Out of China’s recent pasts

Press, 1 October 1983, Page 18

Out of China’s recent pasts

Things Chinese. By J. Dyer Ball. First published, 1892. This edition, Oxford U.P., 1982. 729 pp. Index. $6l. (Reviews by Naylor Hillary) Dyer Ball, son of a missionary doctor in China, was born in Canton in 1847. His life was spent in the Hong Kong civil service where he became Protector of the Chinese and an authority on Chinese language and culture. His book began life as a series of notes connected with China and grew to an encyclopedia of Chinese society and history, as it appeared to a scholarly Englishman in late Victorian times. It is studded with strange and exotic information, as well as useful facts. “Things Chinese” ran through several editions before the author died in 1919. This reprinted text is that of the fifth edition, revised by E. Chalmers Werner, and first printed in Shanghai in 1925. The book was treated in its day as a reliable, standard reference work, especially after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 roused European interest in China. Dyer Ball frequently expresses admiration for the Christian missions in China and believed Christianity had a God-given power to regenerate China. This will seem strange to modern China worshippers. Yet Dyer Ball manages to discuss a host of matters Chinese without ever seeming derisive or condescending. One of his most revealing entries comes under the heading of “Topsyturvydom”: “It is the unexpected that one must expect, especially in this land of topsyturvydom. The Chinese are not only remote from us with regard to position on the globe, but they are our opposites in almost every action and thought. It never does to judge how a Chinese would act under certain circumstances from what we ourselves would do if placed in similar conditions: the chances are that he would do the very actions that we would never think of performing; think the very thoughts that would never occur to us; and say what no foreigner would ever think of uttering.” “Things Chinese” now is an historical curiosity (an expensive one), a relic from a world almost forgotten. It is a book for dipping and browsing. However dated its contents, gems still emerge: “The modern newspaper is destined to be an important factor for good in China ... Unfortunately, a tendency very occasionally reveals itself to pander to depraved tastes in articles not conducive to public morality, and a rabid hatred of the foreigner is sometimes visible in some distorted account.” “Piracy on water and highway robbery on land render to a certain extent life and property insecure in China as compared with countries like England ...” [A modern traveller might well conclude the opposite. China today is usually scrupulously honest towards travellers, unlike parts of the West.] The entries run from abacus to zoology, the information from details of traffic on Chinese railways (as at 1922) to the institution of gambling on the results of public examinations.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of this curious republication is as a reminder that China had a rich and complex association with the rest of the world for at least a century before Mao’s successful civil war. The Communist victory in 1949 turned China over to rule by an imported Western cult. Dyer Ball arouses nostalgia for China as it was, and might have been. One’s Company. By Peter Fleming. Penguin, 1983. 251 pp. $10.95 (paperback). Knowledge of modern China is often assumed to start with those publicists who had the good fortune to visit Mao Tse-tung and his comrades in the years shortly before World War 11. Books such as Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China” picked what turned out to be the winning side and thrived. Perhaps military victory always determines which version of history will be accepted as “true.” Those who wrote about aspects of China other than the Communists in the 1920 s and 1930 s have been largely forgotten, especially if they seemed not to reinforce what became the standard myths of later Maoism. Peter Fleming was one such writer and traveller. On behalf of “The Times” he travelled by train from London to Manchuria in 1933 and went on to visit Nationalist Chinese troops at war with the Communists in Central China. He writes with wry good humour and a fine detachment. Manchuria then was newly under Japanese rule, in spite of proteste from the West. Fleming was surprised by the efficiency of the Japanese and by the general welcome they received from Chinese who had known nothing but warlords and bandits for more than a generation. He went on anti-bandit operations with Japanese troops and found them well disciplined, even if they caught no bandits. Then, in Kiangsi, he became one of the few Westerners to visit Chiang Kaishek’s anti-Communist operations. This was the pre-history of the Chinese Communist revolution — before Chiang’s main campaigns against the Red Army, before the Long March, before Mao was winning foreign hearts and minds by dimpling pronouncements from the Yenan caves. The Nationalists, far from being the brutal masters portrayed by later Maoist historians, were generally well-meaning but ineffectual. Their army was welcomed as protection for the peasants from the Communist rein of terror. But Fleming observed that Communist discipline and ruthlessness should ensure the survival of Mao whose name was already becoming known. Much of the Communist effort seemed to be directed to the destruction of Catholic missions that were maintained under extreme hardship by Irish priests. Fleming regarded himself as “the detached observer, that insufferable person, always difficult to please.” He has no political axe to grind and plays no favourites. His view of China makes refreshing reading. He also has a power of description that many a travel writer might envy. Among his adventures, he survived a train smash on the TransSiberian Railway near the Chinese border: “It would be difficult to imagine a nicer sort of railway accident. The weather was ideal. No one was badly hurt. And the whole thing was done in

just the right Drury Lane manner, with lots of twisted steel and splintered woodwork and turf scarred deeply with demoniac force. For once the Russians had carried something off.” The Retreat of Radiance. By lan Moffitt. Collins, 1983. 324 pp. $19.95. Thirty years is a long time to brood about revenge, especially when the revenge may be inspired more than a little by feelings of guilt at having been a helpless witness of a monstrous atrocity. lan Moffitt is an entertaining Australian writer. Quinn, his chief character here, has as a young Australian journalist been present at a massacre during the Chinese civil war in the late 19405. The incident took place near the Retreat of Radiance, a Buddhist monastery in southern China. Quinn has brooded about it, while his own life has slipped into a seedy emptiness. Finally, almost 50, he decides on a suicidal personal revenge against the Chinese Nationalist, General Keh, who ordered the massacre, and against a United Nations relief worker who seemed to enjoy watching it. The General has risen to power and great wealth in Taiwan. Others connected with the incident seem not to care. Even the Communist Chinese authorities on the spot are indifferent now to Quinn’s evidence of the savagery of one of their old enemies. And Quinn, on his quest through old stamping grounds, is an unlikely hero. He “does everything by halves”, he “paints the town beige”, he sees himself on the brink of “the looney bin”. Moffitt set out to explore the effect on Quinn of his decision to “wipe the slate clean”. His story takes over, pushing Quinn’s personal oddities to one side. Or rather, his stories — for Moffitt tells two very good adventure yarns, first of the young Quinn’s experiences in China’s war, and then of the later Quinn’s search for General Keh in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Along the way a variety of arresting minor characters appear to delight and bemuse — from an Australian tennis star turned stripper in Taiwan, to a “dried arrangement of PanAm hostesses” in a Hong Kong bar. Moffitt manages a sense of events casting shadows forward and back in time, and a powerful sense of modern Chinese history.