MCLC: Simon Leys (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Crevel, M. van <M.van.Crevel at hum.leidenuniv.nl>
Subject: Simon Leys (1)
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Source: The Economist (8/23/14):
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21613159-pierre-ryckmans-simon-leys-
old-china-hand-died-august-11th-aged-78-pierre-ryckmans

Pierre RyckmansPierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys), an old China hand, died on
August 11th, aged 78

WRITERS choose pen names for many reasons. Pierre Ryckmans chose
his‹³Simon Leys²‹to avoid being blacklisted by the Chinese authorities,
who, he feared, would not appreciate his attempts to tell the world the
truth about the horrors of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. But his
chosen surname contained a subtle clue as to who he really was. ³Leys² was
a homage to ³René Leys², a novel by the French author Victor Segalen, in
which a Belgian teenager in old Peking regales his employer with tales of
the hidden intrigues and conspiracies taking place within the imperial
palace.

Like René, Mr Ryckmans was Belgian. He too had visited China when he was a
teenager‹in 1955, to be precise, on a trip with a group of fellow students
that had culminated in an audience with Zhou Enlai, second in command,
after Mao Zedong, of the newly minted People¹s Republic. He had fallen in
love with the place on that trip, he later wrote, and devoted his career
to studying China.

And like René, he became famous for trying to tell his readers what was
really going on, both within the palace walls and without. Swimming
against the tide of intellectual opinion in the West, which tended to see
Mao as an admirable champion of the ordinary Chinese worker, Mr Ryckmans
described, with wit and anger and mordant humour, the skilfully
choreographed shadow play that the regime presented to the world. Behind
the talk of the victory of the proletariat and great leaps forward lay
repression, famines and the terrorising of a nation.

He had not set out to write about politics, although he was himself a
socialist, of the democratic, anti-totalitarian sort (George Orwell was a
guiding light). His interests were painting, history and poetry: his
writing was peppered with fond references to old Chinese proverbs and
stories. Nor was he a China bore: he was as happy discussing Cervantes,
sailing or the life of Napoleon as he was pondering the epigrams of
Confucius (whose ³Analects² he translated in 1997). But China remained his
great love, and at first he ³confidently extended to the Maoist regime the
same sympathy that I felt for all things Chinese².

It was while living in Hong Kong in the 1960s, when it was still a British
colony, that the true nature of the regime became apparent to him.
Pamphlets circulated describing the forced displacement of millions of
people into the countryside in the Cultural Revolution. Rumours spread
about denouncements of the ideologically unsound by friends or even family
members. Thousands of desperate Chinese risked their lives to swim by
night across the waters to Hong Kong, seeking sanctuary from the brutality.

Goaded from his comfortable ignorance, he wrote a book called ³The
Chairman¹s New Clothes², which described the Great Helmsman as an
autocratic emperor in the old tradition, complete with jostling, scheming
subordinates. It chronicled the murders and terror of the Cultural
Revolution, and the destruction of books, temples and anything else that,
to the fanatical Red Guards, was a reminder of China¹s feudal past. In
another book, ³Chinese Shadows², based on a six-month stint at the Belgian
embassy in Beijing in 1972, he described the Cultural Revolution as ³five
years of upheaval, of blood and madness², ³the most gigantic frenzyŠsince
the Taiping Rebellion² (in which, between 1850 and 1864, 20m people died)
and a ³deliberate destruction of intelligence and culture.²

Seeking truth from facts

His fellow Sinologists‹who ran the gamut from ignorance of reality to
sympathy for Mao to a craven desire to avoid rocking the boat‹were aghast.
Leave the politics to the journalists, advised one well-meaning mentor,
and focus on studying the classics. But he couldn¹t. To talk about China,
he said, meant talking about the everyday reality experienced by its
people. He wrote with contempt of ³China experts² who would be horrified
at the thought of travelling by bus rather than officially organised car,
or of eating with the common folk at a noodle stall.

Eventually, of course, his real identity was exposed. That did not stop
him; he was stubborn and principled, and besides, he was right. Being
right had not even required any particularly special effort: before his
stint at the embassy he had not set foot in China in years. All it took,
he said, was listening to Chinese friends, keeping up with dispatches from
trusted sources and reading the official press with a sceptical eye‹and
the courage to recognise the uncomfortable truth that, whatever romance it
may have once possessed, Mao¹s revolution had become a nightmare.

Mr Ryckmans predicted that, one day, the chaos of the Mao years would fade
and that the Communist Party¹s totalitarian grip would ease. Sure enough,
these days even the party admits that the Cultural Revolution was a
³disaster², and that millions died in the famine that followed the Great
Leap Forward, an earlier attempt at collectivisation. But the fundamental
nature of the regime, he said, would not change. He was right about that,
too. Deng Xiaoping, Mao¹s eventual successor, brought prosperity by
liberalising the economy. In today¹s China a little criticism is even
tolerated‹but only if it does not seriously threaten the party¹s rule.