SIGHTINGS NO.3: PING PONG DIPLOMACY

'Sightings': the term used by Prof. Jonathan D. Spence to describe formative encounters of China by Westerners.

Everyone has heard of the phrase "ping-pong diplomacy." And most people know that it originally referred to sporting exchanges between the Chinese and U.S. table-tennis teams that facilitated the re-opening of official relations between the two states after two decades.

But what you may not know (and what I had not realised until I came to research it) is the variety of life-lessons the sportsmen from both countries took from their encounter - and the surprisingly familiar arguments it provoked about the politicisation of sport, which is meant to stand apart from politics, and be pursued for its own sake.

I decided to revisit the initial encounter between the sports teams that preceded the Mao-Nixon meeting, because I think it can help us to make sense of contemporary debates about whether sport and politics should be 'mixed' or kept 'separate.'

As a tool in the construction of modern nation-states sport is inherently political, but it has always had the potential to transcend narrow nationalisms, because it provides an arena in which countries can unambiguously lose one contest yet win another; when we watch international sporting events, we may root for the home team, but we are also conscious of the contingency of national identity, prestige, virtue, and so on. And I think that a brief history of ping-pong in Chinese politics illustrates this rather well.

SPROUTS OF REVISIONISM

Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong made ping pong the new national sport (guoqiu). He chose ping pong because it seemed like a sport China - a poor, densely-populated nation - would be able to win against other countries, and become a unified nation in the process.

It was also a political choice: it was not a terribly popular sport throughout most of Europe, and the Nationalist government that had fled to Taiwan was not a member of the sport's international governing body, so when the PRC joined in 1953 it did not provoke the same struggles for diplomatic recognition that hung over the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through the 1950s.

The CPC set up a vast network of talent scouts were dispatched to identify potential champions. In doing this, Mao was following in the tradition of his predecessors, who had also tried to use sport for state-building (and who, in their turn, followed the model set by other modern nation-states like the U.S., which promoted sports as a means of improving the fitness of its military recruits).

At the turn of the 19th-Century, China was dubbed the "sick man of Asia" in an article by an famous Chinese intellectual. In response the Qing government (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty to rule China, imported military exercises, including gymnastics, from Germany and Sweden, as part of a broader "self-strengthening" movement (ziqiang); it was designed to re-connect the government with the masses through greater efficiency and selective modernisation.

Later, in 1919, the Nationalist government issued a decree entitled The Work Plan for the Promotion of Sport. It stressed that sporting success was vital to the vitality of the new Republic:

"Every country focuses on the promotion of the nation's power through sport...sport in China has largely been neglected. The present situation shows that sport in China is falling far behind other countries...the government should spare no effort to promote sport...otherwise we cannot survive in international competition."

Governments have often popularised certain sports in the hope of building a shared national identity over and above deep social divisions, related to class, race or religion. Thus the Communists made ping pong the national sport to soften some (but not all) of the class distinctions, and to put identification with the nation before traditional bonds of kinship. It had come to China from Europe in 1901 and was starting to become popular in urban areas in the 1930s.

China joined the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) in the last years of Europe's dominance of the sport. In 1956-7, China's team ranked highly, and came third in the women's singles. Then, in 1959, the table tennis player Rong Guotan made history as the first Chinese sportsman to win a world championship. Rong is the central figure in the photograph below.

It was an occasion for jubilation in China. In 1917 Mao wrote one his first articles on the importance of sport for nation-building. Four decades later he demonstrated his savvy awareness of 'soft power', describing Rong's powerful backhand and forehand drives as constituting a "spiritual nuclear weapon".

Here is some footage of Rong at the 1959 championships (starts at 06:25).

Another Chinese player, Zhuang Zedong, won the following three championships, from 1961-5 (there is footage of his play in the video above at 08:40).

But this growth spurt in the international sporting arena was cut short; China did not send a team to the next World Championships in 1967, because by then the Cultural Revolution was underway, during which the country was turned entirely inwards on itself, and the routines of daily life were often violent and unpredictable.


Zhuang Zedong

In 1968, two important things happened:  North Vietnam launched the 'Tet Offensive' and thereby increased the domestic pressure on President Nixon to withdraw U.S. forces from the country, for which he needed China's co-operation; and political instability reached China's sporting elite, when Red Guards put three members of the national table tennis team under house arrest.

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, professional sportsmen were denounced as "sprouts of revisionism." The danger for the CPC of using sport as a political tool was that it had to be kept in check; it was a blunt tool and any ambiguity, such as Rong's having spent most of his life outside of China, was a worrying liability, and so he stood accused of being a foreign spy. So long as China had equally talented but more politically-correct players, Rong was expendable to the regime. Tragically, he and his two teammates committed suicide after being tortured in detention.

Perhaps Mao had allowed the political tumult to reach so high up in the sporting establishment as a kind of warning to sportspeople to be faultless "icons of revolutionary virtue." Or perhaps this had been an example of the Red Guards going too far on their own initiative. Either way, it sent a clear signal to Rong's colleagues to obey orders from the top - the only problem being that the orders themselves were far from clear.

REGARD THE PING PONG BALL AS THE HEAD OF YOUR ENEMY

Although they stayed at home, the Chinese table tennis team resumed training in 1969. Zhuang was the star player. He was a politically reliable former army man, with a penchant for speaking in slogans. For instance: "to play table tennis is a revolutionary endeavour and serves the interest of the people; it is not for fun or for the opportunity to show off."

Yet even Zhuang found himself implicated in Cultural Revolution-era paranoia; he was detained along with other players for alledgedly allying themselves too closely with Mao's rival, Liu Shaoqi.

A sign greeting the visiting U.S. team to the PRC in 1971

It is easy to look back at public figures who talked like this as if they were all either cranks or had all been brainwashed, but in fact the fear that China might be attacked from overseas was very prevalent at the time, and reached all the way to the leadership. Since the Sino-Soviet split had opened up at the beginning of the decade, relations between the PRC and the USSR had rapidly deteriorated, culminating in clashes between their border troops on the Ussuri River in 1969.

Fear of attack from the Soviet Union dominated Mao's geopolitical thinking at the start of the 1970s. Fear of electoral defeat without a semi-orderly exit from Vietnam gripped Nixon. Separately, the two men came to see each other as the 'lesser evil' in the triangular diplomacy of the Cold War, and they recognised that a limited friendship of convenience could be mutually beneficial.

Unfortunately neither country had a way to communicate its sincere interest to the other. From 1954-72 the U.S. and PRC had no official relations with one another, and communicated only via their embassies in Poland and Switzerland. When they started sending signals that they were seeking better relations, the long period of separation meant that their hints got lost in translation - they lacked a detailed understanding of the other's domestic politics, and thus a shared language in which to frankly conduct their diplomacy.

For example, in 1970 Mao invited the veteran American journalist Edgar Snow for one last meeting with him. It was publicised heavily in the Chinese press as an expression of authentic international friendship, and Mao had the photo below put on the front page of the People's Daily in the hope that the Nixon administration would take the hint and get in touch.

The only problem was that Edgar Snow had no credibility in Washington because of his Communist sympathies, so its significance went unrecognised.

As an indication of just how isolated China had been in the years before ping-pong diplomacy, here is a clip of an American news broadcast anticipating Nixon's visit in 1972. The anchorman draws comparisons between the U.S. and PRC, but the overriding impression is that he is describing a newly-discovered planet.

Meanwhile, the Chinese ping pong team were preparing to re-emerge at the 31st World Championships in Nagoya, Japan. As the date of the competition drew nearer, politics intervened again - North Korea and the exiled head of state in Cambodia both requested that China withdraw in protest against Japan's membership of the Asian Table Tennis Federation, a body that recognised the Republic of China on Taiwan as the legitimate government of the whole of China. Zhou Enlai had already seen the potential for the contest to be a springboard for improved ties with the U.S., so he asked the Chinese team for their opinion - to his disappointment, they supported the idea of a boycott.

On Zhou's advice, Mao sent the team to Japan in March 1971 with strict instructions governing how they conducted their interaction with the Americans: they could shake hands, although it was discouraged, but they were forbidden from initiating conversation, exchanging flags or posing for photographs with American players. The competition was "a political battle."

Yet they were officially dispatched under the banner of "friendship first, competition second." This apparent contradiction illustrates the nervousness of the PRC leadership about making tentative gestures to which it could not predict the American response, and their fear of losing face in a very public arena.

It took a spontaneous chance encounter to finally break the ice. A 19-year old American player named Glenn Cowan was leaving the training ground for the stadium one morning and inadvertently jumped aboard the bus reserved for the Chinese team. He stood at the front in awkward silence until at last he informed the curious passengers via a translator that his long hair and baggy jeans were not so unusual in his home country. Zhuang Zedong, who was sitting at the back, replied that they should feel free to converse as friends, since the meeting between Mao and Edgar Snow had symbolised that this was China's policy.

Here is Zhuang remembering that first encounter, and how he had been motivated by conflicting orders from on above: "In a changing world, only the clairvoyance of great men could grasp the seemingly ordinary but essential moment."

The meeting made headlines in the Japanese newspapers the next day. Zhuang and Cowan were photographed shaking hands and they exchanged gifts of a brocaded tapestry from Huangzhou and a 'Let It Be' t-shirt. When he returned to China to face criticism for his behaviour, Zhuang said, "Chairman Mao told us we should differentiate between American policymakers and common people. What was wrong with my action?" Nevertheless the Chinese government decided to reject a proposal from the manager of the U.S. team for a bilateral sporting exchange.

It was Mao's impulsive reaction to the photograph of Zhuang and Cowan that would be the turning-point. Mao was lying in bed, signing-off on decisions taken elsewhere in the bureaucratic machine when he saw the pictures and was suddenly inspired. According to Jung Chang's biography of Mao, "his eyes lit up and he called Zhuang 'a good diplomat.'" In On China, Dr. Kissinger conveys the scene:

"Mao lay "slumped over the table" in a sleeping-pill-induced haze. Suddenly he croaked to his nurse, telling her to phone the Foreign Ministry - "to invite the American team to visit China." The nurse recalled asking him, "Does your word count after taking sleeping pills?" Mao replied, "Yes, it counts, every word counts. Act promptly, or it will be too late!""

THE PREMIER AND THE HIPPIE HIT IT OFF

In 1971, the 15-member U.S. table tennis team became the first non-communist American delegation to visit China since 1949. Premier Zhou provided a packed itinerary for the players: they visited the Great Wall, watched ballet and a revolutionary opera staged by Mao's wife, and learned that many Chinese people were unaware a man had landed on the moon. They travelled by train from Canton, to Peking, to Shanghai.

They also played two exhibition matches to packed stadium audiences - it was dubbed "the ping heard around the world."

The superiority of the Chinese team gave them the diplomatic option of going easy on the Americans, of which, as the retrospective in the video below shows, the Americans were well aware at the time.

It was a momentous occasion, signified by their meeting with Zhou, who stressed that the visit was intended to open up improved relations between the two countries; as he later put it, "the small ball set the big one, the earth, in motion."

Of the American players, Cowan arguably attracted the most attention wherever he went in China because of the contrast between his free-flowing hippy fashion and the drab 'Mao suits' which were ubiquitous at that time. The way that Cowan described the trip afterwards suggests a certain degree of romanticising the poverty he would have witnessed, and the bonds of interdependency forged by living in such a large population: "I loved the Chinese", he said, "Where else, man, would you see a child of three carrying a child of two in his arms?"

Here he is, effortlessly drawing attention (some of it contrived, as he spent much of the trip trying to get pictures that would get him on the cover of Life magazine):

When he was asked by Cowan for his thoughts on the hippie movement, Zhou replied that it was not political enough: "Young people ought to try different things. But they should try to find something in common with the majority." The following day's New York Times headline read: ZHOU, 73, AND 'TEAM HIPPIE' HIT IT OFF. A year later, Cowan won the accolade of Rolling Stone's 'Groupie of the Year.'

The White House took the hint, and immediately pushed through key changes to their foreign policy as regards China, the most significant being the ending of a 21-year old trade embargo dating from the Korean War. Dr. Kissinger recognised that ping pong had provided the perfect cover for the Chinese to publicly engage the Americans without the risk of losing face if their entreaties were rebuffed:

"It committed China publicly to the course heretofore confined to the most secret diplomatic channels. In that sense, it was reassurance. But it was also a warning of what course China could pursue were the secret communications thwarted. Beijing could then undertake a public campaign - what would today be called "people-to-people diplomacy" - and appeal to the growing protest movement in American society on the basis of another "lost chance for peace."

The hippie was followed by the ultimate anti-hippie just ten months later, when Nixon made his historic visit to the PRC. It was the beginning of rapprochement between the two powers, and the first step towards the full restoration of official relations in 1979. Here is a clip from the PBS Cold War series on the meeting.

Later that year the Chinese table tennis team visited the U.S. to play some return games. They were warmly greeted, notwithstanding a small group of Cold Warriors and Christian activists who protested the visit - and were booed into submission by the rest of the audience.

In his role as head of the delegation, Zhuang performed card tricks for captive audiences and dispensed such pearls of wisdom as: "Though Ping-Pong is a highly competitive sport, the is no real victory or defeat. There is always both. Just as there is no life without death, There is no death without life. The whole world is unified like this." On his return to China he was appointed Minister of Physical Culture.

After Mao's death in 1976 Zhuang lost his government post and was made to work as a street-sweeper. He was publicly denounced by the government for "wearing a Swiss-made watch." During four years in solitary confinement, he, like his teammates a decade earlier, attempted suicide. He was later rehabilitated, however, and divides his time between professional coaching and public speaking.

The story of Cowan's return to America does not have such a happy ending. He was diagnosed with manic depression, developed a drug problem and became obsessed with Mao and Mick Jagger. "I do escape in drugs", he said, "They give me a world that fits my needs." What he seemed to need was a worldview that matched the purity and innocence he had perceived in China: "life is simple", he had told his teammates as their train passed field after field of peasants working the land. He went on to work as a teacher and sold shoes, spending many of his later years living on the streets.

SWIFTER, HIGHER, STRONGER...FOR NOW

What wider lessons can we draw from this episode? It would seem to suggest that international sporting events can be used to make a political argument that brings about a desired effect.

But I think it also shows the limited conditions under which sport can be used as an instrument of politics. The message was basic - it was not so much about the content of an ongoing dialogue as it was an invitation to resume dialogue. If the table-tennis championships had been leveraged to influence specific policies, it might not have worked so well because interest groups would have piled in and blurred the signals ; instead, such contentious matters could be left to the Mao-Nixon summit.

Moreover it was seen by the Chinese as a low-risk manoeuvre because if the Americans had rejected their invitation, they would have seemed petty and childish. And yet it only really worked in this way - the product of a schizophrenic political campaign and sheer luck - because of the extreme level of political interference in the Chinese team. In the long-run, this degree of manipulation devalues sport as an instrument of internationalism in a more subtle way - by depriving spectators from all countries of the chance to watch a fair test of ability amongst all of their teams, an experience that breeds a kind of patriotism that George Orwell distinguished from narrower forms of nationalism.

In his Notes on Nationalism Orwell wrote that patriotism is the desire that your team will win, whereas nationalism is an automatic presumption of superiority. The former, whilst it reflects the nation-building potential of sport, is more contingent and fragile than the latter, and can incorporate a willingness to learn from the tactics of other countries; China reversed its decline in the table tennis rankings in the 1980s by adopting the winning tactics of breakthrough teams from Sweden and South Korea, but it was only able to do so because post-Mao political reforms had abolished his rigid prescriptions for how all table-tennis players ought to be trained.

As the Olympics showed in 2008, the impulse to politicise sport remains. I hope to have shown that ping pong diplomacy is actually more of a cautionary tale than is commonly supposed.

SIGHTINGS NO.1: ANTONIONI IN CHINA

'Sightings': the term used by Prof. Jonathan D. Spence to describe formative encounters of China by Westerners.

Here is a real gem. At the start of the 1970s, China was tentatively opening itself up to the rest of the world (with the exception of the Soviet Union). Mao and his inner circle recognised that they needed to try and carefully manage the process of opening in order the shore-up the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

Alongside openness would be an effort to control which of its many faces China presented to the world - and in 1972, the Party invited the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni to visit China and assist with the construction of cultural "soft" power in a new phase of triangular diplomacy.

"IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL"

Antonioni was a distinguished art house director, famous for works such as L'avventura (1960) and Blowup (1966), and as a leading light in the development of neo-realist film-making earlier in his career. But in a China still reeling from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution - in which being "red" was more important than being an "expert" for a person's career prospects - it was Antonioni's left-leaning politics that made him the candidate of choice.

Here is Antonioni:

Maoism had been an influential force amongst the radical left in the student movements in the late 1960s, across Western Europe and North America. This was especially so at the time of the Cultural Revolution, which seemed to be in sync with the same frustrations of the younger generation - and the subsequent 'counter-culture' movements - against the bureaucratic restrictions of the elders of the First World.

In his book, 'The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s', Richard Wolin gives a fascinating account of how the various Maoist sects and factions across Europe wielded a degree of power and influence in public life that vastly outweighed their actual numbers.

Initially, the Maoists in Western Europe were dogmatic 'true-believers' who saw in Communist China what they wanted to see. As Wolin puts it:

"Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical political hopes and fantasies...China became the embodiment of a "radiant utopian future." By "becoming Chinese"...they would rid themselves of their guilt both as the progeny of colonialists and, more generally, as bourgeois."

These 'Maoists' tended to be de facto disillusioned Stalinists who found abandoning their belief in "actually existing socialism" too painful to bear. Wolin describes this mindset: "the "successes" of Chinese communism - or its imagined successes - would magically compensate for the abysmal failures of the Communist experience elsewhere."


But this all changed when the Maoists found themselves utterly sidelined in the dramatic revolts of May 1968. They found themselves forced by the libertarian spirit and 'new issues' agenda of the moment to broaden their appeal, or sink into irrelevance. As usual, they split into two such camps, with one group continuing to centre their political platform around venerating whatever Mao was doing at that moment, and the other group embracing the more open-minded, grassroots spirit of the times.

"The idea of 'cultural revolution' was thereby wholly transformed. It ceased to be an exclusively Chinese point of reference. Instead it came to stand for an entirely new approach to thinking about politics: an approach that abandoned the goal of seizing political power and instead sought to initiate a democratic revolution in mores, habits, sexuality, gender roles, and human sociability."

Here are Black Panther supporters brandishing Mao's 'Little Red Book' in Oakland, 1969:

It is hard to miss the irony of using the rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to promote this new 'post-power' politics, when the Cultural Revolution inaugurated by Mao was precisely concerned with restoring his power inside the Party machine - the "rebellion" against established authority that he encouraged amongst the young was a means to the end of strengthening, not transcending, the power of the Party.


Here is a clip from a documentary about the period, which gives some idea of what it was really about:

The key moment for these neo-Maoists in the West came in the aftermath of 1968. Wolin presents a crucial argument that one of the legacies of the upheavals of 1968 was that it instilled a deep sense of humility in Western European public intellectuals, particularly in France and Italy. This was in part because some intellectuals had failed to predict the momentous events using their elaborate theories (Lucien Goldmann aptly observed that "structures don't go out into the streets to make a revolution"), but also because the bottom-up, anti-paternalistic ethic was so integral to the movements themselves.

And writers, artists and intellectuals had a new sense of themselves as being somehow "above" the masses, telling them what they ought to read, look at, and think - which was something they had a duty to resist.

The Maoist sects played an important role in this, largely because they were merely in the right place at the right time, armed with the right (and suitably ambiguous) slogans. The police in Paris chose to target the Maoist groups, and their publishing outlets, to send a signal to other radicals, because they were small enough to be manageable. But heavy-handed intervention only made a public martyr of them and rallied intellectuals to their cause, most notably Sartre and Foucault. Wolin describes how all these processes interacted to undermine an older model of the engaged French public intellectual as a member of an elite 'vanguard' class:

"They ceased behaving like mandarins and internalised the virtues of democratic humility...insight into the debilities of political vanguardism impelled French writers and thinkers to reevaluate the Dreyfusard legacy of the universal intellectual: the intellectual who shames the holders of power by flaunting timeless moral truths."

 

THE RED DESERT



Maoism in the West had helped to destroy the belief that an artist has a right to decide what an audience should be exposed to, and what meanings they ought to take away. Maoism in China had instituted extremely restrictive censorship across all arts and entertainment. Here were two superficially similar political discourses with a great deal getting lost in translation.

Ever since Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China Western leftists had visited the People's Republic and painted it in a positive light. The Party had the same expectation of Antonioni, who had a reputation for using his films to criticise the exploitation he saw in his own society. Like many of his generation, he was haunted by the living memory of fascism under Mussolini. Like the radical left in post-war West Germany, he felt burdened by a sense of duty to guard against the ever-present danger that fascism might resurface in a disguised form.

His earliest feature films addressed the social alienation that afflicted the working- and middle-classes alike under capitalism. The alienating effects of modernity was a theme that ran through his career - at their best, his films force his audience to honestly confront the restlessness and anomie of modern life, and to abandon the self-deception of thinking that there exists a 'strong man' ruler who could restore a long-lost semblance of permanence, order and meaning.

In 1997 the BBC dedicated an edition of Arena to Antonioni. Here is the start - it is worth watching in its entirety to get a feel for the man less as an individual and more as a representative of a restless post-war generation. (Further down the page I have included the section that deals directly with Chung Kuo.)

During the programme, he describes how his philosophy of being an artist changed over time. His comments from the 1960s foreshadow the difficulty the Chinese government would have in trying to use him as their mouthpiece several years later. He describes losing confidence in his judgment about which features of the world around him are worth observing, which aspects of daily life carry some greater significance.

It is not something that ought to be overly rational - you should freely range the camera over anything and everything that might be of interest.

THE ADVENTURE

In 1972 Antonioni was invited to China to record a documentary of everyday life. His visit lasted five weeks, and the result was Chung Kuo China, a three-part film that was subsequently shown on Italian TV. The first part was filmed in Beijing, the second in rural Linxian and the southern cities of Suzhou and Nanjing, and the final part focuses on Shanghai. Below are some screen-shots from the film.

Here is Part 1 of the first episode (the entire film can be found on there):

It is a strangely hypnotic film, meditative and never intimate yet offering a glimpse of a China that has since disappeared. Everyone is wearing drab 'Mao suits', there are no tourists, and the old parts of cities like Beijing are untouched by high-rise urbanisation - in the third episode there is a shot of the Pudong area of Shanghai consisting of a shipyard, an oil refinery and expansive fields.

This is what the Pudong financial district looks like today:

From the outset, Antonioni as the narrator declares that he is "not pretending to understand China", but is merely providing an objective portrait - though the narration is not always consistent in its value-neutrality. He is frank about the restrictions placed on him by his political supervisors during filming, such as when he describes being instructed not to film the entrance to Mao's residence - but films it anyway.

Other politically-sensitive sections were filmed in secret using hidden cameras, including what he describes as "free markets", which were officially prohibited. Even more galling for the authorities, he speculates that it is these "gaps" in the collectivist economy that are responsible for diminishing "the tragedy of Asian malnutrition." There is an interesting parallel between the Party's boasts that it has opened up previously hidden areas of the Forbidden Palace to commoners, whilst it has erected new barriers of secrecy around the most routine features of daily life.

I think a very interesting section of the film is the recording of a discussion amongst factory workers in the first episode. Antonioni tells us the workers have met after work to discuss a new art exhibition, under the supervision of a Party cadre. But, he says, "there are no real debates" in the group - each takes their turn to recite monotonous slogans. One worker proclaims their need to spin enough cotton for the coming World Revolution. When the sole purpose of art is to glorify the workers, that becomes the sole criterion for evaluating art, and even the discussion of art becomes a dull and dry task - which in turn makes the real-life workers seem ever-more distant from these heroic figures...it is a kind of vicious cycle. The clip comes early on in the segment below.

The generally balanced and open-minded tone of the film was anathema to the Party authorities who insisted that the primary purpose of the arts was to promote the Party line. In the seminal 'Yenan Talks', Mao expressed this bluntly:

"Writers and artists who cling to their individualist petty-bourgeois standpoint cannot truly serve the revolutionary mass of workers, peasants and soldiers."

This policy towards the arts was known as the "Two Servings" - serving the people and serving socialism.

Another slogan was "from the masses, to the masses." This slogan is perhaps the most useful in understanding how Antonioni and the Chinese government came to misunderstand eachother so completely. At the doctrinal level, Maoist theory rejected what might be called 'naive realism' - the notion that unmediated, universal "truth" exists in a directly-accessible form out there in the world - in the same way that the Italian neo-realists rejected it as a basis for making films.

But the crucial difference was that Mao believed that a 'vanguard' party could restore order and meaning in the world if it kept in touch with the masses, listened to their views, and then used the tools of philosophy and Marxism-Leninism to fashion a kind of rational, unified whole out of the assembled fragments of opinions and interpretations. The job of the Party was then to transmit this coherent construct back to the masses, and if necessary to impose it by force - the masses would recognise their thoughts and feelings as expressed in the Party policy, in a higher, more refined form.

It was not a cultural policy that allowed for ambiguity - a piece of work was either pro-China or anti-China. Chung Kuo China was condemned as the latter in a series of critiques in the Peking Review.

The most prominent criticism was that the film did not give sufficient coverage of the achievements of 'New China'. In an extreme instance, the soldiers guarding Tienanmen Square are reported as complaining that Antonioni distorted the sunlight over Beijing:

"When one looks up at Tienanmen Gate, one sees a portrait of Chairman Mao radiant with a kind and warm expression and the state emblem of the People’s Republic of China shining bright. But in Antonioni’s film neither the panorama of the Square nor the magnificence of Tienanmen Gate is seen. The film was taken on a bright sunny day in May. Nevertheless, the Square is shown in dim and dreary colours. The grand Square is presented in a disorderly fashion as if it were a market place of noisy confusion. Is this a result of Antonioni’s neglect or unique interest? Of course not. It is the result of a despicable technique with vicious intention."

Yet in the same newspaper, the film is also attacked by an official from Linxian for supposedly depicting the Chinese as glorying in their exceptionalism and self-importance (a sensitive topic at a time when Mao was trying to present China as a more co-operative player in the international system):

"This out-and-out anti-China imperialist agent Antonioni says that "for the Chinese, this great silent space is the centre of the world" and "China is the country at the centre." This is a vicious slander, intended to drive a wedge between the Chinese and other peoples. The Chinese people have all along adhered to Chairman Mao’s teachings that we Chinese people should "get rid of great-power chauvinism resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely". We never regard China as "the centre of the world." In imposing this allegation on the Chinese people, Antonioni’s criminal purpose is to create doubt and distrust between the Chinese and other peoples and undermine their solidarity and friendship."

Mao hated the film and it was not screened inside China until 2004.

But from another point of view, Antonioni achieved a more immediate victory - as the producer in the Arena programme says, Chung Kuo showcases the deep similarities between Antonioni's style and traditional bedrock themes in Chinese art - panoramic landscapes, the emptiness of the void, non-linear storytelling. The first wave of filmmakers to emerge after Mao died in 1976 - the so-called "Fourth Generation" - sparked a short-lived renaissance in Chinese cinema by fusing the arthouse stylings of Italian neo-realism with the more populist themes of conventional Chinese movies. And nothing quite like that brief burst of creativity has been seen since (but that is a subject for a future post).

-------------------------

Sighting No. 2 is in the works. Here is a clue as to who the subject will be - like China, this visitor is also famous for a teapot, but one rather far-removed...

REVIEW: 'TIGER HEAD, SNAKE TAILS'

I will be posting a new article tomorrow, but in the meantime I thought I would share a relevant book review I wrote recently.

Since this blog is intended to be a collection of interesting perspectives on features of modern China for a non-specialist audience, it makes sense for me to recommend a new book that aims to provide a "one-stop account" of contemporary China - and largely succeeds in doing so.

Jonathan Fenby is a seasoned China-watcher, as a journalist for various outlets, through business dealings, and as the author of 'The Penguin History of Modern China (1850-2009' and 'Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost'.

His latest book - 'Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How It Got There, And Where It Is Heading' - is comparable to the swathe of other generic 'airport books' about China that have made the bestseller lists in recent years, but it is actually a far more thoughtful and panoramic book than might be expected.

Here is an extract from the review:

"As he explains, China’s export-and investment-driven growth model is coming under increasing strain. The nature of the challenge confronting the CPC is that a set of fundamental policy changes need to be enacted to sustain the momentum of recent decades. And herein lies its dilemma - the sway of entrenched sectional interest groups, a legacy of China's current growth model, creates an environment in which cautious consensus-builders rise to the top of the CPC. These leaders, "operating atop a complex web of interest groups" (p.143), do not envisage comprehensive, sweeping plans for reform, but instead concentrate on shoring-up their alliances, which channels any energy for reform into an incremental, piecemeal and partial policy agenda. But the essential nature of China's one-party system is precisely that big-but-piecemeal reform will only exacerbate weaknesses elsewhere in the system - everything is connected.

He gives many examples of these interlinkages: "If farmers gain ownership rights, local authorities would have to be given greater powers to raise revenue...Greater regulation applied objectively would reduce the power and rent-seeking opportunities for officials...In each case, the power of the Party and central state would be weakened" (p.386). The fear that stalks China's leaders is that, if they can't engineer visionary and far-reaching change, they may also be unable to fix the system bit-by-bit, rushing from industry to industry, region to region, putting out new fires - and if they can't, and growth slows dramatically, whether from passivity or badly-sequenced intervention, then all bets are off."

And here is the full review on the Open Democracy site.