others will not be, that giving in to the demands of some people means ignoring others.
I especially like Phil Och's song, There but for Fortune, in which the folksinger takes a sentiment often expressed in Victorian England, “There but for the grace of God” and makes it accessible to people who don't believe in a personal deity. But compassionate emotions sometimes extend the circle to one group while closing to another. When I was in Guatemala in 2004 I learned to play that song. I also learned another song, one which cast aspersions on American Serviceman. I was once at a party in a house of people from Europe and Canada, the mood was jovial, I was thinking of showing off my skills, and to distance myself from the military. But when I picked up the guitar, the voice inside my head said “Don't sing that song.” I think it is both possible and necessary to separate the perspective and emotional tone manifest in different songs by the same author. Ochs' broad brush allegations about the members of the working class who served in Vietnam were picked up by white college boys. And a few years later, many of the same insinuations ended up being picked up by white college girls to be thrown at subsequent generations of college boys. Although I like Phil Ochs, it occurs to me that there are reasons to tone down the smug allegations the folksinger vows to express.
There's also the particular nature of the allegations. The dominance of mercantile interests in the Yankee economic system often required them to intervene militarily in the affairs of their more agrarian southern neighbors. The Old South's Episcopal aristocracy was driven down by men like William Tecumseh Sherman. From the land which suffered under his scorched earth policies a new group eventually arose to enforce order—and one of the chief trespasses with which they were concerned was the one Ochs chose to speak of. They paraded the flag of rebellion at nighttime rallies where they knew there was no danger of being shot--because they had ensured that the men they targeted could not use their weapons. Like the folks in white sheets, the folksinger is not talking about an action by a particular man, but painting it as a collective crime—and trying to shame an entire group of men regardless of their individual actions. For the Klan of course, it was coloreds and Catholics kept in their place by speech and theatrics about things disturbing to white womanhood.
Another scene in the Chinese movie involves a long-haired student, speaking to a rally. His arm gesticulates wildly and he shouts about the need for democracy. Later we see him in darkness. There is gunfire, and his glasses fall to the ground with the right eyepiece shattered. The conventions of contemporary story-telling place certain events off-camera. And this works to minimize the types of questions which make it difficult to repair the social fabric.
For some one who grew up in my generation, democracy and human rights were supposed to be universal values whose value should be obvious to all enlightened individuals. We watched the desire for them topple oppressive power structures in places like Berlin and Johannesburg. But looking back now, I realize that the collective nature of the oppression was a big part of why western students rallied to these concepts. Not necessarily because there was an exact identity between their ideologies and colored peoples' struggles for freedom. In our history, Mandela assumed power because of democracy and the support of an international human rights community, but it is quite likely he would have exercised a different form of power, much earlier if not for his people being sugjugated. In South Africa, human rights served as a way of restoring men of color to the authority they would have had if the great white race had never interfered. As with Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, a form of Protestantism which had become almost Levitical in its hostility toward joy and art, played a large role in creating ideological justification for maintaining the strict separation. Of course the flip side is that the collective nature of the struggle and the orderliness imposed by the Dutch gave symbolic acts much greater resonance. Mandela saw violence as a last resort but while at Robben Island, he justified the use of sabotage against the government which imprisoned him. When released he was able to use symbols to unify the nation. Once he was at liberty, he did not turn the Law to turn collective punishment against those who oppressed him—he sought to find truth, to document how Apartheid had functioned. Talking about Mandela with an Irishman here in China, he mentioned his attitude to the Springboks, an all-white national Rugby team which had previously been the focus of black animus. As president, Mandela donned a cap to show his support, and the team went on to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It sent a powerful message—and all it took was a hat.
To return to the Chinese movie, there is another symbolic resonance to the scene of the long-haired student and the glasses—to something which happened forty-some years later. It was also an issue of human rights and democracy—but it was not a European-descended minority holding back a much larger native population with different language and traditions. All the players involved were of the same race—and one with traditions far more ancient than those of any government run by white folks. And as the scene reminds us, many people in the Chinese leadership at that time might have been idealistic students themselves, or watched friends who were idealistic students fall in the struggle to build a China free of Western Imperialism. Those who died at 天安门 in 1989 had made friends with one group of soldiers, so the authorities sent in new soldiers, with no personal relationships to those who labored to build the Goddess of Democracy. At 天安门 and elsewhere, young people in Asia risked a lot more than the four who died in Ohio. Gandhi once corrected people who talked about trying to improve the world without spilling innocent blood. “No,” he said, “but it must be innocent blood.”
Mao saw that War is better understood as a battle of will than an excuse for killing people—thus when Chinese officers left Chiang Kai Shek to support him he accepted. This is the same thing which has happened for most successful conquerors from Alexander the Great to Cortez. The descendants of those who followed General Lee fought for the City of Washington DC on subsequent occasions—although they sometimes avoided blue uniforms. Navajos on the warpath were killed by the US army, but in uniform they helped us defeat the Army of Japan. Alaskan natives, including the Yup'ik tribe, have the highest rate of service of any ethnic group in the fifty states. What happened at 天安门, like so many other things the sixties generation likes to talk about in emotionally fraught ways, involved the death of individuals—but it was done to destroy a movement, a focus of opposition to the government built the principles of Chairman Mao. Like the officers who originally sided with Chiang, some of the survivors of that day have decided they can serve the Middle Kingdom better by not denigrating the legacy of Mao.
Recently I read a book critical of Zhou En Lai not for his own actions, but for his awareness of what happened under Mao. Zhou En Lai and I share the same last name, and my father pointed out that the building in Southwestern China, on the back of the fifty yuan note was saved from destruction partially through his actions. Once people feel free to speak as if Chairman Mao were the embodiment of evil, no one can escape the charge of complicity, regardless of their personal conduct. But if Mao is maintained as an exemplary figure, that regard can extend both to his able lieutenants, and even those who fought bravely and resourcefully against him. The conflict can be seen, like that between Jacob and Esau in the book of Genesis, as between two members of the same family. Later on in Genesis, when Joseph is thrown into the well, he doesn't blame the patriarch Jacob—and once he gets out of the well and is elevated by a foreign government, he doesn't even hold it against the siblings who threw him there.
In the 19th century a prostrate Chinese government had to deal with a concept called extraterritoriality. Western governments claimed the right to intervene to protect their citizens regardless of how the Chinese legal system viewed their actions. The concept of universal human rights is in a sense an extension of extraterritoriality—now foreigners can cast themselves as the protectors not merely of their own citizens, but of people born and bred in China. And this is objectionable not merely because Western governments kill black boys on mopeds. Even when the criticism is leveled by non-governmental organizations which are professionals at criticizing action, it represents the attempt to universalize a frame of reference developed in secular Europe—one which at best can trace its roots back to the French Enlightenment, and is full of concepts which have not endured the test of a single human lifetime. China has its own traditions of discourse on just governance, dating back millenia to Confucius and others.
When the Jesuit Mateo Ricci arrived in China on September 10, 1583 he spoke of the cultural continuity between the Middle Kingdom and the Catholic Europe he left behind. But different people use different frameworks of analysis when they search for universal principles. The concepts which seemed universal to a Jesuit when the Son of Heaven was an individual human being were different than those which seemed universal to Jacobins in Paris after the guillotining of the King. And the Jesuit's ideas of what to do were different than those who attempted to impose the Code Napoleon, or those who would impose any other legal code--universally, without respect for national sovereignty and cultural differences. Working in human rights I noticed that it seemed to attract people with colonialist attitudes towards other peoples' consciousness—people full of ideas for how the government should be run, how other people should think--even the words we should stop using. And so human rights may have served as a good way for us to make sure we vented those colonialist impulses on each other, rather than interfering with people with the responsibility to actually accomplish things.
Except for the Cultural Revolution—China has long enshrined the importance of filial piety—in stories from a century ago, the pecking order from the emperor on down had become an overly oppressive hierarchy. Which may be why the excesses of the cultural revolution served as an inevitable counterbalance. Most Chinese relationships are described reciprocally—one party is the head, but there are obligations incumbent on both. And from Confucius to Lao Tze, most Chinese philosophers talk in terms of principles rather than Law--which is often stressed in the West. Like many ancient discourses, there is a narrative of justifiable actions rather than individual rights. And these principles have been recognized quietly over time. In his own day Confucius was merely an advisor to a minor governor—it took time for his wisdom to percolate to the center of consciousness.
And if you look back it is not clear what China would have gained had they made concessions to the students at 天安门, or allowed them to become a cause celeb among Westerners. Russia after the fall of communism is still not renowned for free speech or freedom for dissenters. The Chinese economy is arguably more healthy than those who listened to Western experts in the wake of the fall of the Soviets. And representative democracy as a way to determine the “will of the people” has demonstrated a tendency to deadlock—which is actually what it was designed to do. At the time of Bush versus Gore I read an article comparing how the legitimate head of state for England was determined by battles between soldiers in the 18th century, with how the legitimate head of state for the United States was determined by battles between lawyers at the dawn of the 21st. And a much smaller number of people were involved in that discussion than the number who chose Hu Jin Tao. In Germany or Mexico, or Minnesota, we have often seen that even where there is no manipulation when the votes are cast, the decisive element in the number of ballots is something which, for a population as large as a modern nation-state, is statistically just noise. It becomes impossible to ignore the dominance of Judicial branch over the other two. Moreover, procedural maneuvering within the two-party system often ensures that neither the populace nor the politicians can freely voice their true beliefs. A combination of ideological polarization and a very limited range of acceptable views mean that even a politician who might not be the lesser of two evils in a different system, may very well be forced to act like one. Moreover our political system encourages the development of blocs which are dedicated to the proposition that whatever the other party does is idiotic—and a minority who voice that discontent in as offensive a manner as possible. Whether a Republican or a Democrat is in power, contemporary American democracy involves large numbers of people talking as if the head of the nation should respond to their desires like a marionette. People here in China have less reason to mutter about the motives of the person responsible for exercising headship. Whether you are a member of a nation with Monarchy, Democracy, or One-party rule, there are certain tradeoffs you cannot avoid making. And a qualitative distinction between systems doesn't necessarily imply a qualitative distinction in other measures of good governance.
Twenty years ago, Chinese students looked to Western governments for solutions. But now they might look elsewhere. Many western ideas have been readily adopted throughout the world—especially products developed by engineers working with materials whose properties they can test to the breaking point. Guns, cars, and cellphones have a utility which people from most cultures other than the Amish recognize. Wires and wheels don't need to be translated, but for institutional cultural constructs language, and even dialects, can make a critical difference. Cars and computers function as advertised because they are designed by people who work with objects and parts machine-tooled to be interchangeable. Democracy and human rights are more complicated--and often function at the expense of local wisdom and traditions. The attempt to force their adoption by the rest of the world might be compared to asking everyone to use a computer program which still has some significant glitches. Democratic systems designed by the administration put into power by the supreme court may not be what the rest of the world needs.
Mao grew up as a peasant. And in contrast to orthodox Marxists trying to foment a revolution by organizing people who lived in cities, Mao was one of the twentieth century thinkers to see the strengths an agrarian nation could draw on. He understood the wisdom of peasants and designed a concept of guerrilla warfare to allow his followers to move among peasants like fish swimming in water. His concepts inspired the people of the nation of Vietnam, who in declaring their independence from France authored a document which borrowed a great deal from Mr Jefferson's declaration of independence. Like another set of former colonies, they had to fight for their independence against a great English-speaking Empire from across the ocean. Their victory over the corrupt leaders of Saigon ensured that the initials VC will always be a reminder of the limits of the power of the city of Washington DC—a city which a French architect designed to exclude J street, as a snub to Mr Jefferson. It is one thing to advocate regime change. But some one has to end up taking the place of a dictator. Even when you have toppled a real slaveholder, those whom the Yankees would put in his place will thus always be seen as tyrants.
When I was in Guatemala it always interested me that although I was in a Catholic country, the worst crimes were attributed to a Protestant. And not merely a Protestant in the sense that the successor of Thomas a Becket, or the Catholic Priest who sought to reform the church with the concept Sola Scriptura are considered Protestants. He is part of a church which has only been baptizing for a little over thirty years. A great deal of money has been spent to try to use the judicial system of his nation to bring him to court. The legal pressure has forced the military to release some archives, and my friends in Guatemala are grateful for the documentation of what happened to their families. There is the possibility that after decades he might be tried, which would be a symbolic victory. There were many dictators in Latin America, only Peru's Alberto Fujimori has gone to trial. An Asian without the history to build family connections gets punished for things boys with European blood got away with, and the human rights community calls it a victory against impunity. But there are many types of symbolic victories, and not all of them require a lot of money, or lawyers. The man who is the focus of grievance about the violence once came to the valley of Rabinal, wearing a sombrero like the ones peasants wear. Some one who had harvested corn and beans from the mountains above Rabinal, picked up a stone. And the Protestant was no longer wearing the Sombrero.
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