In an interview 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.

In an interview on China and the US

What’s your fifth selection?

Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys. He is a marvellous writer, and was one of those people who dared to say things. The book came out in 1977, as interest in China was beginning to incubate. He was in Beijing and he looked at the toll that had been taken on Chinese culture, archaeology, religion – he looked right down the barrel of the gun and described [the Cultural Revolution] in all its horrific dimension. He’s very Western, an undying humanist, and unrepentant about his humanism.

What were your own impressions of China when you first visited at around the same time, in 1974? – a trip you describe in your book In the People’s Republic.

Well, unlike Pierre Ryckmans or [his pen name] Simon Leys, who was living there as a diplomat, I was coming in for the first time. I was very confused by what I found, and I don’t think it’s adequately reflected in my book. I thought I knew how to feel comfortable around Chinese, because I’d spent a lot of time around them in America, but when I got to China I felt tremendously uncomfortable and insoluble. Of course one understands it now, but the Cultural Revolution was going on.

Simon Leys looked at it from the perspective not so much of trying to understand China but just of what he saw, and whether this was a violation of some basic, fundamental human principles. And it was. The Cultural Revolution was a political seizure of catastrophic and savage proportions.

When you visit China today, what are the most striking differences to that first trip which take you back every time you get off the airplane?

It’s the contradictions that exist in parallel. On the one hand China has changed dramatically. Unbelievable amounts of high-speed change. But on the other hand there’s so much beneath the surface that blunders on and remains the same, undisturbed – whether it’s the structures of government, the ways Chinese interact with each other, or the ways they look at the outside world. These things are very deep and in many ways unyielding.

And looking to the future, how do you picture China and China-US relations in 20 years?

I think it’s going to be a very long, hard slog. Our best hope is peaceful evolution. It’s a kind of terrible wager what the best way forward is, and I don’t know the answer to it. But I do know that if we’re looking at this interaction between East and West, we have to ask what is the best policy, the best angle of repose for the West to seek in relation to China. How do you influence China most instrumentally and effectively and constructively? That’s a really hard question. In a way it is the only question, if you’re interested in American foreign policy.

Do you have any hint as to the answer?

The answer is not forthcoming. I guess I would say that pressure has a positive effect and a negative effect. One constantly has to be adjusting and recalibrating the mix. And as one can see from the books I’ve cited, China is extremely neurotic about comparison, about having its weakness, its insecurity, its lack of confidence put before it.

That’s what happened in [the Tiananmen square protests of] 1989, and it induced a massive epileptic seizure of control afterwards. And we’re still paying for it. That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to people exercising their rights. It’s just a simple observation that within the context of a Communist Party that’s still got a lot of chops, you have to be very careful with your judgements about what can work and what can’t work.