MCLC: Han Suyin dies at 95 (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Han Suyin dies at 95 (1)
***********************************************************

Here's another obit for Han Suyin, this time from the Wall Street Journal.

Kirk 

==========================================================

Source: Wall Street Journal (11/6/12):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204349404578102792626733034.h
tml

A Cheerleader for Mao's Cultural Revolution
Han Suyin hid the truth about China's regime. She was not the last.
By HUGO RESTALL 

It is customary not to speak ill of the dead, but then Han Suyin always
considered herself an exceptional individual. Han, who died Friday in
Lausanne, Switzerland, at age 95, achieved fame when her 1952 romance
novel "A Many-Splendoured Thing" was made into a charming movie starring
William Holden. But it was her praise for China's 1966 Cultural
Revolution—a 10-year nightmare of communist chaos, murder, forced
relocation and cultural obliteration—that defines her legacy.

It would be comforting to think that Han Suyin—the pen name of Elizabeth
Comber, who was born to a Chinese father and Belgian mother—was a
particularly egregious avoider of the truth. Yet the conceits and
constraints that tainted her work affect China scholarship to this day.

As one of the most prominent interpreters of modern China in the West, Han
was invited to meet top leaders in Beijing and permitted to travel to
parts of the country off limits to other foreigners. In return, she
followed every twist and turn of the Communist Party's political line,
defending it against all criticism. At a time when it was fashionable for
Western intellectuals to embrace "anti-imperialist" voices, publishers
lined up to print her glowing accounts of Mao Zedong's socialist New China.

The results were often cringe-worthy. And in 1980, the Belgian Sinologist
Simon Leys published a devastating essay that closely examined some of
Han's writings. For instance, in three books written during the Cultural
Revolution, she defended the movement as "a logical, needful, necessary
event, the only way . . . to give the working class the leadership, to
give the masses the largest possible democratic voice." Her accounts
contradicted a handful of clear-eyed Western analysts who suggested that
Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and a group of ultraleftists were using violence
to settle political scores.

In Han's telling, the Red Guards—the paramilitary social movement of young
fanatics—were "clean, well behaved and polite" youngsters who "learn
democracy by applying democratic methods of reason and debate." The army's
assumption of control over the government was "the continuation of the
revolutionary tradition" and "the reassertion of ideological primacy over
purely military ambitions." The societal ferment also lent "an enormous
spurt to production, to the development of productive forces along
socialist lines."

Next to these passages Mr. Leys quoted from one of Han's autobiographies,
"My House Has Two Doors," published in 1980. By then Jiang Qing and the
rest of the "Gang of Four" had been arrested and denounced. Now
criticizing the 1960s leftists and their crimes, Han recalled that
"everything seemed to go crazy in China." Murder, summary executions and
endless interrogations were the norm, all given the green light by Jiang
Qing. The military's takeover was reminiscent of warlordism, Han wrote.
The Red Guards, she said, had created a reign of terror and the economy
was in shambles.

If this abrupt reversal of views reflected merely a change of heart due to
new propaganda put out by the post-Mao regime, Han might be classed as
another of the "useful idiots" who visited China during this period,
ranging from Simone de Beauvoir to Shirley MacLaine. As Mr. Leys pointed
out, however, it was clear from details in her later books and writings
that Han knew the truth all along.

Indeed, Han admitted "lying through my teeth (with a smile) to the
diplomats and the newsmen who probed" a massive famine in China in
1958-62. More than 30 million Chinese died due to forced collectivization
and Mao's insistence on continuing food exports to pay for his investments
in heavy industry.

Han's accounts of the political mania of the Cultural Revolution leave
little doubt that she found it extremely unpleasant—she claimed to have
suffered "fits of depression." But she was free to leave the country at
the end of her sojourns. Why did she intentionally mislead her readers
when she could have exposed the truth, or just remained silent?

Part of the answer is that she would not have enjoyed any more trips to
China, not to mention the loss of book royalties and her status in the
West as a spokeswoman for China. Han's tenuous sense of Chinese identity
as a Eurasian probably also meant that she craved acceptance from the
Beijing authorities.

However, these explanations only go so far. It is revealing that even
after Han's mendacity was exposed, the Western intelligentsia didn't shun
her. She and other hard-core pro-Party hacks continued to write books and
articles supporting the legitimacy of the Communist regime as an
alternative model to capitalist democracy. The unpleasant truth is that
the self-delusion of the Western intellectual in the 20th century meshed
perfectly with the Chinese propaganda machine, and Han was just one
manifestation of this phenomenon.

Ultimately Han Suyin's tale is a sad reminder that in the field of
Sinology, intellectual honesty is a liability. Even today, most academics
remain circumspect about Beijing's faults because it is the done thing.
Those who insist on writing the truth are labeled "anti-China" and denied
visas. Their colleagues are loath to support them publicly.

Don't imagine that there could never be another Han Suyin. Ambitious
apologists for authoritarianism will certainly vie to take up her mantle.
And who could blame them? Her works might appear odious to us now, but she
had a very successful run.
Mr. Restall is the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.