China: The Long, Long Past

That Shapes the Present-and

THE OLDEST LIVING CIVILIZATION IS UNIQUE NOT ONLY IN ITS ENDURING CULTURE AND ITS LANGUAGE, THE MOST HIGHLY DEVELOPED AND MOST WIDELY USED IN THE WORLD, BUT IN ITS TENACIOUS ATTACHMENT TO ITS ANCIENT TRADITIONS, JUST OR UNJUST; ITS ENORMOUS, ALMOST OBSESSIVE, PRIDE; AND ITS PREDILECTION FOR VIOLENCE.
 
 

Mark Pratt, consul general of the United States of America in Canton,' often takes a hard look at the flat-roofed building opposite as he leaves his office in the red-pillared Dongfing Hotel. The four-story facade of glass panes backed by pistachio curtains bears big silver ideograms reading: CHINA EXPORT GOODS FAIR.. Since June 4, 1989, Pratt has wondered bleakly just how far China will recede into the isolationism that building epitomizes before resuming her progress toward equal participation in the modem world. The semi-annual trade fair in Canton was, only a decade ago, the only place many Chinese and foreign merchants could meet, and the Dongfang Hotel was the only place in Canton foreigners could stay. The two monumental structures are, therefore, potent symbols in a nation attuned to symbolism because direct expression of views has so often been suppressed. They do not, however, symbolize international friendship, but the reverse. The flat-roofed hall and the hotel were not built to bring Chinese and foreigners together, but to keep them as far apart as possible.

Canton has for centuries been the English name for the metropolis of South China, just as Moscow is English for Moskva.. Guangzhou, which sounds like gwong-joe, is the northern Chinese Pronunciation of the Chinese name in the spelling adopted two decades ago by the Chinese authorities. Since no particular political or other significance attaches to the divergent spellings, I shall use the two forms interchangeably.

 Only ninety miles from Hong Kong, Canton has, since the seventeenth century, been the chief meeting place for the people of China and the outsiders they called "Western barbarians." For most of the intervening three centuries, the Chinese authorities approached those meetings with two divergent, almost irreconcilable, purposes. The first was to promote trade, which required communication; the second was to prevent close communication. It was more important to keep outsiders out and Chinese in than to encourage trade. China wished, above all, to remain aloof, rather than to profit through the exchange of goods and ideas.

 Mark Pratt's career was curtailed by the chasm that so long divided China from the world-particularly from the United States. He studied Chinese at the Foreign Service Language School in Taichung, Taiwan, and today speaks and reads the language well. He is a connoisseur of both Chinese art, especially calligraphy, and of Chinese food, which is an art in itself. After 1960, he served in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Laos, and France. Finally, in 1987, at the age of fifty-nine, he was assigned to Canton in the People's Republic.

 Both the United States and China have suffered because highly qualified individuals on both sides were so long kept from direct contact with each other. Both countries are to blame. But, as George Orwell might have put it, the blame rests a little more equally on China, which was pursuing her traditional policy of excluding outsiders and isolating her people. The United States spent several decades withdrawn in horror from the wicked Communists' People's Republic of China. The U.S. then resumed its traditional policy of bounding into others' lands and lives like a friendly Great Dane in a cluttered Victorian parlor, careless of the havoc it might wreak.

 In 1989, that havoc proved catastrophic, at least in the view of hard-line Communists. The orthodox had for several years been campaigning against the "moral pollution" by the "liberal bourgeois" ideas that had been admitted to China with American diplomats and American popular culture. The orthodox had campaigned in vain.

The pro-democracy movement, which was launched in 1986 by students and intellectuals, owed more to American inspiration than any other source except normal human longing for freedom. That movement demanded freedom of speech and the press; a regime more responsive to the popular will; a crackdown on universal official corruption; and effective economic management. Its symbol was a replica of the Statue of Liberty gripping her torch with both hands, like Chris Evert making a backhand pass.

 On June 4, 1989, the old guard struck at the students and workers who had occupied thelienannwn Guangchang, the "Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace," at the center of Beijing, and barricaded the capital against the People's Liberation Army. The heavy-handed autocrats who ruled the Communist Party were forced to use troops to regain control of their own capital. The soldiers fired automatic weapons at the unarmed demonstrators, then crushed those they had missed under their tanks' tracks. Thus was order enforced and social discipline preserved.

 The world recoiled when it saw the massacre on its television screens.

But the clique of octogenarians that had usurped power was apparently unconcerned with outsiders' reactions. That clique ordered a savage new campaign of revenge and repression.

 Some leaders of the pro-democracy movement escaped. Others were captured, displayed in abject humiliation on television, and then shot. Freedom was trampled underfoot, as was Western intellectual influence. Dissenters were converted by force; books were burned; liberal research institutes were gutted; universities were purged; political indoctrination was intensified; and intellectuals' cafes were padlocked.

 Abhorring liberty, the autocrats hunted down that evil as fervently as ever an inquisitor hunted down heresy. Although the leadership said it would retain its economic ties with the outside world, the shutters were going down all over China.

 It all seemed to be happening again, as it had repeatedly happened during forty years of Communist rule-indeed, as it had happened over and over again

n during more than three thousand years of recorded Chinese history. Orthodox doctrine was clashing with practical idealism-and orthodoxy, which had the guns, was, for the moment, prevailing.

All countries are shaped by their history, but none quite as decisively as China. Moreover, no other country is quite so self-consciously aware of its long and glorious past.

 Some feeling for the Chinese past is, therefore, essential to any understanding of present-day China. Since I can hardly attempt a full account here, I shall in this chapter discuss four aspects of the multifarious past that I believe are highly pertinent today and relate them to Present events. They are China's exclusivity; the enormous influence of her unique language; the structure of Chinese society as seen particularly through the status of women; and China's pride, which is so great as to be self-deluding.

 Since China is now unsettled, most of my examples derive from the time before the June 4 atrocity. This is the way it was shortly before the autocrats turned again to widescale suppression when China appeared to be moving into the modern age.

 It all seemed to be happening again: repression and exclusion. By 1955 the Communists had expelled almost all foreigners, but a few diplomats and very few journalists were permitted to reside in Peking. 2 Their activities were strictly circumscribed. They could discuss matters of substance with no non-official Chinese-and rarely with officials. However, a thin stream of foreign traders flowed through Hong Kong twice each year to the Canton Trade Fair. They were almost the only foreigners who could talk with non-official Chinese who did not always utter only the official line.

 In Zurich the other day I talked with David Zaidner, who made his hundreds of millions trading in basic commodities, chiefly metals. He recalled that all travelers walked across the covered bridge at Lowu from British Hong Kong into the People's Republic because the Chinese authorities would permit no passenger trains to cross the frontier.

 "When you carried your luggage across the bridge, you entered another world, " Zaidner said. "You disappeared into China. For a week or two, you heard nothing whatsoever about the outside world. Anything could have happened to you-and no one would have known. It was eerie, stepping over the brink of civilization."

 The Chinese authorities permitted some trade with the West during those years of voluntary isolation. But they exposed only a few of their people to corruption by the decadent culture of the West. They exposed rarely any of their own thoughts to the guests they thus just tolerated. That pattern of behavior was hallowed by the experience of past centuries.

 The mandarins who ruled China had been particularly wary of the Western barbarians since the late sixteenth century, when the Jesuit were pushing against the gates of the great Ming Empire. Only in 1598 was Father Matteo Ricci of the Society of Jesus allowed to settle in Peking. Since the Jesuits were scientists and engineers as well as priests, they could be useful. But the mandarins saw no benefit in admitting ambassadors or merchants, who were otherwise useless,

 The West kept pushing against the gates, its bronze cannon more effective than battering rams. In the seventeenth century, a few foreign merchants were permitted to trade with a few designated Chinese merchants at Canton. The foreigners were restricted to a narrow strip on the bank of the Pearl River. After the trading season they, had to return to Macao, where the Portuguese had, by an oversight been permitted to plant a colony. No foreigner was permitted to study the Chinese language, lest he pry into sacred mysteries.

 2 My previous observations regarding Canton/Gwangzhou apply equally to Peking/Beijing The latter spelling, which represents no change of the name that means "northern capital, conveys the pronunciation more closely, with j pronounced as in plain English Jane, not as in Frenchjour. I shall use either as seems appropriate. Certain events, like the intrigues an' amours of the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi (or Cixi), obviously occurred in Peking, not Beijing
 
 
 
 

No more than the prohibition on Chinese leaving the country could those restrictions be enforced. In the nineteenth century, the poor fled South China for the opportunities of Southeast Asia and America, although their crime was punishable by death. The Western powers continued to batter at the gates of China, penetrating farther each decade. Some Westerners even learned the Chinese language.

 Mark Pratt reflected on the arduous task of learning Chinese when Moira and I stayed in his apartment in the tower of the new Garden Hotel. Acquiring proficiency, we agreed required persistence and a good memory more than intelligence.
 
 

At least the Communists had succeeded in teaching all Chinese to speak the language of the north, which Westerners call Mandarin because it was once the common tongue of the mandarinate. Just fifteen years earlier, Mandarin had been spoken little among the Cantonese, who are commercially the most progressive Chinese but culturally the most conservative. Yet in Canton today, young men and women speak Mandarin to each other, although they speak to their elders in Cantonese.

 'Rough Mandarin is even spoken by the older hawkers at Canton's Chingping Street Free Market, where Mark Pratt sent Moira and me to look for bargains in porcelains. We did not buy any of the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1254) bowls that were extraordinary bargains at fifteen to fifty dollars, though a little rough and a little chipped. We were too depressed by the subtropical rain and the viruses we had acquired in Beijing weeks earlier. We had last seen the free market in 1983, just a few years after farmers, artisans, and collectors were permitted to sell their own goods at their own prices to any customer who came along. Before 1978, they could sell legally only to the state or through the state.

 As always in China, food was still the most important commodity. Once the Chinese had to eat whatever nature offered in order to avoid starvation; today in Hong Kong and Canton, they consume rare animals to display their affluence. The flesh and skins of scaly anteaters, tigers, and eagles were on sale; domestic cats and dogs waited disconsolately in cages for the slaughter.
 
 

The Chingping Market makes London's Portobello Road appear staid and disciplined. The heavy fragrance of herbal medicines evokes tropical islands; the clutter of old teapots, enameled clocks, and statuettes recalls the bourgeois past. Shoppers flit eagerly from stall to stall, and the lucky ones discover the hidden treasure of ancient porcelain bowls. Over this triumph of free, almost anarchic, enterprise rears a black billboard exhorting in red ideograms: ABOVE ALL, PRESERVE SOCIALIST COMMERCIAL MORALITY!

 Before June 4, 1989, such slogans had become hardly more than pious invocations. The remaining true believers might still bold that China 276 PACIFIC DESTINY was following the Marxist-Leninist road--despite landslides, fallen bridges, and dead ends. But true believers were very few in China then, and they are even fewer since the debacle.

Chingping Free Market is a block from the strip along the Pearl River where English, Dutch, French, and American merchants were confined until the mid nineteenth century. The hawkers of Chingping   Street are moved by the same acquisitive spirit as those mercantile adventurers-not by socialism, which they believe has brought deprivation and suffering to China.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an independent enclave nearby, on Shameen Island. It was called a concession rather than a colony, but foreigners ruled absolutely-and they could stay as long as they wished. Some foreigners had even studied Chinese, as well as China's history and culture.

They had learned that in China the name by which something is called is usually more important than its real character. Repeatedly saying that a concept is true can make it true--even call it into existence. As the film The Last Emperor showed, China could proclaim a republic and still maintain the boy emperor in imperial state. The Chinese excel in higher mathematics and theoretical physics, in good part, I believe, because of the nature of their language. Chinese is so concrete that it makes airy abstractions seem real and immediate.

Chinese normally creates new words for new things or ideas by combining ideograms that describe specific natural phenomena. Thus, telephone is dienhua, "electric words," and proletarian is wuchanjyeji, 11 the class with no property." Abstractions therefore acquire hard reality. Chairman Mao Tsetung of the Communist Party was thus misled into believing that Karl Marx's speculations on the future of human society were concrete goals that could actually be attained.

Because of that constant reference to the past, the continuity of concepts is almost uncanny. About 500 B.C., Confucius taught that all things should be known by exact names, so that reality would accord with language. After such "rectification of terms," men would think clearly-and both public and private affairs would proceed properly. In 1942 Mao Tse-tung imposed his control on the Communist Party through a "rectification campaign" that sought to assure that all party members thought the same way, in the same terms.

Language and literature have for thousands of years been of primary importance to China's people. Today they call their standard language by many names: guanhua, the "officials' tongue," called Mandarin in the West; putunghua, the "common or ordinary tongue"; gwoya, the 11 national language"; and baihua, the "white," meaning "simple," tongue.

All but the last of those terms refer to the spoken language. Baihua is, however, the simplified style, approximating speech, in which official documents and literature have been written since the 1920s. Baihua replaced the codelike official style that had required decades of intense study. Naturally, baihua is still written in the complex Chinese ideograms already discussed in connection with Korea and Japan.

China would not exist today as a single nation or civilization had it not been for the unifying effect of those ideograms. Without them, the diversity of dialects would have fragmented her into separate nations.

I recently saw an article that advised the first-time visitor to China to have lots of business cards printed. Explaining that China had many dialects, it then cautioned, "Be sure that your details are printed on the back of the card in Mandarin, not Cantonese."

That is pure nonsense. It is impossible to write names and addresses in Cantonese rather than Mandarin. The ideograms are all the same, though pronounced differently in different dialects. The ideogram meaning "yelloW' is pronounced huang in Mandarin and wong in Cantonese. But it is always written the same way.

The Chinese speak a number Of dialects, although not as many as the West thinks. But they have only one written language, which every literate person understands.

Regional dialects are spoken by no more than 20 percent of the Chinese people; those clustered along the coast from Shanghai, south to Canton.

Yet, anyone speaking Mandarin is now understood anywhere. Differences in regional accent and idiom are not as great as differences in English as spoken in Bombay, Yorkshire, Atlanta, and Kuala Lumpur.

The stewardess, no more than twenty-two years old, was pretty in an apple-cheeked way. She was coughing heavily as the turboprop Antonov-24 bucked across the mountains of western China from Van to Chengdu late on a stormy March afternoon.

Moira solicitously asked the obvious question in a nation of nicotine addicts: "Did you smoke too many cigarettes last night?"

The stewardess replied indignantly, "Junggwo nuhaizi bu chou yan!" "Chinese girls don't smokel"

She had not hesitated to characterize an entire generation. Common standards of behavior and morals unite her hundreds of millions of sisters. She also spoke without self-consciousness of Junggwo nuhaizi, Chinese girls, not young women.

Feminists would say that usage reflects-and reinforces-the subjugation of women in China. They believe, with Confucius, that the name by which a thing is called shapes its character. And they would be right. The ancient attitude, hardly changed for millennia, holds women to be markedly inferior to men-and, therefore, destined to serve men.

The Communists have tried, albeit sporadically, to improve women's lot. In the early 1950s, shortly after the Land Reform Law, which consolidated their power, they enacted the Marriage Law. Designed to transform the legal and social position of women, it has made a change but not enough of a change.

Chiding his countrymen for degrading and exploiting women, Mao Tse-tung once declared, "Women hold up half the sky."

That was an understatement. Chinese women hold up two-thirds of the sky. Doing a disproportionate amount of the nation's work, they maintain social stability and advance the general welfare. Now ostentatiously welcomed to some jobs formerly reserved for men, women still do all the work they traditionally did. Naturally, men do not object.

Few Chinese men help with the dishes or bathe the children. Household chores are for women, even though nowadays most wives work just as hard outside as husbands do. in the city, they earn the essential second salaries; in the country, they tend the cash crops. The Chinese man nonetheless says that a wife is supposed to help her husband in every way, while being modest and unassertive. Those are the paramount feminine virtues.

Among the oppressed the Communists promised to "liberate," women fought hard for the revolution. Yet they are today grievously underrepresented in government, from the supreme authority, the Political Bureau of the Communist party, to the lowest level, the Management Council of Marco Polo Bridge Township, outside Beijing. There has not for years been a single woman in the Politburo; there is only one woman among the nine members of the Management Council.

More than three-quarters of Chinese women work a "double day." Beside their outside jobs, they spend three and a half hours a day on housework, some assisted by the basic domestic appliances now on the market. Almost half also look after aging parents-in-law, as well, but usually not their own parents, who were the responsibility of their brothers' wives. Traditionally, a wife has left her own family to become a member of her husband's family.

The China Wonien's journal, which naturally champions its readers, once cited with dismay a survey taken in a medium-sized city in Hunan, Chairman Mao Tse-tung's home province. Women employed by private manufacturers were working fifteen hours a day and were beaten for their mistakes. Yet the Communists came to power with women's fervent support-to end such capitalist exploitation.

In the deep countryside, one can still see groups of teenage farm girls driven along dirt roads like sheep. They are destined for sale to the. highest bidder as concubines and maidservants---or for service in clandestine brothels. Many female infants are still left to die on hillsides. Sons are traditionally China's social security; they look after their parents in old age. Daughters are liabilities; they require dowries, and they look after their husbands' parents.

The director of the Women's Federation of Beijing pointed out in an interview with Daniel Southerland of the Washington Post: "The belief that women are inferior in the professions is not only established in the minds of men, but also in the minds of women. Some women feel they should sacrifice themselves [to the service of men]."

Chinese women have been admitted to universities since the 1920s. But they have a hard time finding employment and pay to match their education. Yet in some fields their right to work alongside men as equals is not questioned. Women regularly build, repair, and sweep roads; they tow laden carts and carry heavy burdens up steep hills; they pull plows and dig ditches; they chip stones, haul away refuse, and climb scaffolding carrying bricks and cement.

Such tasks, hallowed by tradition, actually weigh heavier on women's shoulders today. Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader, has been pragmatist, happily reviving old practices that work. Many women are, therefore, relegated again to the subjection that Confucius believed was their proper state.

In traditional China, a woman was subject to her father before she married and then to her husband. As a widow, she obeyed the new head of the family, usually her own son. A divorce lost her standing in society. If she went back to her own family, she would be treated as an underling by her sisters-in-law and would often suffer material deprivation.

For obvious reasons, women did not initiate divorce. Social pressure' kept families intact. A well-to-do husband would take a second wife as well as quasi-wives known as concubines. His pretext was often his first wife's inability to bear a male heir or additional male children. But she remained his wife, and all the children called her "mother. " No matter how it hurt, wives would put up with other wives and with concubines, rather than become unpersons through divorce.

Moreover, Chinese puritanism still considers women unclean temptresses, since all sexual matters are shameful. In the modem metropolis of Canton, in 1987, a university senior called Mei became pregnant. A canny American woman believes Mei told the truth when she said she had not known she was pregnant with all such ignorance implies. When her pregnancy was discovered, Mei was summarily aborted, sterilized, and expelled from the university. No one would marry her, and no one could employ her. She had lost her standing in society. She was an unperson.

In that prudish milieu, divorce is still a stigma. Canton is more tolerant because . use it is subject to much outside influence through neighboring Hong Kong. Yet in Canton Moira and I encountered two divorcees who were shamefaced in this new age when women's right to divorce is enshrined in the Marriage Law.

The first was a clever, humorous twenty-six-year-old whom I shall call Wang Ying, which is not her name - We had lunch with Ying and a friend who wore a UCLA sweatshirt and spoke excellent German. The friend confided that she was going to Europe to study-and would "never come back." Not quite as defiant, Ying said she was thinking seriously about leaving China if she could, Perhaps for good.

Her story was simple-and typical . Born in Nanking, she had studied English at the Foreign Languages Institute in Canton and married a fellow student. Within a year they were divorced. A modern woman with a modern education, Ying, like all Chinese women, hates to discuss sexual matters. But she whispered to Moira that the marriage had never been consummated.

Her divorce was easy, but the consequences hard-as is the constant shame. Doing a dull job with an export firm, Ying would like to return to Nanking. That is impossible. Her parents say they have no room for her because her mother does not want her to return. Her divorce has brought shame on the entire family, although it was due to no fault of hers, but to her bridegroom's homosexuality.

Ying~s disposition is sunny, but there is another complication: she is in Canton illicitly. Although employed by a state-owned trading company, she has no hukou, "resident's permit," for the metropolis. Quite illegally' she rents a corner of a female friend's small apartment.

She is lucky to have found a place at all. Desperately overcrowded, China is chronically short of accommodations, in part because legal rents are negligible. The authorities have tried allowing rent to rise to more realistic levels, in the hope that private entrepreneurs would create more housing. But that experiment fueled soaring inflation.

Ying hates the impermanence and the insecurity of her nomadic life. Her only possessions are her books and a huge ginger tomcat called Wu, after the hero of a fairy tale. She would like a home and a family, but she feels she will never marry.

"We're all very enlightened nowadays," she says without discernible bitterness. "But no respectable Chinese boy will marry a divore6eeven if his parents would let him. I just want to go abroad to graduate school-and, maybe, not come back."

Hu Suya, a successful career woman, is virtually Yings opposite. She holds a key senior position in a highly successful pharmaceutical corporation. Smart, even soignée, she wears a black suit with a red silk lining, a silver brooch, and a silk blouse in an abstract white and brown pattern. Her slender legs are set off by gunmetal gray stockings and neat high-heeled pumps. Even in this new China, one hardly expects such chic or such aplomb. Turned out like a Hong Kong career woman, self-assured, she epitomizes the new Chinese woman: an equal partner in the great enterprise of bringing the motherland into the modern world.

Yet, close up, the woolen fabric of her suit is a little shoddy, and the cut is a little clumsy. Canton today is like Hong Kong a quarter of a century ago, but its products are not as sophisticated as Hong Kong's were even then. The metropolis of South China is a little seedy and bedraggled, its newly constructed buildings already tarnished by neglect.

Walking along a walled path past a grimy swimming pool, I ask Ms. Hu when the pharmaceutical plant was built. She replies, "In 1984." Not hiding my surprise, I ask, "Then why is it so.

"Dirty," she fills in. "I know."

Hu Suya smiles wryly. She shrugs, saying without words that she Ii s helpless to affect her countrymen's lack of concern for their surroundings, much less the environment,

Hu Suya bails Moira and me as journalism colleagues. She is a correspondent for the journal of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology, concerned primarily with herbal medicine, whose roots go deep into China's long history. But, as her business card informs us, she earns her living as director of the Strategy Department of the Baiyunshan Pharmaceutical Factory. It is her responsibility to search out new finance, new markets, and new products for a company that has, in fifteen years, expanded from thirty employees to 5,500 and become China's third largest pharmaceutical manufacturer. That rate of growth is unique, even though drugs are a prime growth industry. All Chinese believe passionately in taking medicine to get well, to keep well-and to become more virile.

Ms. Hu runs a vital department with six employees, four male and all university graduates. She earns the Y3,600 plus generous bonuses she receives each year, Some $1,000 to $1,500 does not seem much, considering her responsibilities. But it is the salary of a director of a large factory or a chief scientist in a country where most workers earn no more than eighty dollars a month.

She also enjoys certain perquisites: chauffeured automobiles, an expense account, and travel by sleeping car or airplane. Since all transportation is chronically overcrowded, high position or generous bribes are essential for getting a seat on an airplane or a berth on a train.

Ms. Hu made it on her own. Born just after the war, in the grubby commercial metropolis of Wuhan, at the center of China in Hubei Province, she won admission to Wuhan University. She graduated, with a degree in economics, in 1967, into the chaos of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Assigned to the foreign affairs section of the Provincial Government, she had hardly time to find her desk and the ladies' room before she was "sent down, " that is, banished, to work on a remote farm. She had made the grave error of openly criticizing Chairman Mao Tse-tung's termagant fourth wife, Jiang Ching, who was the evil genius of the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Suya refused to yield to despair. Besides, she was lucky. Others even. less independent suffered not merely banishment, but imprisonment, torture, and death. Yet she was allowed to return to Wuhan in 1971, after only four years in exile. She was assigned to the production line of an automobile factory. But her intelligence and her determination saved her from a life of drudgery. In 1975 she was admitted to the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology where she studied for five years.

"Not enough time to qualify as an herbal doctor," she points out. "That could take twenty years ... or more. "

Assigned to the Hubei Province Pharmaceutical Control Bureau on graduation, she also became a correspondent for the journal of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology. She doesn't say so, but she obviously did not take on that additional work only because she was energetic and curious. It gave her opportunities for further advancement. She had, after all, not come that far by being shy or passive.

Hu Suya knocked on -opportunity's door in 1986, when she came to Canton to write an article on the Baiyunshan Pharmaceutical Factory. The founder-president hired her on the spot to head the newly established strategy department. Her brief tenure in office, a period of great growth for Baiyunshan, has crowned her spectacular personal career.

Epitomizing China's new women, Hu Suya is not typical, but extraordinary. She should be vibrant, indeed triumphant.

Yet Moira and I find her restrained, her expression almost melancholy in repose. Perhaps foreigners depress her. Yet she meets many foreigners, and received a delegation from Yugoslavia earlier the same day.

We begin to understand her despondency when we touch on her personal life. She Smiles and looks away when I ask her age. she will not say, although she must be in her middle forties.When I ask if she is married, she hangs her head. I am astonished to see that the tough, high-flying lady executive is shamefaced. I do not press her. But after a long pause, she says' almost inaudibly, "I was married. But I divorced ... a long time ago. She responds eagerly as when I ask about children. Her sixteen-year old son is studying music at the Canton Fine Arts Academy. Her own taste, she adds, runs to Beethoven and Bach.

"How about Mozart?" I ask.

"Oh, Mozart's all right, but he's not as deep."

Hu Suya has recovered her aplomb. Except for the lingering sadness in her eyes, the painful matter might never have arisen.

She has allowed us to glimpse the shame and guilt that even a strong, successful modern Chinese woman still feels after a divorce a decade earlier. Hers is not simply the remorse and self-reproach any woman or any man must feel at the failure of a marriage. It is self-castigation, almost self loathing.

Yet, because Hu Suya has prospered by her own efforts, she has not lost her place in society as a result of her divorce.

Each time I visit the new China, I am struck anew by how much it is like the old China. Social attitudes that are current not only among the farming and working masses, but also among professionals, intellectuals, and managers, do not differ markedly from the attitudes of their remote ancestors. Aside from a few who are enlightened--or, at least, Westernized-Chinese react not only to divorce, but to many other experiences much as did Chinese in the first century A.D.

The nation , s moral consensus is founded on pride in being Chinese. Actually, pride is too mild, and arrogance not too strong to describe their conviction of cultural and racial superiority. The Chinese consider their country the center of the world. junggwo, the "Central Country," is an old name still in daily use. Tien Hsia, "All That Is Under Heaven," is another traditional term.

The overwhelming pride that has made for Chinas survival as a nation is today the single greatest obstacle to Chinas modernization. If you are already superior to all others, why change? Why imperil your self-esteem by acknowledging that you need to learn from outsiders?

A few years ago, a penetrating and independent thinker discussed with alarm what he called "the center-of-the-world complex. " Yen Jyaqi was until June 4, 1989, director of the institute of Social Sciences at the Academy Of Science, Chinas premier intellectual institution. In exile, he is now the intellectual mentor of the burgeoning resistance movement. In 1986, he presaged the present violent clash of values when he asserted that the Chinese conviction of absolute superiority was the greatest single obstacle to China's learning from the outside world. But, he pointed out, if China did not learn from others, she could never attain the industrial and agricultural modernization that remains today the expressed purpose of even the reactionary autocrats. Yet, Yen Jyaqi wrote, his compatriots still believed China was the center of the world because of her uniquely superior culture.

Supreme for millennia in East Asia, which knew little of Europe, China was greatly superior intellectually and materially to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Jesuits discovered that superiority when they gained admission to the secretive Ming Empire. China's previous superiority and her present illusions both derive from Confucianism, the state ideology that was dominant until the twentieth century. If China were not supreme, why should her neighbors have adopted her Confucian morality, literature, social system, and government?

In Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, as well as Hong Kong and Singapore, children are trained to study hard, to respect authority, and to strive for society's approbation. Such neo-Confucian behavior has promoted modernization. Those states are adept at producing and selling more goods than anyone else.

China is far from creating a self-sustaining modem economy. Her primary trouble is neither her material backwardness nor her unwieldy size. It is in her soul: the moral consensus so powerful it inhibits change and encourages complacency. China's institutions rest on foundations too massive, too fixed, and too deep for easy alteration.

Unlike the flexible Japanese, the Chinese cannot build a centralized modern state on the foundation of a quasi-medieval social order. They cannot operate an ultramodern economy alongside a quasi-feudal distribution system. The Japanese can exist happily amid fundamental contradictions, but not the Chinese.

More logical than the Japanese, the Chinese are less adaptable. More individual, they are far less disciplined. Seeking social harmony, they lack mass creative tension. Besides, the straightforward Chinese language is hostile to the tortuous evasions and deceptions of many-layered Japanese.

Chinese is rich in euphemisms: "flower house" for brothel, 11 plum quarter" for red-light district, and "plum disease" for syphilis; "jade stalk" for penis, and "jade terrace" for vulva. Such elaborations preserve from brusqueness and brutality a language that has been rubbed down by continuous use over four millennia.

Refined over those tens of centuries, Chinese has the simplest grammatical structure of any modern language. As in English, word order is most important, running subject-verb-object, as in Wo kan ni: I see you." As in English, auxiliary verbs are extremely important, as in Wo yao dzou: I will leave." But most of the grammatical infrastructure of English, which is itself much simplified, is absent from Chinese. A word never changes its form to change its meaning in Chinese as run does to -ran or have to has and had. Nor does a word ever acquire a suffix to indicate the past or the plural, as in visit(ed) or auto(s), Simplicity is all.

Yet Chinese is neither inexpressive nor rudimentary. Quite supple, it can say anything English can and almost as cogently or subtly. Nonetheless, the stiff backbone of the Chinese language lies in the ancient ideograms.

Normally the spoken form shapes the character of a language, for writing alters in response to changes in speech. However, the reverence paid to the ideograms made written Chinese dominant. That dominance was deliberately fostered. The men in power hallowed the ideograrns--and the literature written in those ideograms that was the source of their power.

In the sixth century B.C., Confucius had given China his wisdom and had sanctified nine works of history, poetry, ritual, and administration. All wisdom, human or divine, was contained in those works. Understanding their mysteries, however, required rigorous study.

Decades of such study produced the mandarins, who ruled China for more than two thousand years under twenty-six successive dynasties. Their sacred written language was called wenyen, literally "civilized words," for it preserved the classical style of the books canonized by Confucius. No more than Latin in the modern West was wenyen used in conversation. Indeed, it made little sense when one heard it read aloud unless one already knew the passage being read. Deliberately dense and impenetrable, wenyen was a private language for the scholar officials.

Upon the foundation of wenyen, those mandarins built the system of government, economics, etiquette, morals, ritual, and relationships that dominated China for millennia. With the emperor at its center, the ideal Confucian state sought not merely authoritarian, but totalitarian control. Most dynasties did not, however, attempt to regulate every aspect of the behavior of every subject. By and large, such control was unnecessary. Almost all Chinese were already conditioned by Confucian indoctrination to behave as required.

Dynasties might fall to rebels, to invaders, or to their own decay. But the doctrine was immortal. Conquerors, Chinese or foreign, invariably adopted Confucianism. It was the only way to rule China.

Normally, emperors ruled benignly and distantly. The county chief, the lowest-ranking mandarin, was normally instructed to collect the taxes and to maintain public order. He was to avoid excessive levies and intrusions into daily life, lest he provoke discontent, disorder, and rebellion. The system worked very well. Even the Ming (1368-1644), the most totalitarian of all major dynasties, did not originally go much beyond exhorting its subjects to behave properly-and to pay their taxes. Yet no more than other dynasties could the Ming escape the curse that afflicted all in time.

Corruption, as I noted earlier, was the evil of the Confucian system. Most mandarins interpreted Confucius as charging them to look after the interests of their own families above all else, even the public interest. Most mandarins were, moreover, badly paid by a stingy Imperial Court. They were therefore forced to support their scores of kinfolk with the spoils of office. Since the Confucian system relied upon the virtue of men rather than the force ofl aw, corrupt mandarins usually went unpunished by their corrupt superiors.

When the exactions of the mandarinate and the decadent Imperial Court fanned popular discontent, the Ming levied higher taxes and used greater force to make the people pay up. The court needed more and more money to maintain its extravagant state and to pay the armies that put down the sporadic rebellions provoked by its oppressive rule. Rebellion therefore spread, and taxes became more extortionate.

Growing weaker and more corrupt, the Ming Dynasty also grew more bureaucratic. Even the mandarinate, the bureaucracy itself, was increasingly regimented. In official brothels the standard of furnishings, food, and drink, as well as the skills of the courtesans, were determined by the patron's rank in the nine grades of the mandarinate, just as the spaciousness of offices, the size of rugs, and the number of telephones are today determined by civil-service rank in Washington, London, Paris--or Beijing.

Bureaucracy has actually expanded in the interim, particularly under the People's Republic. Present-day reformers obviously face an immense task. A Communist bureaucracy divided into twenty-six grades, each with its fixed privileges, cannot permit, much less stimulate, the initiative necessary for economic development.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen's revolution of 1911 overthrew the Ching Dynasty and with it the millennia-old Confucian state. But the Confucian mentality still dominated China, blocking political and economic progress -and Confucianism rested upon wenyen, the classical written language. Young idealists therefore urged reform of the written language in order to free China from intellectual and political bondage.

Political reform had already failed tragically. After the revolution of 1911, Dr. Sun Yat-sen had become president of the newly proclaimed Republic of China and had shortly thereafter resigned in the hope of reconciling contending factions. He actually made way for scores of rapacious warlords, whose armies fought to seize power-and loot the nation. Those independent generals made much of China a battlefield; they killed hundreds of thousands, and they reduced most of the survivors to misery.

In 1916 a student of philosophy at Cornell University named Hu Shih argued that political reform was impossible until the Confucian mentality had been broken. He believed that the only hope lay in language reform: wenyen had to be replaced by a more easily understood style.

Returning to teach at Peking University, he found his platform in a new magazine called The New Youth. It was edited by Dean Chen Tu-hsiu, who advocated, as the cure for China's ills, sai-yin-ssu, "science, and de-nww-keh-law-see, democracy." In 1917, The New Youth published an article by Hu Shih entitled "A Proposal for the Reform of Chinese Literature." He argued that wenyen should be replaced by baihua, a "white," that is, simple, written style based upon the spoken language of Peking. Baihua was to supplant wenyen in all official and legal documents; popular writing in that readily understandable style to rally patriots to action.

Thus China, in the early twentieth century, began to make the transition from the classical to the spoken language that Europe had made during the Renaissance, half a millennium earlier. Learned and governmental papers, as well as fiction, essays, biography, and history, were thenceforth largely to be written in the vernacular, baihua, rather the classical language, wenyen. In China that transition was to be merely a reform, but a revolution.

Professor Hu Shih's proposal rallied idealistic young men and women-and university students realized that they could decisively influence the future of the nation. Students enjoyed great respect use they were learned scholars-and the Confucian system vend learning. They deployed their enormous influence in the campaign to replace Confucian authoritarianism, which was based upon yen, with democracy, which was to be based upon baihua.

In Peking, on May 4, 1919, a new era began. The students who were fighting for baihua against wenyen took on a more formidable enemy. A thousand students demonstrated against the warlord government's decision to cede Chinese territory and Chinese rights to Japan. Meeting violence with violence when the police tried to disperse them, they set to the residence of the minister of communications and beat up the Chinese minister to Japan. Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, May Fourth Movement was to become a nationwide left-wing crusade for not only a new literature, but a new China.

Dean Chen Tu-hsiu and Professor Hu Shih were among those arrested by the warlord president's police for instigating that violence. s later, Dr. Hu Shih told me that neither Chen Tu-hsiu nor he had n anywhere near the demonstration they were credited with inspiring and leading.

After May 4 1919, such distinctions hardly mattered. The intelligentsia had thrown its great moral power into the struggle to remake China. The power of the student demonstrations on political developments was to be demonstrated repeatedly over the decades.

Professor Hu Shih was for a time to become China's most distinguished philosopher and for a time her ambassador to the United States. Dean Chen Tu-hsiu was, in 1921, to become the founding secretary general of the Chinese Communist party, whose membership was all young intellectuals. The Communist party was, in 1949, to take power and proclaim the People's Republic of China.