I’m just back from two weeks in China, traveling with my wife in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. It was my second trip, and as before, I came away in awe of this gigantic and ancient country living through one of history’s most extraordinary transitions.
On the long flight home I had the depth of the change brought home reading most of Wash Post reporter John Pomfret’s book Chinese Lessons, in which he describes the life stories of five of his classmates from Nanjing University, where he studied as an undergraduate in the very early 1980s.
These individuals had come of age during the Great Leap Forward and/or the Cultural Revolution, two of the most ill-named and disastrous policies in world history, and their harrowing journeys (as both victims of and participants in a great evil) embody the almost impossible-to-believe transition of China from an ideological dictatorship to a hotbed of art and commerce.
I think I first heard about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980 documentary From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China. That was perhaps the first time I realized that the culture of expression and freedom I lived in was not a given – that power in the wrong hands could foster paranoia, hatred, pain and enforced conformity. It had never occurred to me that owning a violin could be a crime, and it made me value my violin a whole lot more.
But Pomfret’s book, coming after two weeks of wandering and eating and talking to people in Western China, revived and refined my awareness of the Cultural Revolution, chiefly because he describes its high-water mark as around the summer of 1966 – exactly when I was born.
You mean to tell me that in my short lifetime this nation of a billion-plus people could go from Orwell’s worst nightmare to a place where people sing and dance in the parks, a place where 40 to 50 million people are studying classical piano, a place about to host the Pittsburgh Symphony on a multi-city tour, a place where rock and jazz bands are finding their feet in the Beijing underground? This just doesn’t seem fathomable (and if you dig deep China still has plenty of social and political problems), but it’s truly a remarkable lesson that no matter how bad things get, societies can hit the brakes and do a U-turn with amazing speed.
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