No More Learning

This unrest represented the psychological need to re-enact a highly disturbing experience, and
2
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is related to what Freud called the "repetition compulsion. " * It is an effort at mastery in which, as Erilcson has described, "The in- dividual unconsciously arranges for variations of an original theme which he has not learned either to overcome or to live with/' and deals with the stressful situation by "meeting it repeatedly and of his own accord. "2
As is also true of people put through many other kinds of painful experiences, these subjects were reliving their thought reform as a means of coming to terms with it. Their experience involved spe- cial emphasis upon problems of shame and guilt, and it was these emotions which they had in some measure to overcome. Otherwise they would be unable either to overcome or to live with their thought reform, and unable to recover their self-esteem. We may therefore describe their psychological task as mastery through res- toration of integrity.
Lecturing and writing about thought reform were particularly effective ways of achieving this mastery. By these acts the subject was in effect saying: "I am no longer the passive, helpless criminal and betrayer. I am an active, strong authority on a manipulative process which could affect any of you in my audience or reading public/7 Such retelling is the former prisoner's means of declaring his identity shift, his beginning disengagement from his own ex- perience.
However, after any great adventure, or even a commonplace oc- currence, the reconstruction can never reproduce exactly the ex- perience itself. The changed inner and outer circumstances and the passage of time must induce distortions. Truth is at best an ap- proximation, and for these men the need for altered reconstruction is likely to be great. The direction and the degree of distortion depended upon the Westerner's way of responding to thought re- form, his developing relationship with his new environment, and his long-standing psychological techniques for dealing with threats to his sense of integrity.
Bishop Barker's reconstruction, for instance, was the story of a clever and heroic man who made no concessions and who out- witted his reformers at every turn. I said of him that he had ex- tended his use of the mechanism of denial to the point of con- fabulation, because I knew that his reconstruction was inaccurate both in terms of actual events and attitudes towards those events.
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Such a distortion in self-representation was characteristic for ap- parent resisters: in order to maintain a sense of integrity, over the years they would build upon the heroic self-image, and "forget" events and emotions associated with their having been weak or deceived. While Bishop Barker was by no means completely free of inner doubts about his heroic self-image, he had been able to master the thought reform experience sufficiently to carry through his distortion rather effectively.
But there were apparent resisters to whom these patterns of denial and repression were dangerous. Another priest whom I saw in follow-up (he was not mentioned earlier) had, like Bishop Barker used denial and repression to reinforce the heroic image which others were ready to confer upon him. He too gave many crusading speeches, and impressed both his audiences and his colleagues with his strength, energy, and stature. Yet when I saw him, I noticed that his eyes expressed fear and agitation. His gaze resembled the "thousand-mile stare" characteristic of prisoners immediately after their release--and he was the only one of my subjects who looked this way three years later. For almost two hours this priest de- scribed his flawless adjustment to European life, denied emotional difficulties of any kind, and spoke of the enthusiasm which he was able to arouse during his lectures on thought reform. Then, in a suddenly lowered voice, he made this admission:
But one thing was strange. . . . For months after I came out, each time I saw a stairway in a house, I thought, "What a wonderful place to jump . . . to commit suicide. "
Underneath the show of strength he was a deeply troubled man who could not fully believe his own self-representation. His obses- sive thoughts of suicide and his outer signs of fear revealed under- lying patterns of depression and anxiety. His efforts at mastery could not still his inner self-accusations, and his need to idealize his behavior prevented him from coming to terms with his strong feelings of guilt. Although he demonstrated strength and effective- ness in many areas, he was having great difficulty restoring his sense of integrity.
Father Simon made use of similar mechanisms, but his distor- tions were in the opposite direction. His need was to justify his conversion to Communism and live up to his identity of the con-
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scientious enthusiast. This involved denial of brutality during his imprisonment, repression of antagonisms toward the Communists and of recent doubts, and rationalization to justify and explain Communist behavior. Like all apparent converts, his sense of in- tegrity required that he idealize the Communists and deprecate himself, and he reconstructed, in this light, not only his prison experience, but his entire life history. The identity of the apparent convert (and this was true of Miss Darrow as well) puts one in a masochistic stance, the paradoxical situation of being able to main- tain self-esteem only by continuous self-flagellation.
The same thing was true of Father Benet Although he had run the gamut from apparent convert to apparent resister, his ap- proach to mastery required that he continually focus upon thought reform's capacity to humiliate and to make men betray themselves. His distortion was in the direction of exaggerating both thought reform's power and the human weakness of those put through it. This "analysis" was partly a reflection of his own experience, and partly a means of restating the sado-masochistic self-representation which he needed for his sense of integrity.
Father Vechten required a serious "accident" to interrupt his compensatory overactivity and permit him the opportunity to deal with his inner conflicts. As one of the obviously confused, he had not resorted to the gross distortions which were characteristic for
(although by no means limited to) apparent resisters and apparent converts. He in fact went to the opposite extreme, and his inability to permit himself the slightest amount of poetic license was a large factor in his difficulties. His approach to integrity demanded that he spare no details of his own "misbehavior" in his reconstruc- tion; on the other hand, his intensified shame and guilt, and his fear of not finding acceptance within his European Catholic en- vironment, prevented him from sharing this accurate version with his colleagues and as a result, he had no way to express his inner preoccupations. His integrity could not be restored until the "ac- cident" broke this impasse.
The struggle for mastery is most intense immediately following thought reform, and during the first weeks and months after re- lease emotional crises center around it. In most of my Western subjects> it tended to subside a great deal after a year, as distance and perspective were gradually achieved, and the Westerners be-
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came able to formulate an explanation of their behavior. This re- construction is the subject's new psychological truth, his means of coming to terms with both his thought reform and his Western environment. A subject was likely to have difficulty with his re- construction when it was so distorted that he found it hard to sup- port his own belief in it, or when it was so literal and unsparing that he was unable to express it. In any event, each subject's struggle for mastery probably will continue indefinitely, whether or not he is consciously aware of the struggle.
Separation
A second major emotional conflict for these men and women was the problem of separation. At first I was surprised when West- ern subjects, almost without exception, put as much emphasis on their sadness at being separated from China as on their conflicts over thought reform, and wondered if their doing so was a means of avoid- ing more disturbing emotions. This was the situation to some extent in a few; but the continued longing for China which most of them expressed years later convinced me that separation was a profound problem in itself. They were clearly experiencing a "grief" reaction. But what were they mourning?
Some were mourning the loss of the very special intimacy of the thought reform group--the delight in total exposure and sharing. As was true of Dr. Vincent, this delight can be keenly felt if one has never before known it; and Father Simon still retained the effects of this loss years later. Others, like Father ? mile, mourned for those (in his case, Chinese Catholic priests) who were left be- hind to suffer. As a Western missionary, he felt that because he had helped introduce the alien religion now being persecuted, he was responsible for the suffering. This emotion is not unlike that of a man who has lost a wife, parent, or, perhaps more appropriately, brother or son by death; he remembers all the ways in which he had caused his loved one suffering, to the point where (at least uncon- sciously) he feels he is responsible for the death itself. This type of reaction is intensified by any pre-existing hostility which the mourner might have had for the mourned, since this makes the assumption of a sense of responsibility for the death or suffering all the easier.
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Others among my subjects--Father Luca is a notable example-- suffered from the realization that they were being separated per- manently from their life in China. They would have no more con- tact with the special combination of human beings and landscape which had nourished them during important adult years. This more generalized grief at separation from China includes and transcends the first two reactions. In fact, the fear of separation, and the anticipated grief could render a prisoner susceptible to thought reform, as was clearly true of Father Simon. When this separation does occur, finally and irrevocably, the Westerner must experience true mourning: he temporarily intensifies his identification with China, preoccupies himself with reminders of his past existence there, and then bit-by-bit works through the process of detaching himself from what has been lost. 3
All these Westerners mourned the loss of something which in- volved their most profound emotions; we may say that each mourned a lost part of himself. Moreover, this symbolic splitting of identity was forced upon these men under the most dishonorable conditions; they were expelled from China as criminals and spies. This separation with dishonor at the same time robbed them of that part of their identities they most treasured, and imposed on them the shameful and guilt-laden thought reform elements.
The problem of separation becomes most acute when a West- erner arrives in Europe or America: at that time he becomes aware of having been totally removed from the Chinese environment. He will then seek to return to a Chinese environment, or to main- tain contact with others who are in one, in order to recapture what has been lost of himself, to reverse the separation process. Much depends, of course, upon the degree of involvement with China; but among my subjects, there were few for whom the problem of separation is not a lingering source of pain.
Expatriates Return
The return to Europe or America confronts the Westerner with still another difficult psychological issue, that of the expatriate's return. (None was literally an expatriate; the term is used here symbolically. ) Long residence in China had created in many of them a sense of alienation from their own countries, an alienation
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which thought reform greatly intensified; and almost all felt them- selves emotionally removed from those around them who had not shared their Chinese experiences. They themselves created and perpetuated this emotional distance, partly because of their need for a personal moratorium which would help them solve problems of mastery and separation. This moratorium also allowed them to postpone their confrontation with the Western milieu.
Most of my subjects found the Western world strange and hard to get used to. And indeed, for those who had been in China for several decades, the changes that had occurred in the Western en- vironment during that time, as well as in its people, must have been striking. Yet the problem was not so much strangeness as it was familiarity. Father Vechten's visit to Rome (the center and the spiritual patria for all Catholic priests) confronted him with beliefs, behavioral codes, and a world view which had always been part of him, but which had, during his years in China--and espe- cially during his imprisonment--become in some ways modified, combined with other influences, and less clearly present in his moment-to-moment consciousness. This confrontation did not have the effect of something new; rather, he felt an uneasy revival within him of a "way of thinking and judging . . . more that which I had formerly. " The same kind of revival also occurred, usually in a more insidious fashion, with all of my Western subjects, whether in mat- ters religious, cultural, or specifically personal.
The expatriate's return then is a confrontation with elements of one's identity which one has long denied, repressed, or modified be- yond easy recognition. The Westerners had originally become ex- patriates only in relation to their own identity: the emotions which led them to choose careers in China included a need to deny or repress, at least temporarily, portions of their heritage in the search for a newer synthesis. Each man's early self had been further un- dermined by the imposed judgments of thought reform. Back home, they were brought in contact---sometimes critically, some- times with psychological sensitivity, but always with full impact-- with these archaic parts of themselves, reminded of them by the physical surroundings they encountered and by the people they met. Having to face their roots in this manner was both nourish- ing and disturbing: they could feel strengthened by being brought back to what they had been, and at the same time feel threatened
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by partisan and provincial emotions arid ideas which they thought they had long discarded in their cosmopolitan existence. This ex- perience of outward journey and inward return is not characteristic only of the temporary exile or expatriate; it occurs with anyone who risks the slightest deviation from the life patterns originally assigned him. 4 For these subjects, either their years of work in China or the thought reform experience alone would have made this problem a profound one. Together, the two exposures produced one of the most difficult forms of expatriate's return imaginable.
Renewal of Identity
The overriding task for these men--a task which included and went beyond problems of mastery, separation, and return--was that of renewal of identity. To renew, one must look to what has gone before; and it was no accident that so many of these men ap- proached the problem historically, in both a personal and a broader sense.
Sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Kallmann, this historical orienta- tion led to a good deal of confusion: unable to trust sufficiently any one among many identity elements, he clung tenaciously and some- what uncritically to a number of antithetical sides of himself, re- lating to Communism and anti-Communism, Nazism and anti- Nazism, authoritarian and libertarian emotions, China and the West, and a general sense of being "all things to all men" in mediating among men. In other cases the historical search had a careful, almost academic pattern, although no less emotionally in- volved: when Father Luca, for example, studied the life of a great modern missionary, he was also immersing himself in the historical problems of all Western missionaries in China. To understand this process of renewal, we must make a brief excursion into some of these historical aspects of the identity of the Westerner in China.
We may begin with the most painful of Western identities--- that of the imperialist. The Communists built a highly personalized image around this term; a non-Communist Westerner was per se an "imperialist" (one spoke in prison of "the People" and "the Imperialists"); he was greedy, demanding, intrusive, and unscru- pulous; he sought to further his own interests by taking from
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others what was rightfully theirs. And only a Westerner could be an imperialist; Chinese might be "bourgeois" or "reactionary"--even "lackeys" of the imperialists--but never imperialists themselves. In ideological terms derived from Lenin's theory of imperialism, they considered the imperialist the agent of,'military, political, economic, and cultural subversion, and the destroyer of all that was good and noble in Chinese civilization.
The Westerners who had this version of the imperialist identity drummed into them during imprisonment began to dislodge them- selves from it during the years after release; but each remained troubled by the Icernel of truth around which the identity is built. It is mainly to decide how much of this guilt they should personally assume that so many of them made investigations of what the West- erner in China had really been. Each discovered what he had al- ready known, that the heritage was mixed; schools and gunboats, industrial techniques and exploitation, enlightenment and dog- matism.
At best, Chinese attitudes toward Westerners have always been ambivalent. They have always viewed Westerners with an ethno- centric eye, and during four centuries of contact there have been periodic waves of persecution and anti-foreign outbreaks. Many times before, they have accused the foreigner (with his strange, non-Confucian doctrines) of being dangerous and "subversive. " Conflicts magnified during the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, the era of the West's most vigorous military penetration of China. Then all individual West- erners became party to the special arrangements and privileges of the "unequal treaties" so much resented by the Chinese. This was as true for the missionaries as for anyone else--perhaps even truer for them because of their influence on Chinese subjects:
. . . the treaties placed not only the missionaries but Chinese Chris- tians under the aegis of the foreign powers. . . . The provision . . . tended to remove Chinese Christians from the jurisdiction of their government and to make of Christian communities imperia in imperio, widely scattered enclaves under the defense of aliens. . . . The Church had become a partner in Western imperialism and could not well dis- avow some responsibility for the consequences. 5
These are not the words of Chinese Communists, but the well- considered opinions of Kenneth Latourette, a distinguished Ameri-
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can historian of China, and himself part of the Protestant mission- ary movement.
Some missionaries welcomed this "partnership" with imperialism, viewing the military operations and treaties which followed as "God's way of opening up the country to his servants. " 8 But an increasing number of both Catholics and Protestants came to re- gard the situation as not only highly "un-Christian" but potentially dangerous. In terms of identity, these two groups may be divided roughly into pure proselytizers and spiritual mediators; one of these two patterns predominated in every W estern missionary who came to the Middle Kingdom from the sixteenth to the twentieth cen- turies.
The spiritual mediator approached China with respect for (or at least recognition of) its traditions; he sought to establish common cultural ground, so that Chinese could become Christians and still retain their identity as Chinese. The missionary himself also had to undergo some shift in his own identity before he could move to- ward this common ground. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), one of the first and greatest of Catholic missionaries in China and a spiritual mediator par excellence, found that the best way to approach the Chinese was through the literati, and the best way to approach the literati was to blend with the Chinese scene--to become proficient in the Chinese language, wear the clothes of a mandarin, adopt completely the complex honorifics of literati speech and writing. He gained the respect of his hosts by demonstrating his scholarship, and by teaching them the latest (Renaissance) Western ideas in mathematics, natural sciences, astronomy, and geography. But even in this teaching he and his colleagues were careful to make con- cessions to Chinese ethnocentricity: on a map of the world which they prepared, China was located at the center--it was hard enough for the Chinese to accept the idea that great geographical and cultural areas existed at all among the "barbarians" outside the Chinese sphere.
Ricci went further: he made a detailed study of classical Chinese philosophical texts, finding much to admire in Confucian beliefs, and always stressing whatever similarities he could find between the words of the Sage and the Christian doctrine. He made a special point of his conviction that a man could embrace the beliefs and customs of both without doing injustice to either. Ricci and his colleagues were known as "preaching literati. " Their early Jesuit
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successors became important figures at court; some of them were given titles as scholar-officials, and received financial and moral support from the Emperor himself. Their learning, and especially their cultural flexibility, carried them far. As one historian has put it, "The Jesuits largely fulfilled traditional Chinese expectations as to the likely course of intelligent barbarians in Chinese society. " They were "culturally conciliatory" and quick to realize that in the stable and self-confident Chinese society of that day, "they would receive a hearing more or less as candidates for membership or not at all. " 7
Not all Catholic missionaries approached China with such a light touch. The early Franciscans and Dominicans were contem- poraries of the Jesuits, and they--rather than Renaissance-influenced scholars--were the "simple friars"8 who brought with them to China attitudes of purified medieval Christianity. They were pure proselytizers; and their approach to missionary work was "going headlong at it/' Thus, in 1579, a Franciscan expedition on its way to Japan "took possession of China in the name of Christ by offer- ing mass on the 24th of June in Canton. "9
The Jesuits were cautious about displaying the crucifix because they realized that it "horrified" many Chinese; but the Franciscans, in their evangelizing, would "march openly through the streets dressed in their outlandish habit, cross in hand. " 10 Similarly, one Dominican "set about overthrowing idols wherever he could lay his hands on them" until "the Mandarins . . . laid their hands on him and he was speedily ejected. " n A great Dominican hero of this period was Francis Capellas who, during a persecution, was taken into custody and put to death, Before achieving martyrdom, he is reported to have said: "I have no other house than the wide world, no other bed than the ground, no other food than what Providence provides from day to day, and no occupation other than that of laboring and suffering for the glory of Jesus Christ and the eternal happiness of those who believe in Him. " His death was witnessed by some of his own recently arrived Dominican col- leagues, and its news was received in Spanish Catholic circles throughout the world "not . . . with mourning but with great
developed. The Jesuits were appalled by what they considered the
joy"12
Conflict between spiritual mediators and pure proselytizers soon
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crude approach of the Dominicans, and feared that it would en- danger their own patiently constructed accomplishments. The Dominicans--at least many of them--regarded the Jesuits as too loose in their methods and too tolerant toward paganism, and as threats to the purity of Christianity. Their battle was the celebrated "Rites Controversy" of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, fought over the question of how much of customary Chinese practice the Christian convert could be permitted to re- tain. The Jesuits favored Ricci's approach of conveying the Chris- tian concept of God through the use of the classical Chinese terms for "Heaven" (Tien and Sftang Ti), claiming that these words originally had a theistic significance, and were in any case necessary to explain the new faith in a familiar idiom. The Dominicans held that these Chinese terms connoted a material heaven or sky; that much "superstition" had grown up around them in the Chinese mind; and that therefore they should not be used.
Again following Ricci, the Jesuits favored allowing Chinese Christians to continue to honor Confucius and their ancestors, on the ground that these observances were a tradition of the Chinese empire, with a civil rather than a religious significance. The Do- minicans considered the observances "pagan" and "superstitious," and therefore not permissible. The Dominican position was upheld by Papal decrees in 1704, 1710, 1715, and 1742,much to the detri- ment of Catholic missionary efforts. The decision injured Chinese sensibilities in a variety of ways--the Emperor K'ang Hsi had ex- pressed his support of the Jesuit position, and felt that the Pope was contesting his authority--and a century of persecutions fol- lowed. These persecutions had complex causes and were by no means simply a result of the Rites Controversy; but the outcome of this controversy and the events which followed were in psy- chological and cultural senses, a major triumph for purist, ex- tremist forces--and a major defeat for the mediators on both sides. Not until 1939, 235 years after the initial decree, did Rome finally reverse its decision.
Much more can be said about the political, religious, and cul- tural issues of the Rites Controversy; but this outline is enough to indicate the importance of these two conflicting identity stances for the Westerner in China, and for relations in general between China and the W est. 13 The examples cited were from early Catholic
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experience, but these two identities were equally present in later Protestant missionaries: the pure proselytizers were the Funda- mentalist preachers who with their message of hellfire and brim- stone had little regard for Chinese cultural traditions; the spiritual mediators were those more liberal and socially-oriented missionaries who tried to understand and to enter into Chinese life while build- ing their churches, universities, and hospitals.
Even secular Western residents--businessmen, diplomats, non- missionary teachers, students, and free-lance Sinophiles--were not entirely free from this dilemma. They had not come to China to propagate Christianity, but they too had the problem of how much of the West to sell to the Chinese (or at least to hold onto themselves) versus how "Chinese" to become. The treaty-port businessman, that prototype of the "old China hand," could be something of a proselytizer of Western business methods; or he could relax comfortably into his surroundings, accepting his priv- ileged position as his due, and regarding the Chinese around him with "patronizing affection. "M The true spiritual expatriates were the "Peking Men," a unique group of scholars, writers, and as- sorted individualists so thoroughly absorbed by China (even if they lived in its past glory) that the rest of the world seemed to them virtually uninhabitable, and everything after Peking anticlimactic. Those among the Peking Men who had the special subidentity of the "China-born" often (like Miss Darrow) struggled hard in their adult lives to establish an intimacy with China which they felt had been denied to them by the segregated patterns of their missionary upbringing; at the same time they tried to recapture and embel- lish an idealized childhood memory.
My Western subjects had also found that confronted with China over a period of time, one's identity could not, so to speak, stand still. Most, spiritual mediators more than anything else, gradually slipped into a "Chinese" pattern. They usually made an elaborate identity compromise, rather than completely "going native"; the compromise offered many creative satisfactions, but there was al- ways the danger, whether or not a Westerner was aware of it, of his old identities becoming obscured and his sense of commitment confused. Yet the same man could also identify a part of himself as uncompromisingly Western, and feel stirrings of the pure pros-
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elytizer. The psychological rewards for so doing were those of im- posing on others one's own creed and thereby exerting influence over others; the dangers (in a sense interchangeable with the re- wards) were those of arousing antagonism and persecution, and of becoming isolated from Chinese life. What is more, these subjects found that historical circumstances generated increasing tension between the mediator and the proselytizer within them. China, in its quest for modernization, both sought and resented various forms of proselytizing. Western institutions which sent people to China became more sensitive to the need for mediating, but these in- creasing sensitivities opened the way for the kind of historical and racial guilt I have already described.
These conflicts were especially great for the priests among my subjects. Their education and characters bore the stamp of modern liberalism; they tended strongly to become cultural mediators, and play down the pure proselytizer within themselves. Even so, the conflict between these two aspects of their identity was ever-present: Father Luca was torn between his liberalism and his urge to mar- tyrdom; Father Vechten's deep commitment to spiritual mediating was certainly undermined by his confrontation in Rome with a more pure proselytizing attitude. All these men experienced with unusual intensity the inner struggle between liberal and authoritar- ian emotions which any modern Catholic priest faces. Many tried to resolve the struggle by using the approach of Father Vincent Lebbe, considered by many to be a modern counterpart of Father Ricci. One of the most articulate of modern mediators, he had condemned Western imperialism, refused the protection of his own consul, and advocated love for and intimate identification with the host coun- try; he had set a personal example by taking out Chinese citizen- ship and forming a stretcher-bearing battalion during the Japanese war. 15 But whatever the approach, the tension between these two elements had to remain, since they are both part of the identity of any missionary anywhere: the urge to proselytize takes him to the mission land in the first place; and the mediator within him makes his work possible.
The Communists--themselves pure proselytizers in the extreme --were quick to make the association between missionary - pros- elytizing and imperialism, an association not too difficult to estab- lish. It was a bit harder for them to cast a spiritual mediator as an
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imperialist, but they accomplished this also with two approaches: they held him responsible for the behavior of his less liberal col- leagues, and called his flexible adjustment a tactical maneuver to deceive people and obscure ultimate goals. Moreover, although Father Lebbe himself was a spiritual mediator, some of the priests (including close colleagues of my subjects) who had followed his lead in aiding China's defense efforts against the Japanese had gone on to co-operate with Nationalist forces in their struggle against the Communists--thus giving the reformers a good reason to label them imperialists.
The Communists thus used actual historical events to exploit already-existing identity strains of the Westerner in China, sim- plifying the complex elements involved into the single pure image of the evil imperialist. They then did everything possible to make the man fit the image.
During the years after their release, my subjects were preoc- cupied with extricating themselves from this pure image, and find- ing a version of what they had been (and still were) which was both reasonably accurate and morally justifiable. Some form of recon- struction was necessary, and the degree of distortion paralleled that of the thought reform experience itself. Thus Fathers Luca and Vechten could be critical of much of their Church's behavior and at the same time reject exaggerated Communist charges; while Bishop Barker brought his characteristic all-or-nothing fundamen- talist judgmentsto bear upon both the Church and the Communists.
These men and women were aware that their prison thought reform marked the end of an era for the non-Communist Westerner in China, as well as for them as individuals. They had to achieve a new relationship with Western institutions to overcome the guilt associated with the imperialist label. What they sought during the years after imprisonment, and what many of them attained, was nothing short of another rebirth.
Long-term Effects
What can be said about the long-range success or failure of prison thought reform as applied to Westerners? From the stand- point of winning them over to a Communist view of the world, the program must certainly be judged a failure. Only one (Father
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Simon) among my twenty-five subjects (and only one or possibly two more from among the scores of others I heard about) could be regarded as a truly successful convert. Follow-up information con- firmed what I had begun to observe when I interviewed these sub- jects in Hong Kong: a general movement away from the reform ethos toward a more critical view of Chinese Communist behavior. Three or four years after their release, most of them expressed sentiments much more harsh toward Communism than those they had felt before being imprisoned. They looked not to Communism, but to the forces in the West they had known earlier, and to an inner synthesis of their own, for answers to the world's great ide- ological questions. This conscious disavowal of their reform was by no means the entire psychological picture; but conscious opinions are, after all, not unimportant,
Whatever success thought reform had with most of the West- erners lay in the unconscious influences which they retained from it. These influences are basic to an understanding of what really hap- pened, even though they can be easily overlooked. Despite the years that had passed since their imprisonment, these men and women were still grappling with the powerful emotions and ideas implanted by the Chinese Communists. Most had succeeded in neutralizing them; but the implant had been compelling enough to defy easy excision. For once a man has been put through prison thought reform, he never completely casts off its picture of the world and of himself.
Inner tension between the reformed and nonreformed elements of a person can be itself imprisoning; or lead toward expanding horizons. Most people felt something of each, but the ratio be- tween the two varied greatly. Father Luca and Father Vechten, for example, had suffered and continued to suffer from a compulsive weighing of the influences of thought reform; yet both had broad- ened their personal vistas and enlarged their sense of identity as a result of their prison experiences. Father Simon and Bishop Barker, on the other hand, seemed to have narrowed their focus, con- stantly protecting themselves against too broad an exposure lest this upset their singlemindedness. It was generally true that those who, like Father Simon and Bishop Barker, were either apparent con- verts or apparent resisters, had to live on this constricted level if they were to maintain their extreme position; while the obviously
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confused reaped both pain and creative benefit from their con- fusion. Those who, like Miss Darrow, gradually gave up an extreme position, were opened to the same pitfalls and opportunities as they surrendered both their constriction and the reassuring cer- tainties it had offered. One other position is possible: one can, like Mr. Kallmann, become so "broad" in his horizons that the inner substance of identity and commitment can scarcely take shape.
And this brings up the nonideological residua present in all Westerners, whose effects were also mixed. Four years after the experience, my subjects still bore marks of both fear and relief. The fear was related to the basic fear mentioned earlier, the fear of total annihilation; it is an unconscious memory not easily lost. Some people may equate it with the experience of having felt totally controlled and dangerously threatened by a powerful parent; but whatever its associations, all dread the possibility of risking its re- currence through re-exposure to total control. Along with this dread, however, some entertain a deeply repressed desire for just such a repetition as a means of atoning for a troubling sense of guilt. I need not again emphasize the importance of this guilt, except to say that it joins with the residual fear to form the most destructive of thought reform's bequests.
Nonetheless, thought reform can also produce a genuinely thera- peutic effect. Western subjects consistently reported a sense of having been benefited and emotionally strengthened, of having be- come more sensitive to their own and others' inner feelings, and more flexible and confident in human relationships. These bene- ficial effects occurred in subjects with all three reactions, although it is difficult to say just what produced them. The best explanation is perhaps that these people had had the experience of testing their emotional limits. They had undergone the ultimate in physical and spiritual pain, and had yet survived; they had been forced to hit rock bottom in their imposed negative self-analysis, and yet had emerged with some measure of self-respect. Each had thus gone farther than ever before in realizing his human potential. Their consequent feeling of having been benefited is analogous to the sense of well-being which has been observed in people after they have experienced severe stress of almost any kind, including that of prolonged sensory deprivation. 16 When the stress is brief, the well- being may be limited to a rebound euphoria. But after an experi-
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ence as totally disintegrating as prison thought reform, the relief at being put together again is more basic and more enduring. In the experience itself, and in the process of recovery and renewal which followed it, these men and women gained access to parts of them- selves they had never known existed.
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? ? PART THREE
THOUGHT REFORM OF
CHINESE INTELLECTUALS
We must be engineers of the human soul.
V. I. Lenin
The cultivation of the person depends upon recti-
fying the mind.
Confucius
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? ? 1
In turning from imprisoned Westerners to "free"
Chinese intellectuals, we arrive at the ideological center of the thought reform movement. Instead of being directed at alleged criminals and "imperialists/' reform is used to manipu- late the passions of the most enlightened members of Chinese society. Chinese intellectuals experience thought reform in their own country's educational institutions, under the direction of coun- trymen not too different from themselves. They are asked to un- dergo it as an act of patriotism, as an expression of personal and national rejuvenation.
Their thought reform is not entirely different from the prison program applied to Westerners, Indeed, as I alternated between Western and Chinese subjects during the study, I was often struck by the similarities in the emotional experiences reported by two such divergent groups. But the contrasts were also impressive-- contrasts in thought reform settings and pressures, in life experi- ences and character traits, and in differing relationships to Chinese Communism--so much so that I sometimes felt as if I were con- ducting two separate research projects.
An exploration of these differences takes us inevitably into mat- ters Chinese, into a consideration of influences derived from tradi- tional Chinese culture and from the modern, antitraditional Chi- nese cultural rebellion. Only these patterns can account for China's
CHAPTER THE ENCOUNTER
243
? 244 THOUGHT REFORM
unique way of dealing with imported Communist principles. I shall retain my emphasis upon individual emotions and the sense of inner identity, and move from the individual outward as I attempt to explain his experience in the light of his own and his country's history and culture. This approach also requires an examination of thought reform's origins, both its actual history, and its use of psychological themes derived from Soviet Russian and traditional Chinese models. After that, I shall summarize the general prin- ciples derived from my study of both subject groups--principles which apply to any culture and have significance far beyond that of thought reform itself.
Who are the "Chinese intellectuals"? The term is a loose one and is often applied to anyone in China with a secondary school educa- tion, although the Communists themselves distinguish between "higher intellectuals" and "general intellectuals. " It includes, of course, scholars, teachers, artists, writers, scientists, advanced stu- dents, physicians, and other professional people--all of whom make up a very small but particularly influential segment of the Chinese population. As a group, they are the spiritual if not lineal descend- ants of the Confucian literati, the celebrated class of scholar- officials who in the past set the cultural standards and administered the political structure for whatever dynasty they served. Nowhere was learning more honored than in traditional China, and nowhere was a body of knowledge more necessary for personal advancement; until the beginning of the twentieth century, the main path to wealth and prestige was the state examination based entirely upon the Confucian classics.
But during the last fifty years, the intellectuals, influenced by the West, have led the revolutionary movements to cast off the decay- ing traditional social structure. Much of their identity was trans- formed in the process, and the rebellion was costly to them in an emotional as well as a material sense. Yet even when most be- leaguered, they have always retained their aura of a learned ? lite and a sharp sense of separation from the rest of the mostly illiterate population.
Like the dynasties before them (and like Communist parties everywhere) the Chinese Communists recognized the importance of winning over and putting to effective use this precious intellectual
? THE ENCOUNTER 245
talent. Indeed, their thought reform program has gone far beyond anything either their dynastic predecessors or their Russian Com- munist mentors ever attempted. They called for a personal con- version (or for something very closely resembling one) from every Chinese intellectual, surely an excessively ambitious program. Yet during the period immediately after they assumed power, many circumstances favored their efforts.
The Communists were then in the full flush of triumph. Their discipline and their confidence could not fail to impress a popula- tion which had been spiritually sapped by decades of civil war, foreign encroachments, and political corruption. Well before this a sizable number of intellectuals had been attracted to the Com- munist movement, many of whom had been introduced to it dur- ing their student days. By 1949, intellectuals as a group--including those with no particular ideological commitment--seemed more prone to welcome than to oppose the Communist victory. This was the impression of many observers and scholars, and one also clearly conveyed to me by my Chinese subjects and by friends in Hong Kong. Most intellectuals and students regarded the Nationalist regime with bitter hostility. They resented what they felt were police-state methods without the compensation of police-state ef- ficiency. If one can speak of a class despair--a despair born of dis- illusionment, emotional confusion, repeated frustration, and eco- nomic suffering accompanying runaway inflation--one may cer- tainly say it of the Chinese intellectuals during the years before the Communist takeover. In this condition, many of them were recep- tive not only to change, but to methods of being changed which they might otherwise have abhorred. 1
Some Chinese intellectuals (although by no means all) had an opportunity to acquaint themselves gradually with Communist re- form measures through small "political study" and "mutual aid" groups organized where they lived, worked, or studied. These were dogmatic, but relatively mild compared with what followed. By late 1951, all intellectuals were swept up in a year-long Thought Reform Campaign primarily aimed at them as a group--the first of China's national outbreaks of soul-searching. One Chinese com- mentator, writing from Hong Kong, described this campaign as "one of the most spectacular events in human history. " 2 Other equally spectacular campaigns were to come; but this one set the
? 246 THOUGHT REFORM
precedent, and its sequence of top-to-bottom manipulations--typical for all national campaigns--is worth describing. 3
First came the mandate from Mao Tse-tung himself: "Ideological reform, first of all the ideological reform of the intellectuals, is one of the most important conditions for a country's all-out complete democratic reform and industrialization. " Next, the central ministry of education called together three thousand leading university pro- fessors and academic administrators of the Peking-Tientsin area to launch a "study campaign" aimed at "the reform of the teachers' ideology and of higher education. " Premier Chou En-lai addressed this group for five hours, spelling out in detail a program for trans- forming the university into a genuinely "progressive" institution, and stressing such personal reform issues as "standpoint," "atti- tude," "whom we serve," "problems of thought/' "problems of knowledge," "problems of democracy," and "criticism and self- criticism. " (One of the educators present reported that Chou set a personal example with a self-criticismof his own "social relations. ") Then, under Communist guidance, study groups were formed. At the same time, the campaign was given wide publicity in news- papers, magazines, and radio broadcasts; and through organizational work, it spread from the capital city outward, to all universities and intellectual communities throughout China.
Centered in universities (but including all intellectuals, whatever their affiliations), the campaign included everyone from the elderly college president to the newly-admitted freshman student, as "tens of thousands of intellectuals . . , [were] brought to their knees, ac- cusing themselves relentlessly at tens of thousands of meetings and in tens of millions of written words. "4 This was the campaign's harvest: a flood of self-castigation from China's most learned men, public confessions which became a prominent feature in the coun- try's press during the next few months, and on repeated occasions from then on. Combining personal anecdote, philosophical so- phistication, and stereotyped jargon, the confessions followed a con- sistent pattern: first, the denunciation of one's past--of personal immorality and erroneous views; then a description of the way in which one was changing all of this under Communist guidance; and finally, a humble expression of remaining defects and a pledge to work hard at overcoming them with the help of progressive col- leagues and Party members.
? THE ENCOUNTER 247
Distinguished scholars denounced careers that had brought them international fame, and expressed the desire to begin over again in their work and in their lives. One prominent feature (also present in the case histories) was the professor's public humiliation before his own students: a professor of law, for instance, in making his confession before a large meeting of undergraduates, addressed them as "fellow students/' went on to thank them for their suggestions and to promise to adhere to these "in the most minute detail so that I can improve myself," then closed with the pledge "to be your pupil and to learn from you/' (These confessions must be read to appreciate their full flavor; the published confession of a Harvard-trained professor of philosophy, made at a leading uni- versity in Peking, appears in the Appendix, page 473. ) While much of the content of these documents seems ritualistic and uncon- vincing, my Western subjects made it clear that even such expres- sions are by no means free of emotional involvement, and reflect pressures of immense magnitude. Students outdid their professors in reform enthusiasms.
During the two years of Communist rule before this official campaign began, however, many intellectuals underwent their thought reform in special centers called "revolutionary universities" or "revolutionary colleges/' These institutions provided the most concentrated of programs, sealed-in worlds in which thought reform existed in its own pure culture. The revolutionary university was directly derived from Party schools in which (see Chapter 20) the reform program for Chinese intellectuals had been developed years before; these schools were quietly conducted prototypes for the later, more flamboyant public displays.
Set up in every area of China almost in the wake of the victorious Communist armies, revolutionary universities were most active dur- ing the regime's first few years; by 1952, many had been converted into more conventional cadre-training centers. One of their pur- poses was to meet an emergency need for trained personnel; the course was usually only six months long, at most eight or twelve months, and the student body was by no means exclusive. It in- cluded such groups as former officials of the Nationalist regime, professors from ordinary universities in a particular area; "returned" students from the West, some who had just come back and others who had been to Europe or America as long as thirty or forty years
? ? 248 THOUGHT REFORM
before; and arbitrarily selected groups of young university instruc- tors, recent graduates, and even undergraduates. There were also Communist party members and affiliates, some of whom had dem- onstrated significant "errors" in their work or thoughts, and others who had merely spent enough time in Kuomintang areas to be con- sidered contaminated by the exposure.
Many came to revolutionary universities in response to thinly- veiled coercion--the strong "suggestion" that they attend. But others actively sought admission because they wished to adapt themselves to the new regime, or at least to find out what was ex- pected of them; they believed, moreover, that a diploma from one of these centers would be a big help in the New China. And, as the first Chinese case-history demonstrates, some sought admission to solve personal problems in their relationships to the Communist regime.
I soon became aware that the programs at both regular uni- versities and revolutionary universities had maximum importance for Chinese intellectuals and maximum psychological interest for my research. Twelve of my fifteen subjects underwent their reforms at one or the other, and the four case histories I shall describe are equally divided between them. I have given the revolutionary col- lege the most detailed attention, because I believe it represents the hard core of the entire Chinese thought reform movement. But before weattempt to penetrate this core, I must saya bit more about my Chinese subjects, and the nature of my work with them.
As a group, they could not show as wide a spectrum of responses to thought reform as the Westerners whom I interviewed, for they were all essentially thought reform failures. They belonged to that small minority of Chinese intellectuals who had elected to leave the mainland and remain in Hong Kong as refugees from the Com- munist regime. They are therefore in no sense typical of Chinese intellectuals in general. But neither are their reactions unrelated to those of the larger body of intellectuals who remained: even as thought reform failures, they had some positive responses which can help us understand the program's successes; and their negative reactions, although stronger than those of the majority of intel- lectuals, can help us to appreciate some of the stumbling blocks thought reform ran into with China's intellectuals. Moreover, the nature of the reform process--its stress on close contact and on the
? THE ENCOUNTER 249
psychological expos6--enabled my subjects to make telling observa- tions about others who responded quite differently from themselves. Chinese subjects, of course, could not avoid the psychological and financial strains of their refugee status. Sometimes one of them would attempt to use an interview with me as a forum to attack, not the Communists or the Nationalists, but a rival refugee or- ganization. Most were living under conditions which were, at best7 tenuous, and they tended to look upon their participation in the research as a potential means of sooner or later bettering their lot. This attitude was in keeping with Chinese views of reciprocity; as L. S. Yang has pointed out, when a Chinese acts, he anticipates a response: "Favors done for others are often considered what may be termed5'social investments/ for which handsome returns are expected. " A Chinese subject, understandably enough, usually
wanted material rather than psychological assistance from me; and some of the "handsome returns" expected (or at least hoped for) included my recommending a particular refugee organization to an American group whose assistance was desired, my helping a man to obtain a job with a Western organization in Hong Kong, or my supporting a man's efforts to enter the United States.
I decided that financial remuneration in some form was in order, both because these people badly needed money, and because it could serve as my reciprocal response in place of other expectations, which usually were impossible (if not inadvisable) for me to meet. But I felt that paying by the interview would not be a good idea, since it might create an incentive for a subject to hold back mate- rial in order to prolong the financial opportunity, and also because it might have conveyed the undesirable suggestion that I was pay- ing for information. I hit upon a compromise arrangement which worked so well that I used it throughout the study. I had the sub- ject prepare written materials useful to my work, most often a near verbatim reconstruction of the final thought summary originally composed during thought reform itself; and for this I paid the standard Hong Kong publication rate for an article of approxi- mately that length. If my relationship with a subject was prolonged, I simply repeated the procedure after a certain number of inter- views, and asked the subject to contribute additional autobiograph- ical information that was of special significance in his case. This arrangement proved to be highly beneficial and face-saving for both
? 2JO THOUGHT REFORM
of us.
My interpreters were also refugee intellectuals, and this too cre-
ated problems. Subjects often felt more uneasy about revealing themselves, especially their political convictions, to fellow Chinese refugees than they did to me. I was a relatively harmless American; but who could tell what my interpreter's affiliations might be? Some- times a subject required that a friend of his serve as interpreter, an arrangement I accepted only when I also knew the person sug- gested and thought he was suitable. And even then, I usually tried to replace him with one of my own interpreters for some portion of the work. Other subjects cultivated the interpreter after hours, hoping to win his support for a favor from me. For all of these reasons, I considered it extremely important that the interpreter strongly identify himself with me and with the research. The two men I regularly worked with were personal friends who more than met my requirements.
These considerations were important because my interpreters were required to do a good deal more than simply translate back and forth during the interviews: as Westernized Chinese, they were a bridge between the relatively un-Westernized Chinese subject and the (also relatively) un-Sinicized Western interviewer. David Riesman has called this "tandem interviewing": the interpreter served as an acculturating force in both directions, making it pos- sible for the subject and myself--between whom there was no common language and much cultural distance--to converse with one another. There had to be a certain amount of compromise: the subject had to adapt himself to my Western approach and I had to bend slightly in a Chinese direction. This included, on my part, serving tea with each interview, the unconscious development
of a bit more reserve than usual, and the conscious development of an indirect (or circular) approach to the more sensitive topics discussed.
I have emphasized the difficulties I encountered owing to the Chineseness and the refugee status of this subject group (the lat- ter condition perhaps created more problems than did the former); but once the three of us had surmounted these early barriers, a three-way team enthusiasm often developed. All of us directed our full energies toward illuminating the nuances of the subject's emo- tions and then conveying these to me as the final common pathway;
? THE ENCOUNTER 2$l
and all of us shared in the excitement of achieving a deepening understanding of thought reform. These interviews were often quite grueling, and required at least twice as much time as ordinary inter- views to cover the same ground; but they had a special fascination. After months of work, a significant therapeutic relationship often developed in both interpreted and direct (English language) inter- views with Chinese subjects. This usually did not have the same cathartic intensity as with Westerners (although with one English- speaking girl it did); rather there was a gradual shift from my prob- ing to the subject's raising questions on his own about past and present emotions which had troubled him.
On the whole, my Chinese subject group was young, with a heavy student representation. I did not intentionally seek young subjects; their preponderance was due to a number of reasons. They were available to me through the refugee publishing organ- izations to which they belonged; and younger people could more easily leave Communist China after intensive thought reform, both with and without official permission: they had fewer family responsibilities, greater anonymity, and better excuses (visiting parents in Hong Kong during university vacations for example) to cross the border This accidental emphasis upon youth turned out to be a great advantage. It helped me to achieve better understand- ing of the phenomenal role which young people have played in revolutionary twentieth-century China, and it shed light upon psy- chological questions relating to identity and change. The subject group did not lack diversity, however; it included college students in their late teens and early twenties, seasoned revolutionaries in their thirties, and experienced government officials close to middle age. My subjects came from all parts of China, and from such di- verse backgrounds as middle-class urban merchant families, rural gentry, and, rarely, rural peasantry.
The Chinese subject group may be broken down as follows: total --fifteen; locale of thought reform experience--seven in regular universities, five in revolutionary colleges, two in military settings, and one in a business group; occupation at time of thought reform --seven students, two displaced students, two government officials
(both of whom had done some university teaching), one university instructor, two soldiers, and one businessman (in the Hong Kong environment, thirteen of the subjects were in an ill-defined group
? 252 THOUGHT REFORM
of students-teachers-writers, and the other two were in business); geographical distribution--seven from the Hunan-Hupei-Anhui area (South Central China); four from the Peking area (North Centfal China); and four from the Canton area (South China); sex--twelve male, three female; age--from nineteen to forty-nine, mostly between twenty and thirty-five.
Chinese subjects were on the whole more removed in time from their thought reform than the Western group, most having experi- enced it one to four years before our interviews. This time lapse increased the possibility of retrospective distortion, which I had always to keep in mind. To get underneath any such distortion, I encouraged each subject to try to recapture during our interviews the actual emotions of his reform, rather than merely talk about them from a distance. I eventually got most of them to do this to a considerable extent, because there is something about the reform process which causes it to retain an unusually high degree of emo- tional vividness for the former participant. Only after extensive efforts of this kind--including much focused questioning and re- checking of responses, as well as an over-all estimation of a man's reliability of recall--did I attempt to reconstruct an individual eise.
As I participated in the subject's recapturing process, I often felt that I was listening to a Gulliver telling of his travels in a very strange land. That strange land was not so much China as it was thought reform--especially the alien realm of the revolutionary university.
? 14
UNIVERSITY: MR. HU
Early in my stay in Hong Kong I was introduced to
Mr. Hu Wei-han, a native of Hupeh province in Central China, and a graduate of North China University, a large revolutionary university1 situated just outside of Peking. I met him in the customary fashion, through intermediaries: a Chi- nese acquaintance of mine was working closely with him in a "third force" (critical of both Communists and Nationalists) press service. Mr. Hu was then thirty, tall and thin, erect and dignified, if a bit rigid, in his bearing. Courteous and formal in the fashion of an upper-class Chinese, he spoke in quiet, measured tones, al- ways with intensity. I soon noticed that he rarely smiled; his facial expression was invariably serious, not infrequently sullen, never really relaxed. At the same time, he maintained throughout our sessions an unusual degree of enthusiasm and stamina.
Although he had left Communist China four years before, he was still cautious about interview arrangements.