People sometimes ask me how I first became interested in China and Chinese politics. Today, C.W Hayford has a post over at Frog in a Well that provides a significant part of the answer: I read a book when I was an undergraduate at Purchase College, a book that caught me at a vulnerable intellectual moment and that turned my attention to revolutionary China: Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China.
A little background. My political socialization began forty years ago, in the summer of 1968. Before then I have memories of preferring Johnson over Goldwater in the 1964 presidential elections, at least to the extent to which a seven year old can have political preferences, and clear recollections of JFK's assassination in 1963. But in 1968, I sat, transfixed to the television, an eleven year old boy watching the streets of Chicago fill with protesters, denouncing the war in Vietnam, challenging abusive police power, chanting "the whole world is watching," and calling for revolution. My parents, Eisenhower Republicans who had been drawn to vote Democratic by JFK, were aghast at the violence. They did not encourage me in my fascination with the protesters; indeed, they were likely unaware of my emerging political consciousness due to my general reticence in their presence. But the idea of revolution had been planted, the possibility and, perhaps, necessity for radical change.
As I grew, and the sixties morphed into the seventies, I fed my political interest. My father, out of sheer curiosity and not any sort of commitment, brought home a copy of Jerry Rubin's, Do It: Scenarios of Revolution. I read it, or parts of it, hardly understood it, but assumed the man was serious. A copy of Mao's little red book of quotations appeared, again the result of my father trying to comprehend a political movement he naturally resisted. I took it to school one day, when I was in high school, about ninth grade or so, on the day we had an assembly to hear Lois Wheeler Snow give a talk. She was Edgar's second wife. She had recently been in China - it's about 1971 - and she had nothing but praise for the place. The revolution and establishment of the PRC in 1949 had truly transformed the country. The peasants had come to power, the people had overcome the imperialists and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, progress had been made socially and economically (no mention of the holocaust of the Great Leap Forward). And the Cultural Revolution was a radical and exciting experiment in collective and cooperative politics. I asked her to autograph my little red book and she did: "To Sam Crane - good choice - good book - Best wishes, Lois Snow."
I still didn't have a good idea of what was going on in China, but it seemed cool.
In the meantime, the practice of revolution in the US was running aground. Jerry Rubin was drifting off into personal self-help and, ultimately, business. By the terms of his radical youth, he was a "sell out." Abby Hoffman, whose book, Steal this Book, I had very much enjoyed as a typically transgressive teenage boy, was on the lam. The idealism of 1968 was disintegrating into the self-absorption of the 1970s. I was politically disillusioned.
I went to college, at Purchase, in 1975, hoping to be an actor and understanding myself as a person of the left. I had much to learn. I began to encounter Marx and Marcuse. Indeed, in my very first class, one of the very first books we read was One Dimensional Man. I understood almost none of it. Marx made more sense to me. In my sophomore year, I took a class that did a very close reading of Capital, vol I and The German Ideology, which gave me a new sense of what revolution might entail. And, then, in the summer between my sophomore and junior year, while living and working on campus as a dorm cleaner and painter (my brush with the proletariat), I read Red Star Over China.
It impressed me immediately. I thought: "Now, there is a revolution. None of this play before the cameras and then go into business inauthenticity of American radicals. This is the real thing." I drifted away from acting, which was not panning out for me anyway, and toward politics. I wanted to learn everything I could about China. But Purchase, as an institution, was small; and its performing arts focus meant that its resources on China were rather spare. But there was a class, taught by a sociologist, Ruth Sidel. She was still working on her Ph.D at the time, more of a specialist in women's issues than in China, but she took us through some basic literature (I remember Franz Schurman's classic, Ideology and Organization in Communist China). There was little critical perspective on the PRC (this was, after all, before the full revelations of the horrors of the Great Leap) but it provided some basic historical and political orientation. I took another "short term" class on the Cultural Revolution, with a young professor newly hired from Princeton (I forget his name!) that did begin to develop a critique of the PRC's authoritarianism, but not much. And I did research of Sino-US relations in my senior year.
The more I learned about China, the more I wanted to learn. It was a new world opened up before me. When graduation was upon me, I decided that I did not, could not, take a job in the work force (I had internalized Marx's critique of alienated, or estranged, labor from the 1844 Manuscripts). So, I found a way to continue learning about China: graduate school in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was then that I started learning Chinese language, and that pretty much nailed if for me. With abilities to read and speak and listen, I was drawn deeper and deeper into China studies.
And Edgar Snow was the starting point, of a sorts, of it all.
I have, of course, come to see Snow's book for what it is: a highly romanticized and politicized image of the Chinese Communists as country-saving heroes. The darker side of the revolution, or what it was to become, are ignored. Snow's work is still important - he was the first US journalist to get such a close look at the Chinese communist movement - but something as large and complex as "revolution" has its failings, which Snow avoids, as well as its victories.
Indeed, my view of Chinese politics has been fundamentally shaped by my graduate school teacher and adviser, Ed Friedman. He, too, understood himself as a man of the left. He defended the legitimacy of the Chinese revolution against its conservative critics. But he also honestly engaged the totality of the evidence of the nightmare of the Great Leap Forward when it came out, just as I was entering graduate studies. That evidence changed his perspective; he came to openly criticize the communist regime. He was attacked by erstwhile left-wing comrades. But he followed along where the truth lead him; and I learned much about humanity and honesty from him.
And how about Chinese philosophy, my current pursuit? Well, in fact, it is not quite so current. Way back in college, at Purchase, the one other class about China I took was a philosophy class. We focused on Taoism and the I Ching. I learned to consult the oracle and became the fortune teller for my hallway. Throughout my immersion into social science, the Tao Te Ching circled in the back of my mind. And when my expectations of a managed and manageable life crumbled with the birth of my son, Aidan, it was to Taoism that I turned for solace.
Oddly enough, it was Edgar Snow who had led me to Chinese philosophy. It was the interest sparked by his book that inspired me to take every class on China I could. An apology for communist revolution ultimately brought me to contemplate Way. Just another reminder that:
Way is vast, a flood
so utterly vast it's flowing everywhere...
(34)
Thank you for sharing your life story with us. It remind me the first time I read " Red Star Over China." ... I will write about it later, have to earn my daily bread in the work force first, no matter what is my personal belief.
Isha
Posted by: isha | July 18, 2008 at 12:26 PM