Frequently
in a foreign office, people didn't want you under them because your qualifications were better than theirs.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
I don't wish to but I have to, .
.
.
I am so full of fear I cannot consider refusing.
He went on to give a subjective analysis of the sources of the cadre's effectiveness; using machine images, he came to conclusions similar to those of others who have studied the Communist cadre.
A Communist cadre is an apparatus rather than an individual. His knowledge, ability, emotion, every part of his body, is dedicated to the
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utilization of this piece of apparatus. That is why he has no real emo- tion toward you, no real feeling. That is why he is so terrible. . . . In action, a Communist cadre is more effective than an ordinary man be- cause where an ordinary man would quit a job and say that he has done his best, a Communist cadre would go on and finish it. He is always responsible for what he has done because there is a deliberate system behind him such that he may be considered responsible for something he had done ten years before. He must check and check again, as when he finishes a job and hands in his work, there is no way of escape. He is not working for himself, but for the glory of the Party. 4
Hu was still troubled by guilty, fearful secrets which he had kept from the Communists:
I have a feeling of guilt--not to my own conscience--but because I had a secret with them as one who came from among them. . . . When I decided to leave the mainland, I did not tell them that I had been a student at North China University or that I had been in the People's Revolutionary Army. If I had told them this, they would not have let me go. . . . If they knew that I were here working against them and they caught me, they would show no mercy, . . . It is like being a member of an underground gang somewhere, deciding that this is not decent, and then leaving. The fear that the gang would catch up with you would still be in your heart.
He expressed a feeling of helplessness toward Communism, and made it clear that its control over him had been the most thorough and the most frightening he had ever known. When he compared it with previous authorities in his life, even his step-grandmother seemed less forbidding: "She could compel me to do things that I was not willing to do, but she could never make me say that they were good things. " And so did the KMT:
The KMT could bore me, make me disgusted, bitter and angry at them --but even when they arrested me and I thought that I was being shot, they could not frighten me. It was the Communists who really made me fearful. Now I have no way to protect myself against them. If I face a Communist cadre he can do anything he wants to me and I can do nothing to him.
He began to ask me many questions about human emotions, per- haps the most significant of which was, "How is it possible for a man to hate--to be irreconcilable in this hatred--but to actually submit to the person or group which he hates? " He was speaking of
? A CHINESE ODYSSEY 299
his general conflicts relating to hatred and submission, but his as- sociations also suggested that he was indirectly referring to a feeling of being still partly under the Communists' intellectual and emo- tional control, a control which he was always fighting off within himself. This interpretation was confirmed by a second question, asked in ostensible reference to someone else: "Why is it that some people who have suffered persecution and oppression at the hands of the Communists remain enthusiastic about them? "
As he became more introspective, Hu expressed a basic insight about the relationship of his character to the Communist move- ment, and about his own quest for selfhood:
I now realized why the Communists tried so hard to gain me over. - . . When I believe in something I can forget myself completely while throwing myself into the cause. It was for this reason that I could be so unusually persistent in maintaining my own opinion in opposition to that of the Communists. For this is also a standard characteristic of the Communist cadre, to be so determined because he had no self, and the Communists knew that I could be a very good cadre. . . . I was proud of these characteristics within myself before. But now I under- stand that if I could preserve some of my individual interest, some individuality, I would be less like the Communists. . . . My life would be more balanced and I would not go to such extremes as I used to.
Hu was beginning to recognize his own totalism, and understand its affinity for Communism and its usefulness in preserving his identity against Communist pressures. The recognition itself sug- gested that he was making a dent in this totalism, as did his iden- tification with Western Protestant individualism. He had (at least temporarily) traded heroic action for introspection, leadership for discipleship.
This may have been just another lull in Hu's lifelong emotional storm, but perhaps it was something more as well. I was not sur- prised when he told me during a follow-up visit to Hong Kong I made years later that he had become dissatisfied with Lutheranism and Lutherans (although he had been baptized), that he no longer felt comforted by religion, and that most of the missionaries were "not truly religious. " He also attributed their failure to support him more actively for an American visa to his disinclination to pursue a religious career. Whatever truth there was in this last assertion, his critical attitudes were part of his old pattern, reflections of a still-
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viable totalism forever seeking and never finding its ideal of sin- cerity. On the other hand, there had been no explosive break with the missionaries, and after an association of almost eight years Hu was still livingand workingamong them. As always, he was imposing severe discipline upon himself, but his cause had finally become one of self-interest: he rose at six in the morning to study English and mathematics to prepare himself for the possibility of further educa- tion in America. And he was no longer alone; he had met a girl he wanted to marry and bring to America with him.
I do not know what the outcome of Hu's personal struggles will be; I do know that in his own exaggerated way, he had lived through and described to me most of the major emotional dilemmas of his generation of Chinese intellectuals.
? 16
As much as Hu's story does reveal about the thought
reform of intellectuals and about their background environments, it cannot tell us everything. Others differed from him in their identity patterns and their responses to reform. Some of these differences--as we shall observe in the three case histories which follow--were a matter of personal variation, and others of group trends.
The age at which one undergoes reform has great significance; a revolutionary university reform experience at forty-five cannot be the same as one at twenty-five. The next life story, that of an older intellectual, has an emotional flavor quite distinct from Hu's.
Robert Chao had been a Nationalist official for almost twenty years when he was "invited" (in effect, ordered) to attend a revolutionary university set up soon after the takeover especially for affiliates of the old regime. When I met him in Hong Kong three years later (we had been introduced by a common acquaint- ance), he was working as a translator for a Western business con- cern, A stocky and ruddy-faced man who had studied for several years in America, he was unusually articulate and his English was fluent.
I soon gained the impression, however, that he had mixed feel- 301
CHAPTER THE OLDER GENERATION:
ROBERT CHAO
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ings about talking with me. He was overly courteous (too proper even for a Chinese), and he rarely looked at me directly. I sensed in his guarded manner a fear that should he permit himself to relax, his exaggerated self-control might give way and permit disturbing feelings to emerge. And this is what frequently happened during the course of our interviews: after cautious platitudes and detached statements of general principles, where he felt on safe ground, something would set off in him a brief, tense outburst in which the frustration and pain of his emotional life would be revealed. Our sessions did not become any easier for him as the work progressed, and for this reason we spent just nine hours together-- enough time only to discuss the main currents of his experiences.
Brought up in a rural area of Hunan Province during the early years of the twentieth century, Mr. Chao's first memory was of weird supernatural fear, from which he still does not feel free:
It was New Years Day. . . . I was about four years old. . . . I was brought out by a maternal uncle to the Temple of the City God. And in front of the Temple, under a wooden shed, there were two statues made of clay. There was an image of a man attending a horse. . . . Somehow I got scared--very scared--and very ill, because he looked at me as though smiling at me, . . . I was very sick after this for a few weeks. It was a serious illness and nothing would cure me--no medicine would help me until my relatives suggested that they get a Taoist priest to say incantations. And actually this had the effect of curing me. . . ? I was generally superstitious--and later read a lot of superstitious books. It was a different world from now. . . . These things can be scarey. I can still be scared by them. . . . Superstition influences me even now.
The only child in a family of small landowners, he was still in his infancy when his father died. He later heard tales of his father's adventurous career as a local civil servant during the Ch'ing dynasty, adventurous because of the presence of bandits and the frequent social and natural upheavals. He and his mother lived with different groups of relatives, but it was she--a little-educated, yet strong- minded and intelligent country woman--who took on the roles of both parents, and devoted her major life energies to the boy's future. Chao spoke of his mother and of her sacrifices for him in glowing terms:
She was a very affectionate woman. As a young widow, I was her only child and this made her treasure me. . . . The only son is very spoiled
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in China. . . . She was kindhearted and generous--very open-minded and modern for her age. She was progressive and believed in change. . . . She was very clever and knew the importance of education. . . . She made great personal sacrifices to get me a complete education . . . which was not ordinarily available to a person of my background.
Mother and son combined forces to overcome financial and social difficulties and obtain this education, which included a special tutor in Chinese classics, the best primary and secondary school training available in the region, and later a university degree and graduate study abroad.
As a youngster, Chao spent most of his time at home with his mother, had few friends, and focused his attention mainly on his studies. He was extremely competitive, frequently transferring from one school to another when his superior grades made this possible. His mother moved with him, first to a large provincial city for his secondary school training, and then to Peking for his university education; she sold the small amount of remaining family land to get money for them to live upon.
Together they planned out Chao's future, always calculating carefully how best to use their resources, how best to carry out the steps necessary to attain worldly success. During the early years she contributed what she could from her own knowledge, teaching him to read and write, and telling him the historical anecdotes, legends, and romances which were part of her heritage. When he began to attend boarding schools, and to move beyond her intel- lectual capability, she lived apart from him and saw him on week- ends. Their efforts were rewarded: Chao obtained a government scholarship which included his undergraduate university work in China as well as advanced studies in the United States financed by Boxer indemnity funds.
From the time of his arrival in America, Chao (now Robert) began for the first time to encounter difficulties, both external and internal. He was extremely uncomfortable about his social status, highly sensitive to slights of any kind and especially to possible sug- gestions of racial discrimination. During our talks, it was still dif- ficult for him to come to terms with his own feelings about these problems:
I think the Americans have a justification because I can see clearly the racial situation in America. . . . They have such a large Negro popu-
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lation, so many alien people from Eastern Europe. . . . And besides, I was very proud myself--I didn't want to mix with them either. . . . I didn't go with any coeds--and in a way it was disconcerting--but I never had the courage. Once I felt the Americans looked down on the Chinese, I was too proud to make approaches.
He found, as did many Chinese in the W est, that his friends were limited to other Chinese students, or to members of minority groups: "I had American friends, but I discovered that most of them were Jews. It was commiseration. " Only after we had discussed these matters at some length did he begin to express his hostilities, and even then he checked himself in the midst of his brief out- burst:
I think the Americans have a superiority complex. In a way they are narrow-minded, not interested in knowing foreign things and foreign people. . . . Of course as a human being I could not be free from resentment. . . . But then I was never insulted during my experience in America. I felt that the Americans showed indifference rather than discrimination. Those people who showed too much interest in the Chinese were too patronizing and not spontaneous.
He also experienced a certain amount of indecision about his course of study, switching from journalism to history, starting at one large midwestern university where he found that "life was too lonely/' and then changing to another. In the end, he used only four of the five years allotted by his scholarship for study in Amer- ica. He brought back to China a Chinese-American bride, as well as considerable admiration for American confidence and self-re- liance: "I noticed that Americans, in making their own efforts, are sure of their destiny. "
He described his experiences in his own country during the next twenty years as "a sad story--a story of frustrations. " Working for various government departments as administrator, publicist, and diplomat, occasionally engaging in brief periods of teaching--many of these jobs being held during the confusion of wartime--he was perpetually disappointed, and in his view, unappreciated.
Sometimes he blamed himself:
The trouble is I haven't stuck to any line. If I had stayed in the foreign service, I could have risen and become an ambassador. . . . I had friends high up, but I didn't follow one particular man or faction. I was often offered jobs which I thought were below me.
? THE OLDER GENERATION 305 Sometimes he blamed the ingratitude of friends and political
associates:
I knew everybody in Chinese government--from the generals down many were my close friends. But although I had helped them plenty, they have never given me help. . . .
Frequently in a foreign office, people didn't want you under them because your qualifications were better than theirs.
But he was always highly critical of the entire government struc- ture of which he was a part. "There was absolutely no security if you didn't accumulate money. , . . Everyone was out for himself. "
Therefore, at the time of the change in regimes, he felt neither sympathy for the victorious Communists nor loyalty to the defeated Nationalists:
I knew nothing about Chinese Communism, but from contacts with the Russians during the war, I did not like Russian Communism, as I thought there was no freedom. But on the other hand, I did not feel that I had an obligation to flee with the Nationalists. They were going nowhere, and we did not think that they could hold Taiwan.
When he was sent for his thought reform, he was "tense" about not knowing what to expect, but at the same time he anticipated from the experience an opportunity to "fit in better" with the Communists. From the beginning, he tried to remain emotionally detached, to adopt a practical wait-and-see attitude, and to judge the program on the basis of the material rewards it might offer him. His cautious and pliable approach--also that of many fellow "stu- dents" much like him--was a far cry from the youthful enthusiasms of Hu's group:
I entered into the situation without knowing exactly what it would be. I wanted to see results. . . . We felt that if it suited our interests, then it would be successful. If I were to get the kind of job that I wanted, it would be successful. If I did not get a desirable job, it would have the opposite kind of result. . . . At the beginning, we discussed the best way to go about it, which we decided was . . . not to be too progressive and not to be reactionary. . . . There was nothing idealistic, we had no emotional abandon. . , . But most of us wanted to get on the good side of the Communists. . . . Often the sessions were sterile because everybody followed the Party line.
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But when the reformers began to demand that the participants deepen their self-analyses, Chao found that it became increasingly difficult, even for such a wary group, to maintain its detachment:
We were always baffled because we did not know how to link theory with practice, . . . To link up personal experience with the question being discussed. . . , They were always asking us for examples. This was diffi- cult.
And as the participants revealed more of themselves, they found that detachment gave way to genuine involvement:
Everybody began to know a great deal about everybody else. . . . Every- thing was public--money, crime, past sins, and so on. We developed a kind of esprit de corps.
Nor could Chao and his fellow students avoid the usual group hostilities, especially when individual people overplayed their "pro- gressive" roles:
Although we wanted to increase our solidarity, in practice often the op- posite occurred. Men didn't like to be criticized, and they would regard those who criticized them as an enemy--as in bourgeois psychology. This caused bad feelings in the group. . . . Sometimes a man was not sincere and would try to put something over. , . . Being not really pro- gressive he would falsify his thought and pretend to be more progressive than the others. Everyone was acting to a certain extent, but there was no need in trying to be extra progressive. . . . Such a man would be ostracized by the group. . . . Even the Communists don't want this.
In dealing with the problem of guilt, the men continued their efforts to go through the proper motions:
It was taken for granted that every man from the old society was a bad man--guilty of all kinds of crimes--that anyone connected with the Nationalist regime was really unpatriotic. . . . In discussing this, every- body tried to put himself in a favorable light. Even when someone ad- mitted guilt, it was with the intention of showing everyone how much he had improved.
Again Chao and the others found themselves unable to icmain detached, for their past experiences made them especially suscepti- ble to a genuine sense of guilt--which offered an avenue of entry for thought reform influences:
? T H E OL DER G E N E R A T I O N J O y
I knew that in the past I had done things without purpose--whereas the Communists said everything should be done with the idea of serving the people. . . . The important question waswhether youconsidered what you did in the past really wrong. . . . I admitted that certain criticisms of me were valid--having a self-seeking approach and not considering the masses. . . . A nd when you put things down on paper, you believe them more than when you just say them. . . . Y ou really feel them to be shortcomings. . . . W e all fell for the phrase, "working for the peo- ple. " We couldn't answer it.
This acceptance extended to much of the Communist message: "You begin to believe a great deal of it . . . and all of us believed that the Communists were better than the Nationalists. "
But when Chao summed up the effects of thought reform for me, he presented two alternative, almost contradictory views. The first was a strongly negative statement, based upon a return to a de- tached and calculating judgment: the Communists had not come through with a good job offer and therefore the "reform" did not succeed:
After thought reform, they offered us low clerical jobs in the fanning areas. . . , The indoctrination failed because we did not like the jobs assigned. We became more reactionary. . . . Now I am more critical of them. They allow no personal freedom, and no freedom of silence. . . . They are liars and I do not believe them.
The second view was one of moderate praise, and a recognition of personal gain from thought reform.
Any Communist indoctrination, well taken, must leave some effects. It is not entirely bad. . . . A man who has been indoctrinated will always think differently as compared with those who have not been indoc- trinated--at least in certain respects. For instance, I might have been very haughty to my servants before, but now I would never treat servants as some of the Hong Kong people treat their servants. I think that this emphasis on labor and the respect they pay to labor is a very good idea. . . . Personally I had a great change. Before I had all of the ambitions that other people had. . . . I wasegocentric. . . . But now I really realize that the individualis. ratherinsignificant,
He tried to resolve his dilemma by transcending both views and withdrawing from all involvements:
People don't understand me. When they pick a quarrel with me, I don't respond--even if you persecute me. It is because of what I have been through. I am above human emotions.
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Yet the circumstances of Mr. Chao's departure from Communist China reveal he was susceptible to human emotions after all: he ran off with a Western woman who was leaving for Hong Kong. The affair dissolved after their arrival, and just at that time, travel between China and Hong Kong became much more difficult. He felt that if he returned to China, as he had more or less planned to do when he left (his wife, mother, and children were still there), he would not again have the chance to leave, and would also be re- garded with suspicion. His eventual decision to stay had little to do with ideological considerations:
I left only because of this woman. If I felt that I could move in and out freely I would have gone back. I wasn't too decided. . . . I could have been very useful to them [the Communists]--one of their propagandists in the foreign office or something.
In his contemplative moments, Chao took a somewhat Taoist or Buddhist view of his life, emphasizing its pointlessness and its nothingness. He expressed this view in one of his responses to the Thematic Apperception Test, when he was shown a blank card and asked to make up a story: x
On this piece of cardboard all I can see just now is empty whiteness. But if I look at it more intently I can imagine things which crowd into a life of many years. These things were the happenings in a man's career. When one came into this world he was just like a piece of white cardboard. There was no image, nothing engraved on it. Pretty soon when he got into contact with worldly things he carried out his own destiny and he could have painted many pictures of many kinds--some gay and some sad, some successful, some failures, some permanent, some ephemeral. And this seems to be what happened to me. In my life I have gone through all of the stages, but in a moment of self-complacency, it would seem to me that everything vanishes again into this original piece of cardboard, without picture, without color, and without emotions.
This passive resignation--real as it was for Chao--did not pre- vent him from calling into play the more active side of his char- acter. He showed extraordinary energy and effectiveness in finding work in Hong Kong, arranging for his wife and his children to leave Communist China, and then utilizing his Western contacts to set up employment for himself and residence for his family in England. There he will probably carry on ably, if without clear purpose.
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Chao's life story (even more than Hu's) indicates something of the vast emotional journey which many of his generation were re- quired to make from the "old China" of their youth to the Com- munist reform of their middle years. Taking into account the per- sonal, cultural, and political obstacles they faced, their accomplish- ments were often impressive; but each of these accomplishments was apt to be paid for with an increasing sense of anomie--with pro- found personal and social dislocation and unrelatedness.
Chao's oldest identities (oldest in the history of both his culture and his own life) were those of the fearful rural mystic and the "mother-directed" filial son. The first identity, which included both an awe of the supernatural and an imaginative richness, was his bond with generations of people from his local area. It formed a basic underlying identity upon which later more worldly ones were grafted, and it contributed to his inability to ever feel truly at home in the modern, urban world. Many Chinese intellectuals (including Hu) possessed similar elements of rural mysticism, however sup- pressed by the rational demands of both Confucian and Western teachings; but Chao reveals the strong staying power of this rural self, which made it both a refuge and an embarrassment.
Chao's relationship with his mother supplied him with some- thing of a conveyor identity, and allowed him to remain filial and at the same time move beyond the narrow world of filialism. It was not unusual in Chao's generation, especially if one's beginnings were rather humble, for a parent like this--rooted in tradition, but possessing the capacity to imagine a modern future--to help a child make this great emotional leap; nor is such a phenomenon confined to Chinese society. In Chao's case, more conflict was involved than he cared to reveal: he made clear his early dependency upon his mother, as well as his sense of gratitude and of personal debt; but from some of his test responses (descriptions of bitter disagreements between mothers and sons), I learned of his struggle to become inde- pendent of her control, and of the guilt and resentment which accompanied this struggle. This mother-son alliance of love and ambition was nonetheless the means by which a rural child of the old China reached the educational channels which transformed him into a sophisticated (if brittle) modern Chinese man.
Chao became immersed in his personal ideology of social ac- complishment and recognition and remained relatively detached
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from broad ideological movements. Although his developing iden- tity of the detached careerist was a natural outgrowth of his relation- ship with his mother, it was also an identity very frequently chosen by others during these chaotic years--a means of survival in a so- ciety whose moral cohesion was rapidly breaking down.
For Chao's generation, the path to accomplishment was Western learning, and the price of Western learning some degree of West- ernization. But by spending his early twenties in America, and by becoming a Westernized Chinese, Chao experienced the beginning of an almost interminable identity crisis. Before he went, he was able--with some difficulty--to handle the continuous adaptations and personal changes necessary for his advance within Chinese so- ciety; but the more jarring conflict of feeling both attracted to and repelled by the Western world was almost too much for him. Like many Asian students in the West, he felt himself simultaneously liberated and denigrated. In the midst of newfound possibilities for self-expression, he felt keenly his status as a non-Westerner, an Oriental. Along with the threat to his masculinity--Asian men are apt to look upon American women with trepidation, and Amer- ican women are likely to treat Asian men in a kindly, sisterly fashion--American society posed a more important threat to his general sense of autonomy: how much of his self would be con- sumed by this tantalizing new Western influence? Historical events both American and Chinese led Chao to value all that was West- ern; and men like Chao wavered between taking too great a plunge into Westernization and recoiling defensively into Chineseness. Facing all of these problems while for the first time navigating without his mother's help, Chao never fully recovered from the intense sense of identity diffusion initiated within him by his Amer- ican experience.
He returned to China much better educated in useful Western ways, but less sure of what he was and where he was going. His sensitivity to, and expectation of, rebuff made him, over the years, a resentful bureaucrat, another identity in which personal conflicts blended with the social realities of a frequently unscrupulous en- vironment. This identity also was common among those Chinese intellectuals who threw in their lot with the Nationalist regime
(the academic field was the only major alternative, and this had its own severe strains). What characterized the resentful bureaucrat
? THE OLDER GENERATION 3 1 !
was a lack of involvement in an ideal beyond himself, a nagging suspiciousness of others, and the kind of deep-seated self-hatred which is the inevitable outcome of losing a battle with one's sense of integrity.
Chao and many of his associates, naturally enough, attempted to carry over their detached attitude to thought reform; older par- ticipants in any case tended to be rather cautious. Yet this exag- gerated detachment was a liability as well as a strength. It did en- able Chao to keep a cool eye out for his self-interest; but it also rendered him susceptible to strong feelings of guilt and shame in response to Communist-style self-analysis. He was most disturbed by the exposure of his detached careerism, most impressed by the Communist program to devote oneself "wholeheartedly" to serving "the people/' As was also true for Dr.
He went on to give a subjective analysis of the sources of the cadre's effectiveness; using machine images, he came to conclusions similar to those of others who have studied the Communist cadre.
A Communist cadre is an apparatus rather than an individual. His knowledge, ability, emotion, every part of his body, is dedicated to the
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utilization of this piece of apparatus. That is why he has no real emo- tion toward you, no real feeling. That is why he is so terrible. . . . In action, a Communist cadre is more effective than an ordinary man be- cause where an ordinary man would quit a job and say that he has done his best, a Communist cadre would go on and finish it. He is always responsible for what he has done because there is a deliberate system behind him such that he may be considered responsible for something he had done ten years before. He must check and check again, as when he finishes a job and hands in his work, there is no way of escape. He is not working for himself, but for the glory of the Party. 4
Hu was still troubled by guilty, fearful secrets which he had kept from the Communists:
I have a feeling of guilt--not to my own conscience--but because I had a secret with them as one who came from among them. . . . When I decided to leave the mainland, I did not tell them that I had been a student at North China University or that I had been in the People's Revolutionary Army. If I had told them this, they would not have let me go. . . . If they knew that I were here working against them and they caught me, they would show no mercy, . . . It is like being a member of an underground gang somewhere, deciding that this is not decent, and then leaving. The fear that the gang would catch up with you would still be in your heart.
He expressed a feeling of helplessness toward Communism, and made it clear that its control over him had been the most thorough and the most frightening he had ever known. When he compared it with previous authorities in his life, even his step-grandmother seemed less forbidding: "She could compel me to do things that I was not willing to do, but she could never make me say that they were good things. " And so did the KMT:
The KMT could bore me, make me disgusted, bitter and angry at them --but even when they arrested me and I thought that I was being shot, they could not frighten me. It was the Communists who really made me fearful. Now I have no way to protect myself against them. If I face a Communist cadre he can do anything he wants to me and I can do nothing to him.
He began to ask me many questions about human emotions, per- haps the most significant of which was, "How is it possible for a man to hate--to be irreconcilable in this hatred--but to actually submit to the person or group which he hates? " He was speaking of
? A CHINESE ODYSSEY 299
his general conflicts relating to hatred and submission, but his as- sociations also suggested that he was indirectly referring to a feeling of being still partly under the Communists' intellectual and emo- tional control, a control which he was always fighting off within himself. This interpretation was confirmed by a second question, asked in ostensible reference to someone else: "Why is it that some people who have suffered persecution and oppression at the hands of the Communists remain enthusiastic about them? "
As he became more introspective, Hu expressed a basic insight about the relationship of his character to the Communist move- ment, and about his own quest for selfhood:
I now realized why the Communists tried so hard to gain me over. - . . When I believe in something I can forget myself completely while throwing myself into the cause. It was for this reason that I could be so unusually persistent in maintaining my own opinion in opposition to that of the Communists. For this is also a standard characteristic of the Communist cadre, to be so determined because he had no self, and the Communists knew that I could be a very good cadre. . . . I was proud of these characteristics within myself before. But now I under- stand that if I could preserve some of my individual interest, some individuality, I would be less like the Communists. . . . My life would be more balanced and I would not go to such extremes as I used to.
Hu was beginning to recognize his own totalism, and understand its affinity for Communism and its usefulness in preserving his identity against Communist pressures. The recognition itself sug- gested that he was making a dent in this totalism, as did his iden- tification with Western Protestant individualism. He had (at least temporarily) traded heroic action for introspection, leadership for discipleship.
This may have been just another lull in Hu's lifelong emotional storm, but perhaps it was something more as well. I was not sur- prised when he told me during a follow-up visit to Hong Kong I made years later that he had become dissatisfied with Lutheranism and Lutherans (although he had been baptized), that he no longer felt comforted by religion, and that most of the missionaries were "not truly religious. " He also attributed their failure to support him more actively for an American visa to his disinclination to pursue a religious career. Whatever truth there was in this last assertion, his critical attitudes were part of his old pattern, reflections of a still-
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viable totalism forever seeking and never finding its ideal of sin- cerity. On the other hand, there had been no explosive break with the missionaries, and after an association of almost eight years Hu was still livingand workingamong them. As always, he was imposing severe discipline upon himself, but his cause had finally become one of self-interest: he rose at six in the morning to study English and mathematics to prepare himself for the possibility of further educa- tion in America. And he was no longer alone; he had met a girl he wanted to marry and bring to America with him.
I do not know what the outcome of Hu's personal struggles will be; I do know that in his own exaggerated way, he had lived through and described to me most of the major emotional dilemmas of his generation of Chinese intellectuals.
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As much as Hu's story does reveal about the thought
reform of intellectuals and about their background environments, it cannot tell us everything. Others differed from him in their identity patterns and their responses to reform. Some of these differences--as we shall observe in the three case histories which follow--were a matter of personal variation, and others of group trends.
The age at which one undergoes reform has great significance; a revolutionary university reform experience at forty-five cannot be the same as one at twenty-five. The next life story, that of an older intellectual, has an emotional flavor quite distinct from Hu's.
Robert Chao had been a Nationalist official for almost twenty years when he was "invited" (in effect, ordered) to attend a revolutionary university set up soon after the takeover especially for affiliates of the old regime. When I met him in Hong Kong three years later (we had been introduced by a common acquaint- ance), he was working as a translator for a Western business con- cern, A stocky and ruddy-faced man who had studied for several years in America, he was unusually articulate and his English was fluent.
I soon gained the impression, however, that he had mixed feel- 301
CHAPTER THE OLDER GENERATION:
ROBERT CHAO
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ings about talking with me. He was overly courteous (too proper even for a Chinese), and he rarely looked at me directly. I sensed in his guarded manner a fear that should he permit himself to relax, his exaggerated self-control might give way and permit disturbing feelings to emerge. And this is what frequently happened during the course of our interviews: after cautious platitudes and detached statements of general principles, where he felt on safe ground, something would set off in him a brief, tense outburst in which the frustration and pain of his emotional life would be revealed. Our sessions did not become any easier for him as the work progressed, and for this reason we spent just nine hours together-- enough time only to discuss the main currents of his experiences.
Brought up in a rural area of Hunan Province during the early years of the twentieth century, Mr. Chao's first memory was of weird supernatural fear, from which he still does not feel free:
It was New Years Day. . . . I was about four years old. . . . I was brought out by a maternal uncle to the Temple of the City God. And in front of the Temple, under a wooden shed, there were two statues made of clay. There was an image of a man attending a horse. . . . Somehow I got scared--very scared--and very ill, because he looked at me as though smiling at me, . . . I was very sick after this for a few weeks. It was a serious illness and nothing would cure me--no medicine would help me until my relatives suggested that they get a Taoist priest to say incantations. And actually this had the effect of curing me. . . ? I was generally superstitious--and later read a lot of superstitious books. It was a different world from now. . . . These things can be scarey. I can still be scared by them. . . . Superstition influences me even now.
The only child in a family of small landowners, he was still in his infancy when his father died. He later heard tales of his father's adventurous career as a local civil servant during the Ch'ing dynasty, adventurous because of the presence of bandits and the frequent social and natural upheavals. He and his mother lived with different groups of relatives, but it was she--a little-educated, yet strong- minded and intelligent country woman--who took on the roles of both parents, and devoted her major life energies to the boy's future. Chao spoke of his mother and of her sacrifices for him in glowing terms:
She was a very affectionate woman. As a young widow, I was her only child and this made her treasure me. . . . The only son is very spoiled
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in China. . . . She was kindhearted and generous--very open-minded and modern for her age. She was progressive and believed in change. . . . She was very clever and knew the importance of education. . . . She made great personal sacrifices to get me a complete education . . . which was not ordinarily available to a person of my background.
Mother and son combined forces to overcome financial and social difficulties and obtain this education, which included a special tutor in Chinese classics, the best primary and secondary school training available in the region, and later a university degree and graduate study abroad.
As a youngster, Chao spent most of his time at home with his mother, had few friends, and focused his attention mainly on his studies. He was extremely competitive, frequently transferring from one school to another when his superior grades made this possible. His mother moved with him, first to a large provincial city for his secondary school training, and then to Peking for his university education; she sold the small amount of remaining family land to get money for them to live upon.
Together they planned out Chao's future, always calculating carefully how best to use their resources, how best to carry out the steps necessary to attain worldly success. During the early years she contributed what she could from her own knowledge, teaching him to read and write, and telling him the historical anecdotes, legends, and romances which were part of her heritage. When he began to attend boarding schools, and to move beyond her intel- lectual capability, she lived apart from him and saw him on week- ends. Their efforts were rewarded: Chao obtained a government scholarship which included his undergraduate university work in China as well as advanced studies in the United States financed by Boxer indemnity funds.
From the time of his arrival in America, Chao (now Robert) began for the first time to encounter difficulties, both external and internal. He was extremely uncomfortable about his social status, highly sensitive to slights of any kind and especially to possible sug- gestions of racial discrimination. During our talks, it was still dif- ficult for him to come to terms with his own feelings about these problems:
I think the Americans have a justification because I can see clearly the racial situation in America. . . . They have such a large Negro popu-
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lation, so many alien people from Eastern Europe. . . . And besides, I was very proud myself--I didn't want to mix with them either. . . . I didn't go with any coeds--and in a way it was disconcerting--but I never had the courage. Once I felt the Americans looked down on the Chinese, I was too proud to make approaches.
He found, as did many Chinese in the W est, that his friends were limited to other Chinese students, or to members of minority groups: "I had American friends, but I discovered that most of them were Jews. It was commiseration. " Only after we had discussed these matters at some length did he begin to express his hostilities, and even then he checked himself in the midst of his brief out- burst:
I think the Americans have a superiority complex. In a way they are narrow-minded, not interested in knowing foreign things and foreign people. . . . Of course as a human being I could not be free from resentment. . . . But then I was never insulted during my experience in America. I felt that the Americans showed indifference rather than discrimination. Those people who showed too much interest in the Chinese were too patronizing and not spontaneous.
He also experienced a certain amount of indecision about his course of study, switching from journalism to history, starting at one large midwestern university where he found that "life was too lonely/' and then changing to another. In the end, he used only four of the five years allotted by his scholarship for study in Amer- ica. He brought back to China a Chinese-American bride, as well as considerable admiration for American confidence and self-re- liance: "I noticed that Americans, in making their own efforts, are sure of their destiny. "
He described his experiences in his own country during the next twenty years as "a sad story--a story of frustrations. " Working for various government departments as administrator, publicist, and diplomat, occasionally engaging in brief periods of teaching--many of these jobs being held during the confusion of wartime--he was perpetually disappointed, and in his view, unappreciated.
Sometimes he blamed himself:
The trouble is I haven't stuck to any line. If I had stayed in the foreign service, I could have risen and become an ambassador. . . . I had friends high up, but I didn't follow one particular man or faction. I was often offered jobs which I thought were below me.
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associates:
I knew everybody in Chinese government--from the generals down many were my close friends. But although I had helped them plenty, they have never given me help. . . .
Frequently in a foreign office, people didn't want you under them because your qualifications were better than theirs.
But he was always highly critical of the entire government struc- ture of which he was a part. "There was absolutely no security if you didn't accumulate money. , . . Everyone was out for himself. "
Therefore, at the time of the change in regimes, he felt neither sympathy for the victorious Communists nor loyalty to the defeated Nationalists:
I knew nothing about Chinese Communism, but from contacts with the Russians during the war, I did not like Russian Communism, as I thought there was no freedom. But on the other hand, I did not feel that I had an obligation to flee with the Nationalists. They were going nowhere, and we did not think that they could hold Taiwan.
When he was sent for his thought reform, he was "tense" about not knowing what to expect, but at the same time he anticipated from the experience an opportunity to "fit in better" with the Communists. From the beginning, he tried to remain emotionally detached, to adopt a practical wait-and-see attitude, and to judge the program on the basis of the material rewards it might offer him. His cautious and pliable approach--also that of many fellow "stu- dents" much like him--was a far cry from the youthful enthusiasms of Hu's group:
I entered into the situation without knowing exactly what it would be. I wanted to see results. . . . We felt that if it suited our interests, then it would be successful. If I were to get the kind of job that I wanted, it would be successful. If I did not get a desirable job, it would have the opposite kind of result. . . . At the beginning, we discussed the best way to go about it, which we decided was . . . not to be too progressive and not to be reactionary. . . . There was nothing idealistic, we had no emotional abandon. . , . But most of us wanted to get on the good side of the Communists. . . . Often the sessions were sterile because everybody followed the Party line.
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But when the reformers began to demand that the participants deepen their self-analyses, Chao found that it became increasingly difficult, even for such a wary group, to maintain its detachment:
We were always baffled because we did not know how to link theory with practice, . . . To link up personal experience with the question being discussed. . . , They were always asking us for examples. This was diffi- cult.
And as the participants revealed more of themselves, they found that detachment gave way to genuine involvement:
Everybody began to know a great deal about everybody else. . . . Every- thing was public--money, crime, past sins, and so on. We developed a kind of esprit de corps.
Nor could Chao and his fellow students avoid the usual group hostilities, especially when individual people overplayed their "pro- gressive" roles:
Although we wanted to increase our solidarity, in practice often the op- posite occurred. Men didn't like to be criticized, and they would regard those who criticized them as an enemy--as in bourgeois psychology. This caused bad feelings in the group. . . . Sometimes a man was not sincere and would try to put something over. , . . Being not really pro- gressive he would falsify his thought and pretend to be more progressive than the others. Everyone was acting to a certain extent, but there was no need in trying to be extra progressive. . . . Such a man would be ostracized by the group. . . . Even the Communists don't want this.
In dealing with the problem of guilt, the men continued their efforts to go through the proper motions:
It was taken for granted that every man from the old society was a bad man--guilty of all kinds of crimes--that anyone connected with the Nationalist regime was really unpatriotic. . . . In discussing this, every- body tried to put himself in a favorable light. Even when someone ad- mitted guilt, it was with the intention of showing everyone how much he had improved.
Again Chao and the others found themselves unable to icmain detached, for their past experiences made them especially suscepti- ble to a genuine sense of guilt--which offered an avenue of entry for thought reform influences:
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I knew that in the past I had done things without purpose--whereas the Communists said everything should be done with the idea of serving the people. . . . The important question waswhether youconsidered what you did in the past really wrong. . . . I admitted that certain criticisms of me were valid--having a self-seeking approach and not considering the masses. . . . A nd when you put things down on paper, you believe them more than when you just say them. . . . Y ou really feel them to be shortcomings. . . . W e all fell for the phrase, "working for the peo- ple. " We couldn't answer it.
This acceptance extended to much of the Communist message: "You begin to believe a great deal of it . . . and all of us believed that the Communists were better than the Nationalists. "
But when Chao summed up the effects of thought reform for me, he presented two alternative, almost contradictory views. The first was a strongly negative statement, based upon a return to a de- tached and calculating judgment: the Communists had not come through with a good job offer and therefore the "reform" did not succeed:
After thought reform, they offered us low clerical jobs in the fanning areas. . . , The indoctrination failed because we did not like the jobs assigned. We became more reactionary. . . . Now I am more critical of them. They allow no personal freedom, and no freedom of silence. . . . They are liars and I do not believe them.
The second view was one of moderate praise, and a recognition of personal gain from thought reform.
Any Communist indoctrination, well taken, must leave some effects. It is not entirely bad. . . . A man who has been indoctrinated will always think differently as compared with those who have not been indoc- trinated--at least in certain respects. For instance, I might have been very haughty to my servants before, but now I would never treat servants as some of the Hong Kong people treat their servants. I think that this emphasis on labor and the respect they pay to labor is a very good idea. . . . Personally I had a great change. Before I had all of the ambitions that other people had. . . . I wasegocentric. . . . But now I really realize that the individualis. ratherinsignificant,
He tried to resolve his dilemma by transcending both views and withdrawing from all involvements:
People don't understand me. When they pick a quarrel with me, I don't respond--even if you persecute me. It is because of what I have been through. I am above human emotions.
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Yet the circumstances of Mr. Chao's departure from Communist China reveal he was susceptible to human emotions after all: he ran off with a Western woman who was leaving for Hong Kong. The affair dissolved after their arrival, and just at that time, travel between China and Hong Kong became much more difficult. He felt that if he returned to China, as he had more or less planned to do when he left (his wife, mother, and children were still there), he would not again have the chance to leave, and would also be re- garded with suspicion. His eventual decision to stay had little to do with ideological considerations:
I left only because of this woman. If I felt that I could move in and out freely I would have gone back. I wasn't too decided. . . . I could have been very useful to them [the Communists]--one of their propagandists in the foreign office or something.
In his contemplative moments, Chao took a somewhat Taoist or Buddhist view of his life, emphasizing its pointlessness and its nothingness. He expressed this view in one of his responses to the Thematic Apperception Test, when he was shown a blank card and asked to make up a story: x
On this piece of cardboard all I can see just now is empty whiteness. But if I look at it more intently I can imagine things which crowd into a life of many years. These things were the happenings in a man's career. When one came into this world he was just like a piece of white cardboard. There was no image, nothing engraved on it. Pretty soon when he got into contact with worldly things he carried out his own destiny and he could have painted many pictures of many kinds--some gay and some sad, some successful, some failures, some permanent, some ephemeral. And this seems to be what happened to me. In my life I have gone through all of the stages, but in a moment of self-complacency, it would seem to me that everything vanishes again into this original piece of cardboard, without picture, without color, and without emotions.
This passive resignation--real as it was for Chao--did not pre- vent him from calling into play the more active side of his char- acter. He showed extraordinary energy and effectiveness in finding work in Hong Kong, arranging for his wife and his children to leave Communist China, and then utilizing his Western contacts to set up employment for himself and residence for his family in England. There he will probably carry on ably, if without clear purpose.
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Chao's life story (even more than Hu's) indicates something of the vast emotional journey which many of his generation were re- quired to make from the "old China" of their youth to the Com- munist reform of their middle years. Taking into account the per- sonal, cultural, and political obstacles they faced, their accomplish- ments were often impressive; but each of these accomplishments was apt to be paid for with an increasing sense of anomie--with pro- found personal and social dislocation and unrelatedness.
Chao's oldest identities (oldest in the history of both his culture and his own life) were those of the fearful rural mystic and the "mother-directed" filial son. The first identity, which included both an awe of the supernatural and an imaginative richness, was his bond with generations of people from his local area. It formed a basic underlying identity upon which later more worldly ones were grafted, and it contributed to his inability to ever feel truly at home in the modern, urban world. Many Chinese intellectuals (including Hu) possessed similar elements of rural mysticism, however sup- pressed by the rational demands of both Confucian and Western teachings; but Chao reveals the strong staying power of this rural self, which made it both a refuge and an embarrassment.
Chao's relationship with his mother supplied him with some- thing of a conveyor identity, and allowed him to remain filial and at the same time move beyond the narrow world of filialism. It was not unusual in Chao's generation, especially if one's beginnings were rather humble, for a parent like this--rooted in tradition, but possessing the capacity to imagine a modern future--to help a child make this great emotional leap; nor is such a phenomenon confined to Chinese society. In Chao's case, more conflict was involved than he cared to reveal: he made clear his early dependency upon his mother, as well as his sense of gratitude and of personal debt; but from some of his test responses (descriptions of bitter disagreements between mothers and sons), I learned of his struggle to become inde- pendent of her control, and of the guilt and resentment which accompanied this struggle. This mother-son alliance of love and ambition was nonetheless the means by which a rural child of the old China reached the educational channels which transformed him into a sophisticated (if brittle) modern Chinese man.
Chao became immersed in his personal ideology of social ac- complishment and recognition and remained relatively detached
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from broad ideological movements. Although his developing iden- tity of the detached careerist was a natural outgrowth of his relation- ship with his mother, it was also an identity very frequently chosen by others during these chaotic years--a means of survival in a so- ciety whose moral cohesion was rapidly breaking down.
For Chao's generation, the path to accomplishment was Western learning, and the price of Western learning some degree of West- ernization. But by spending his early twenties in America, and by becoming a Westernized Chinese, Chao experienced the beginning of an almost interminable identity crisis. Before he went, he was able--with some difficulty--to handle the continuous adaptations and personal changes necessary for his advance within Chinese so- ciety; but the more jarring conflict of feeling both attracted to and repelled by the Western world was almost too much for him. Like many Asian students in the West, he felt himself simultaneously liberated and denigrated. In the midst of newfound possibilities for self-expression, he felt keenly his status as a non-Westerner, an Oriental. Along with the threat to his masculinity--Asian men are apt to look upon American women with trepidation, and Amer- ican women are likely to treat Asian men in a kindly, sisterly fashion--American society posed a more important threat to his general sense of autonomy: how much of his self would be con- sumed by this tantalizing new Western influence? Historical events both American and Chinese led Chao to value all that was West- ern; and men like Chao wavered between taking too great a plunge into Westernization and recoiling defensively into Chineseness. Facing all of these problems while for the first time navigating without his mother's help, Chao never fully recovered from the intense sense of identity diffusion initiated within him by his Amer- ican experience.
He returned to China much better educated in useful Western ways, but less sure of what he was and where he was going. His sensitivity to, and expectation of, rebuff made him, over the years, a resentful bureaucrat, another identity in which personal conflicts blended with the social realities of a frequently unscrupulous en- vironment. This identity also was common among those Chinese intellectuals who threw in their lot with the Nationalist regime
(the academic field was the only major alternative, and this had its own severe strains). What characterized the resentful bureaucrat
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was a lack of involvement in an ideal beyond himself, a nagging suspiciousness of others, and the kind of deep-seated self-hatred which is the inevitable outcome of losing a battle with one's sense of integrity.
Chao and many of his associates, naturally enough, attempted to carry over their detached attitude to thought reform; older par- ticipants in any case tended to be rather cautious. Yet this exag- gerated detachment was a liability as well as a strength. It did en- able Chao to keep a cool eye out for his self-interest; but it also rendered him susceptible to strong feelings of guilt and shame in response to Communist-style self-analysis. He was most disturbed by the exposure of his detached careerism, most impressed by the Communist program to devote oneself "wholeheartedly" to serving "the people/' As was also true for Dr.
