Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beware Law Written in the Heart

The quantity of unintended human misery is near enough infinite. But the quantity of misery experienced by the Chinese nation intentionally through its own government's policies is of a higher cardinal order of infinity altogether. The capacity of the Chinese to endure what they have seems only matched by their capacity to forget it. It appears that nothing about China can be exaggerated. Its suffering, its resilience, its insanity, and its resistance to self-analysis, all defy measured description.

I had just entered American high school in 1961. Everyone was concerned about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the formation of OPEC, and the big Russian hydrogen bomb. No one who was known to me knew, much less cared, that somewhere around 45 million Chinese were dead or dying of starvation. China existed effectively in a universe beyond my event horizon, a situation almost unthinkable in a world of Twitter, Google Earth, and Feedly.

So to read Tombstone is shocking in two ways. First because it documents the famine planned by Mao Zedong for purely personal political reasons. Second because this was an event carried out in secret - not just kept from the rest of the world, but, more remarkably, kept from the Chinese themselves, despite the overwhelming physical evidence visible to everyone.

The research findings made by the author, whose father died of starvation in front of him, were even a surprise to him. He hadn't known, or at least couldn't accept the possibility, that his fellow countrymen of his own government, a government dedicated to socialist principles of human welfare, could intentionally do what they so obviously did: sacrifice not just the interests but the lives of an entire population to maintain the position of one man. At least Stalin had the politesse to terrorise and exterminate mainly those who might resist. Mao was not in the least selective.

My questions approaching Tombstone, therefore, are I suppose naively anthropological. Are the phenomena it describes, and describes well in terms of experiences as well as policies, simply human? That is, could any nation fall into the chasm of destruction that was the old Communist China given its circumstances and the randomness of politics; or was there something in Chinese culture itself, a fatal flaw, that was exploited by the Communist leadership? If what has gone on is a risk to/of humanity in general, why is its reality still resisted by the Chinese? If there is something peculiarly Chinese, in terms of history or culture, that has created such horror, how can it possibly be avoided as the central constitutional issue in today's China?

The answers Yang gives, I think, are reasonably clear, however nuanced his presentation. Certainly the imperial tradition and Confucian values of respect for authority promoted a level of receptivity to Maoist direction. But it was his description of a pervasive, highly spiritual, and apparently irrepressible, Chinese idealism which, it seems to me, energised the propaganda machine and motivated the Party at grassroots levels. This inveterate, irrepressible idealism, paradoxically, stands out as the most significant factor in sustaining such a murderous regime.

This is an unexpected conclusion, but one which introduces some comprehensibility to events. It is not a flaw in Chinese culture, but a virtue very much appreciated in the West, that was the lever used to move an entire society. And it seems to be the same lever used in subsequent shifts - from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution and into a Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.

That the Chinese are a people exceptionally willing to sacrifice themselves, even unto death, is certainly not how the Chinese are perceived through most Western media. Recent books like Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition, or Leslie Chang's Factory Girls describe a society of grasping individualism that appears to want to emulate the consumerist and entirely materialist mores of the West. It is, according to these accounts and many others, a society in which deceit, fraud (legal and not) and the exploitation of foreigners as well as other Chinese is routine. Principled living, much less idealism, hardly features.

But Yang gives things away that he may not even be aware of, and that those who are not part of Chinese society may not perceive as central to Chinese character because they are so much what we in the West perceive ourselves to be. There is a certain fear about China but that fear originates in a similarity too close to the bone to admit. This similarity is buried beneath differences in language, history and politics. Yet Yang alludes to it throughout. I shall attempt to put this similarity succinctly, even if inadequately.

An abiding ideal in Western culture, stated by all its principal religions, traditions and ancient philosophies, is 'the law written in the heart', that is, the assimilation of spiritual values so completely that codification and enforcement of formal restrictions is unnecessary. Individuals in such a state act correctly because they are aware of both the criteria of correct action and the beneficial effects of following those criteria. As I have shown elsewhere (see GR review of Giorgio Agamben's The Highest Poverty), this is the goal not only of Western monasticism but its derivative, the most important conceptual export from Europe to Asia in modern times: the idea of the civil corporation.

This ideal is embedded in European literature. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans (and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, whoever he may be), Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their announcements of a new form of covenant, the Greek Stoic philosophers with their concept of natural law, the Roman Cicero in his raising of this natural law above legal statutes, even the injunction of the Quran that says, "This is the Nature of God on which he has formed and moulded the Nature of man. The understanding of this Nature constitutes right religion.", all speak of this internalised ethical as well as religious framework.

What all these texts are describing is the ideal society which is hidden in the heart of all men. 'Revealed' is how it is put in religious terms; 'known instinctively and universally' are the terms preferred by philosophy. The specific content of this ideal is not nearly as important as its presumed existence as a common moral 'core' of humanity.

Such an ideal is not just shared with Chinese culture. It is arguable, given the otherwise inexplicable mass cultural adaptations in China during the last 70 years, that this ideal is the central spiritual impulse of the entire Chinese nation. The Chinese have achieved what the West has perennially sought but failed to achieve - a social system controlled not by law but by common sentiment.

The strangeness of China in Western eyes - its 'adaptable' legal system, its willingness to conform to the party line, its creation of an economic system which is neither capitalist nor Marxist, its capacity for living with paradox - may well be down to the inability of those eyes to see how fundamentally they have abandoned this ideal as too difficult to achieve. Impossible for us, therefore it can't exist.

But it does exist in what its citizens consider a far more advanced society. It also gives the lie to the presumption, Freudian as well as Christian, that monotheism is essential to such internalised morality (pace to the American sociologist Philip Rieff who formulated the hypothesis)..

Clearly I do the Chinese nation, Yang’s book, and particularly those sacrificed during The Great Leap Forward, an injustice in this identification of an apparently unbounded spiritual idealism as the motive force of Chinese culture. For this I can only offer an apology; but I also remain in a way unrepentant. China is too vast - culturally as well as geographically - to comprehend. Such as I can only make a guess as to its meaning in anticipation of more, immensely more, reading and thinking.

But if I am only even partly correct, China raises an issue about the foundations of Western culture. Despite our long-standing lip service to the ideal of ‘law written in the heart’, are we really prepared for its consequences? Law in the heart tends not to be subject to effective criticism or adaptation to circumstances. It cannot be discussed because it is the foundation for all discussion. Its very hiddeness makes it dangerous. It may not be law at all, merely prejudice - literally premature judgement.

Hidden, secret law can obviously cause immense pain and harm. To the degree we have already approached this ideal in our overwhelmingly corporate lives, we too in the West have induced similar pain and harm - with somewhat less 'success' than the Chinese, for the moment. We still treasure it even though we may believe it to be infeasible. Our smug non-chalance may be just the opening needed for Trumpian blathering to undermine Western society as completely as Mao's demagoguery.

Yang quite sensibly prefers to substitute a ’tombstone in the heart’ as an alternative ideal. I am inclined to agree. Perhaps we might be able to find such an alternative for our corporate ideal.

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