Richard McGregor on The Chinese Communist Party

Your first book is Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys, published in 1977. I gather from reviews that at the time people still thought Mao was really great and so the author’s negative approach did not go down well.

Yes, Mao was still the cuddly guy in the Andy Warhol paintings and the visionary statesman who allowed Nixon to visit China. He was the man standing up in Tiananmen Square with 27,000 giggling schoolchildren waving their flags at him. But the truth, as we now know, was much, much worse. At the time, it wasn’t easy to write a polemic of this kind against Mao, but the style of writing is brilliant: it’s a literary work as much as a work about China. It’s sarcastic, it’s witty, it’s deeply learned. And it absolutely takes apart Mao’s defenders limb by limb. It’s the sort of thing that utterly cuts through all sorts of cant, and I still enjoy picking it up and reading it today.

Why? Do the things it says still hold true?

It’s not true in describing day-to-day life in China now. But it’s certainly true about Mao. And you still can’t talk about Mao like that in China these days.

Tell me about the author, what did he base his information on?

Leys is a Belgian-Australian, the ultimate high-minded scholar. I think he may have worked for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing at one point, but ended up at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra. He was a great defender of Chinese culture, and the refinements of Chinese culture. He wrote a wonderful essay once on the art of calligraphy. But he made a trip back to China in 1976 and was absolutely horrified at the changes that had taken place. For example, Mao had knocked down the old city walls. There’s one chapter where he goes to find one of the famous old city gates, which he thinks has survived the Maoist purge of the old city, and it’s not there. He goes almost into a delirium – he thinks he’s lost his way, that he must have come to the wrong spot. And then he realises that it’s gone altogether.

There are these quite remarkable scenes that illustrate his horror at the utter destruction of the Mao period. He uses a great word to describe the Maoist policy: he calls it cretinous. It’s so evocative of his bitterness at what has happened and his scorn for the apologists in the West who defended Mao.

So is it more about the culture and not so much about talking to Chinese people he knew?

He has conversations with Chinese people. But he’s not allowed to talk to ordinary Chinese, which is another theme in the book. He is shadowed by people wherever he goes. It’s really an utterly spooky and deeply pessimistic work but also gripping to read. I can’t fathom why it has gone out of print and hasn’t been republished.

Let’s go on to the book by the Washington Post correspondent, John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.

I found this book really unputdownable. We’ve all read lots of books about the reforms under Deng Xiaoping since 1979. Pomfret takes it straight down to street level, almost, with the story of five people that he knew, former classmates he had met at university as a foreign student in Nanjing in 1981. He was able to trace their lives intimately from when he left them. The book really has this grand sweep to it – like a great historical novel, part Balzac, part Exodus. The stories are very poignant and moving on their own, but once they’re displayed on the widescreen of China and the policy changes taking place in China at that time, it amplifies them even more. The detail is just amazing.

There’s one guy who becomes an official in Nanjing. He becomes your typical petty official, banging his desk and demanding sentences be handed out to various criminals, and coming up with grand schemes to redo the city. Another guy goes into business. He has lots of failed businesses, but at one stage he manages to corner the market in urine in a district in Beijing. They distil urine to make a particular sort of medicinal product. So Pomfret’s old classmate goes around Beijing at night collecting people’s piss. And there’s a horrible story, about a guy whose parents were killed by some fellow students in the Cultural Revolution – and he has to bicycle past them every day. He’s resigned to the fact. He doesn’t boil with anger; he just shrugs his shoulders as if it was a bad thunderstorm that had passed or something.

The stories themselves are incredibly poignant, even though they’re ordinary stories. In China, ordinary people’s lives have been so dramatic. It works really well, and the book is really well written as well.

Let’s talk about Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar. So the fact that Yao Ming is 7ft 5in didn’t happen by accident, it seems…

I don’t have any interest in basketball, but the great thing about this story is that it becomes another way of telling the story of China. Look at the story of Yao Ming’s mother, for example.