Butterfield's recent book, China—Alive in the Bitter Sea, resulted from his 20-month experience on the mainland, and focuses on the results of the Communists' assumption of power since 1949.
The book bears a preface by his former Harvard teacher, Professor John Fairbank: "(A) milestone in American understanding of China... (by) probably the most competent and effective journalist ever to go to China....Just as Edgar Snow's Red Star over China in 1938 reported the promise of Mao's revolution, so Fox Butterfield forty-four years later now reports the ills that have overtaken it. It is a compelling story, a necessary baseline for the next phase of Chinese-American relations."
He is also the author of The Pentagon Papers and American Missionaries in China.
This is Butterfield's fourth visit here. He came here in 1961 on a Fulbright Fellowship to study Chinese and returned in 1967 to do research for his doctoral dissertation. His third time was as a stringer for the Times.
Butterfield, now 43, heads the Times' office in Boston. The object of intense journalistic interest here, and tired after a hectic schedule, the six-foot-tall reporter talked about the current mainland system, sometimes in Chinese.
Q: Recently, Communist China opened up a little to more contact with the rest of the world, and there are students and others going abroad. Do you expect this will result in any change within the society?
A: There is no question that since Teng Hsiao-ping came to power in 1978, the society has opened up somewhat in comparison with what it was like before Mao's death.
It is very good to open up and let the air in. At the same time, there are ten thousand (mainland) Chinese people who have gone to the United States to study. And other middle age, older people, besides these ten thousand, are on delegations going all the time. And they bring back, we don't know exactly what in their heads. They are bringing back technological knowledge, but they are also bringing back some views of how the outside world lives. And in an English expression, it is a two-edged sword. On one hand, the (Communist) Chinese need technological knowledge, on the other hand, people bringing back democratic ideas may be dangerous to the Communist system. So, the leadership in (mainland) China is somewhat ambivalent about all this.
Q: How about the four areas of modernization—agriculture, industry, etc.—Do you expect much effect there?
A: Oh, those are only slogans. The four modernizations don't mean anything much.
Q: Is there any factor outside the mainland which can better its living situation—like the "retrieval" of Hongkong?
A: Hongkong is so small. The influence on Communist China would not be very great...some influence on Kwangtung Province, maybe. But the influence on Hongkong would be enormous.
Q: What do you think about Hongkong's future?
A: I, myself, am somewhat pessimistic about Hongkong's future. The Communists don't fully realize how fragile the situation is in Hongkong, how easy the confidence on which Hongkong has been built can be destroyed. And it seems to me that, clearly, the Communists want a fully-Chinese (Communist) administration, without the British in Hongkong. With that, many people, both foreigners and Chinese, will lose confidence, and the Hongkong stock market, particularly, will go down. I think, eventually, something of a compromise will have to be reached. But, Hongkong would never be what it is now.
Q: You said that Chinese Communist society was marked by a widespread cynicism and disillusionment. Does this occur within the Communist Party?
A: I think the Chinese Communist leaders themselves were also undergoing the same kind of crises of the spirit because of the loss of confidence in their own ideology. A problem with the death of Mao is that they don't have an adequate replacement—a replacement for Mao's thoughts. Teng Hsiao-ping himself has some awkward and simple slogans, like "seek truth from facts," which is not very...practical. I think the Communists have looked around; they looked at Japan, they looked here, the United States, and West Europe. They are searching in some way to try to find an ideology that they have not found yet.
Q: You called Communist China a police society, which is not like any other society in Chinese history. In the long run, what does such organization mean?
A: I'm an American. I grew up in an open society. I don't like that kind of control. That much control is unnecessary. It stops people from using their energy and initiative. I think the biggest problem in (mainland) China today is that control is so great, so rigid, that people are not able to take the initiative. The Communists' problem is how to encourage the people to use the energy they have.
Q: The Communists claim to be classless, but it turns out that their society is full of class distinction—Why?
A: China traditionally has had class distinctions. I think there is a traditional Chinese tendency toward classes, going back to Confucius—Those people worked with their minds and those people worked with their hands, and the people who work with the mind will be on the top, etc.
Mao tried to get rid of them. The truth is that the Communists did not succeed. They created a new class in which the Communists are the elite themselves, and Mao himself was a perfect example of it. He was a rich, powerful ruling class member. He lived a really different life from the masses. He lived in a beautiful house with a swimming pool. He had lots of servants, big cars, places for special vacations. I've visited several places where Mao stayed. They are luxurious compared to what everyone else could have. There is a certain amount of indication that he is a little hyprocitical about it all. Everybody should be classless, except him. Mao himself was part of the problem. The Communist leaders live in the Chung-nan-hai area that he shut off from the outside world. They began to lose touch with the masses.
The whole idea of a Communist Party is, of course, elite by definition. The Communist Party is what they call the "vanguard of the proletariat." If you are going to have a Communist Party, you are going to have an elite. That is a contradiction that Mao could never overcome.
Q: Your book, China—Alive in the Bitter Sea, provides insights into mainland China that many other journalists didn't report. How about Westerners—how do people without first-hand experience weigh your perceptions against other views?
A: I don't claim to have the whole truth. But it's not just me; there are a lot of books that have come out with similar views to mine. I'm afraid that what I said has become the conventional wisdom. A few years before my book was published, views were different. My book came out, and others like The Center of the Earth and The Son of Revolution, just like what I said, gave a realistic view of (Communist) China. I think audiences will use their own eyes and ears.
I think, yes, there is a tendency in the United States, that is very American, to have a love affair with the Chinese. American people are very romantic about China. It goes back one hundred or two hundred years. The American people never liked Japan that much; they don't like India at all. But China, Americans have strong feelings about it. They want the best things for China; they want China to do well. Because the Communists happen to be in power in (mainland) China, they want the Communists to do well. There is, say, a romanticism, idealism about China. So some people, when they go to (Communist) China, they see just the best things. And the Chinese are extremely good hosts; they know how to entertain people, and that does have an effect. I just hope that foreigners, when they go to (mainland) China, really keep their eyes open and are not entirely influenced by superficial things. To see children in a kindergarten putting on a dance show doesn't prove anything about the society.
Q: Foreign correspondents' reports may shape foreign policy in one way or another. Your book on Communist China punctured some illusions. Do you see any possible change in American foreign policy?
A: American journalists are not necessarily shaping foreign policy. They certainly do shape American public views of what (mainland) China is like. And, I think there have been effects in the past few years from a series of books, not just mine. I think there is a new kind of trend of American views on China; mine is one of those books. This perhaps has some effect on American foreign policy, lowering our expectations about what the relationship with (mainland) China can be. In the late 70s, there was some kind of expectation that the U.S. (and Red) China could become some kind of close allies—a military alliance. There was a kind of romanticism.
It's true since President Nixon, President Ford, President Carter, President Reagan—that it is important for the United States to try to achieve better relations with Communist China. Basically, there is a strategic factor that America sees as very important in dealing with the Soviet Union—to have (mainland) China not necessarily as an ally...but some kind of unity toward the Soviet Union. I don't believe any (American) president would want to ignore Taiwan or downplay the importance and performance of the Republic of China. The question for American leaders is how to combine the objectives of keeping (mainland) China away from the Soviet Union, and of keeping traditional close relations with you here. It is not an easy thing to do, and Mr. Reagan has his difficulties. If mainland China were back in the 1950s and close to the Soviet Union, this would be extremely dangerous for the United States, and dangerous for you here also.
I'm speaking for myself, not for the Times—I feel strongly that the United States has good reasons to keep in continuous support of you as long and as best it can. I don't see why the U.S. has to accept the demands from the Communists on arms sales to Taiwan.
Q: Do most of the Chinese on the mainland benefit from the Communist system or not?
A: I believe that the Communists did not live up to the expectations that most people have had. In the 1950s, the Communists seemed to be doing quite well. In the late 50s, things began to go low. I'm not a Communist, and basically I think (one reason) is the system itself. I don't agree with it. Countries like the Soviet Union, Vietnam, in Eastern Europe, mainland China—it would be hard to say that these Communist countries have done as well as their neighbors. There must be reasons for that. The reasons might be the system.
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Experiences of 'The Bitter Sea'
The following excerpts from fox Butterfield's almost pictorial representation, in his speeches here, of the situation on mainland China, are a compromise with space requirements. Many of the happenings he mentioned in the speech, are to be found in full detail in his recent book:
— (My experiences) did not fit into the mental model of (mainland) China which I had built up over years of reading other foreigners' accounts of the People's Republic. Traveling on the invisible dotted line of a few dozen cities and communes that is the authorized itinerary for almost all foreigners in China, they had returned to proclaim that China was an extraordinary place. That under Chairman Mao it had abolished poverty and inequality, it had gotten rid of crime, inflation, and unemployment, all the ills of the modern world. Some well-meaning foreigners even reported that China was a country where if you left a used razor blade in your hotel room wastebasket in Peking, when you arrived in Shanghai the room boy in your new hotel would return it to you with a smile.
Few of us would be so naive in analyzing the Soviet Union. We had learned what Stalin was like. We had read Solzhenitsyn. But it seemed China exercised a magic spell over Americans. There was nothing new about this. In the 19th Century, American missionaries had dreamed about converting the "heathen Chinese" to Christianity in a single generation. For years, American businessmen have dreamed of that fabulous China market: "If we had all those hundreds of millions of Chinese customers, we'd get rich."
— Here I would like to clarify one point, what I have to say about Communist China is not meant as criticism of the Chinese people, but rather it is directed at the system. For the Chinese people, I have only respect, admiration, and sympathy. With this in mind, let me suggest a few of the pieces of the China puzzle that I have wrestled with.
The first of these is the degree to which China has become the classless utopia Mao tried to achieve.
I know many foreigners who have been to China have been impressed by the forest of baggy blue clothing which everyone seems to wear and the endless streams of bicycles. And it's easy to conclude that people in China really are equal.
But as my Chinese friends explained it to me, reality is very different. The 40 million members of the Chinese Communist Party are themselves divided into 24 separate grades, with another 18 distinct ranks for engineers, 16 for actors and musicians, 12 grades for college professors, 8 for factory workers, and even 4 for chefs. Each grade has its corresponding salary, ranking from a low of US$11 a month for apprentice factory workers to US$225 a month for generals.
But the differences in salary are not nearly as important as a person's place in the political spectrum. For many consumer goods and services which can be acquired with cash in the United States or Taiwan can only be gotten by political rank in China. Where the "masses," the ordinary people, may have to wait in line for an hour or two hours a day at the large central markets for the scanty supplies of meat, fruit, and vegetables, for senior Party members there are special food stores, without lines and with much better supplies. There are also Party bookstores which carry literature considered unfit for the masses, like Eric Segal's novel Love Story. There are special hospitals with modern equipment and imported Western drugs; there are luxury vacation villas, and even such seemingly simple things as tickets on airplanes. Only officials can go by plane; the masses go by train.
— There was another myth that I had to unlearn—foreigners who visit China often come away saying that they were able to walk wherever they wanted, poking down old lanes, looking into people's houses, even striking up conversations with eager students on busy streets. China isn't a police state, after all, they conclude. But that isn't the way the Chinese control system operates. I discovered that it functions from the inside out, so thoroughly imbedded in the social fabric that it is like a form of radar that picks you up wherever you go.
During a visit to the smogbound industrial city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River, I looked up an American scholar, Michael Gasster, who was doing research there at the Central China Normal Institute. I drove from the hotel where I was staying to the school in a taxi, and I was not aware of being followed. But a few minutes after my arrival, the phone rang. I could hear a loud woman's voice ask, "Do you have a foreigner visiting you?" She did not identify herself, but when Gasster answered in the affirmative, she probed further. "Is he an American reporter? We need to know."
It was Mrs. Chou, said Gasster. He recognized her voice. She was the official in the college security section assigned to watch him. I had not been overtly tailed, but everyone in the school was required to report to the security section when a stranger appeared on campus, and obviously someone had caught a glimpse of me.
The incident was an example of the effectiveness of what the Chinese call the danwei, literally a "unit," the place where you work, whether it be school, factory, or office. Every Chinese belongs to a unit; it serves as a kind of second citizenship, and a Chinese is more likely to be asked what his or her unit is than what their name is. When I first arrived in China and tried to get a room at the Peking Hotel, the desk clerk eyed me for several minutes and then asked, Ni nar? literally, "Where are you?"—but meaning what is your unit. I said I had none, to which he replied brusquely, that was impossible, everyone in China has a unit. The hotel only gives rooms to units, not to individuals.
That set off a frantic search to find my unit—the "foreign ministry," which had issued me my visa, declined to take the responsibility. The U.S. Embassy refused to accept me, pointing to the great tradition of separation between the government and the press. The China Travel Service said they only provided rooms for tourists, and I was now a resident. The "diplomatic services bureau," which provides housing for resident foreigners, said they only give out apartments, and for the next year they would have none. Finally, in desperation, I got a letter from Ambassador Leonard Woodcock to the "foreign ministry," which agreed to adopt me as part of their unit.
But the unit is no joking matter. For in addition to providing people their jobs and their housing, I came to learn, it also gives families their ration coupons, for everything from rice and cooking oil to soap and bicycles; it arranges their medical care, school for their children, and after they retire, jobs for their offspring too, under China's unique system of inherited jobs.
To put it in more understandable terms, imagine if all of you in this room after finishing school had been assigned by the government to work in the same office. You also would all live in the same apartment building. You would shop at the same store, your children would go to the same school. In other words, wherever you went in your daily rounds, wherever you went throughout your life, someone who knows you would have you under surveillance.
Before a Chinese can get married, he must get permission from the Party secretary of his unit, which will run a security check on his prospective spouse. If a couple want to get divorced, the unit must first approve. Before you can make a trip that will take more than one day, you must get clearance from your unit. In a sealed envelope in the personnel section of each danwei is a confidential dossier that contains not only the usual elements of your biography—your education and work record—but also any political charges made against you by informers, and the party's evaluation of you. In keeping with the Communists' theory of blood guilt, the file lists your class background going back three generations, whether your father and grandfather were labeled landlords and capitalists, or peasants and workers.
In recent years, the unit along with its counterpart in each neighborhood, the street committee, has gained a further and extraordinary power—the right to decide which couples may have children. This prerogative is part of the government's tough new birth control campaign that aims to reduce China's rate of population increase to zero by the year 2,000 by encouraging families to limit themselves to one child. Under the drive, each province and city has been awarded quotas for the number of babies they can sire per year, and the unit then determines which families may use the quota. Local clinics often publicly post charts showing what method of birth control each family is using—with a red star for those people who have been sterilized. Many units have women whose duty is to keep track of the menstrual cycles of all the other women in their danwei. If a woman who is not scheduled to have a baby misses her period, she is encouraged to get an abortion.
— Another of the myths about China that I came to question was that China is a revolutionary society: Revolution suggests words like change, a redistribution of wealth and power, an opportunity for people at the bottom to get to the top. But China today offers less mobility than the United States, or Japan, or Taiwan.
As in the past, one of the main avenues to advancement in China is through education. But only three percent of China's young people can go to college because of the low level of government spending for education, compared to 40 percent in the United States. Even the Philippines, with 45 million people, has more university students than China.
— The Communist Party itself has in some ways become a very conservative organization, paradoxical as that may sound. Its leaders were revolutionaries in their youth, fighting against the Nationalists and the Japanese. But that was many years ago, in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
Most of these Communist leaders came from poor peasant backgrounds, men with little or no education, whose only training was in the army or in Mao's writings. Not surprisingly, once in power, they reverted to the old ways of their rural homes: they were respectful of authority, suspicious of change, interested largely in the comfort of their own families, and skeptical of the importance of technology and the intellect. Above all, they were profoundly xenophobic.
Let me give you an example. A quiet, intense 26 year-old lathe operator in a Peking truck factory whom I got to know told me how he had been going to night school six days a week for a year after work, to improve his physics, math, and chemistry. He had been forced out of junior high school by the Cultural Revolution, but now was determined to apply to China's new television university—which would give him a college degree and ensure him a better job.
The only problem was, he needed permission from the Party secretary of the factory, a man named Ke. Ke turned him down. "Study is useless," Ke explained, following Mao's often quoted dictum that the more you learn, the more stupid you become.
— Unfortunately, Ke is not an isolated case. Men like him, many former political commissars in the Red army, have been installed as Party secretaries in most of China's factories; offices, universities, hospitals, even scientific research institutes. The surgeon general of the army, whom I once met, had never been to medical school. Of the 40 million Party members, only 15 percent have gone beyond high school. Only one member of the politburo, the highest decision making body, is known to have gone to college.
College education of course is not the only qualification for leadership. But in a country determined to modernize its economy, technical competence is important. And the sheer weight of men like Ke in the bureaucracy is one of the greatest drags on Peking's plans.
— But the most profound impression left on me was of the widespread cynicism and disillusionment generated by the years of political campaigns, particularly the most tumultuous of them all, the Cultural Revolution, which in Chinese terms lasted from 1966 to Mao's death and the overthrow of the infamous "gang of four" in 1976. By the time I arrived in China the idealism and almost religious fervor which had marked the Communists' early years were gone.
— A 16 year-old high school student offered one of the most chilling comments I heard. The Cultural Revolution was actually a good thing, she said. For before it, people like her mother—a teacher—had believed in the Communists. But after her mother had been forced by her students to kneel on broken shards of glass, she had "seen through" the Communists.
An archaeologist tried to put China's experience in perspective. "It may be presumptuous to say it, but what China has been through is like the holocaust," he commented.
There were no gas ovens, of course, no genocidal plan to eliminate an entire race. But there are horrifying parallels. Many people, like (a) six-year-old girl banished from her home or (a) Harvard trained doctor, were persecuted because of their class background—not for what they did, but for what they were said to be. Moreover, the destruction in lives, in lost education, in ruined books and art, was so staggering it defies the Western imagination.
— There are some scholars and diplomats in the United States who worry that my book, and several others that have been published over the past two years, represent a disturbing new trend. They see us as revisionists, painting a more critical picture of China after years of rosy romanticism which accompanied ping-pong diplomacy. They fear that this criticism, I would say realism, will annoy Peking, and given the Communists' already sensitive feelings about continued American arms sales to Taiwan, will adversely affect Sino-American relations.
But good journalism, like good history and diplomacy, must start from a basis of honesty, not self-deception. We would not temper our writing about the Soviet Union out of deference for the feelings of the Russian government. Why should China be treated differently?