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Shanghaied in Peking
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14859 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1988 |
2,093 Words |
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Richard Amber
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PEKING
Anthony Grey
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1988
672 pp., $19.95
It's not surprising that the drama of twentieth century Chinese history has proved irresistible to epic novelists. From the Opium War of 1839 and the seizure of Hong Kong by British colonizers the year after to the tumult of latter-day Shanghai--teeming city of revolutionaries, greed, entrepreneurs, and sin-the various elements of China's modern experience have the stuff of drama and melodrama. It is history on a massive scale, full of portent and meaning. The French novelist Andre Malraux set a standard for the China epic genre with Man's Fate, transforming the defeat of the communist-led urban insurrection by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in 1927 into one of the great works of Western fiction.
Since, then, most of the creators of the China epics have mingled a certain conception of Asian eroticism with personal Drama, generally involving a European or an American who has come east in search of fortune or adventure, and set this against a background of mystery and political turmoil. Much of this formula is included in a recent contribution to the genre by Anthony Grey, a former British journalist in Peking, who was jailed by the communist government during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and who thus has an insider's view of political fanaticism. Grey's Peking features the standard refrain of other China epics--idealistic foreigners sailing through the stormy seas of Chinese events. In this regard it has some of the predictability of other China epics written by foreigners. (The Chinese have not yet turned the tables by writing their own sagas set among westerners.) But although Peking is not particularly original, and lacks the philosophical depths of Man's Fate, it is nonetheless absorbing and well informed. Grey traces a plausible history of the great events of the Chinese Revolution from the legendary Long March of the 1930s, when he picks up his story, until after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.
It also serves as a kind of foil for Malraux's work. Man's Fate, written more than twenty years before the communist takeover, was a kind of advertisement for the coming revolution. Malraux was urged on by a sense of the injustice of what the communists later came to call "the old society," as well as by what they have long portrayed as the treachery of Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang ended a period of uneasy collaboration with the communists in 1927, when he executed much of the party's leadership in Shanghai.
Grey depicts the aftermath of that, the shift of the communists' activists to rural bases, the Long March, and beyond, to the first thirty or so years of revolutionary government. Malraux shows the revolution as an act of idealism; Grey's focus is on the fanaticism that surged out of the communists' utopian vision. Man's Fate saw the betrayal of the communist movement in Shanghai as a political and human tragedy. It is pessimistic because Malraux believed the revolution had failed. Peking dwells on the tragedy that came as a consequence of the revolutionary takeover. It is pessimistic, because the revolution triumphed. In it's sophisticated, unblinkered preoccupation with the tragedy of Chinese politics, it comes closer to Man's Fate than most other books of the
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