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Geremie R. Barmé

14th November 2002

I have entitled my remarks this evening "Over 30 years of China and Australia-thoughts on a glum convergence". I fear that the tenor of my reflections, while complementing Steve's oration, will also act as something of a cautionary counterpoint.

My own career in China has, fortuitously, overlapped and intertwined with Steve Fitzgerald's life as diplomat, businessman and educational visionary. And please forgive my use of that bold, latter word. I know in fact that it and terms of a similar ilk have long been quiescently outlawed in this our era of pax Howardania.

But even in the silence of the crypt you can always perceive the muted sounds that issue from a crumbling cadaver. There are invariably wisps of decaying sentience, and the tremens of lost souls and their memories of happier days reverberate with a certain nostalgic frisson.

Damn, see that! There I go getting all macabre and morose on you. But it is not just the sodden grey realities of middle-age that elicit such morbid sentiments, a reflection on the past and consideration of the future also leads me to these ruminations.

I was in the second group of Australian students who went to China to study after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with that country in 1972. Steve Fitzgerald and his colleagues at the Australian embassy-and here I think in particular of Jocelyn Chey, Murray Mclean and Ross Maddock-provided frequent comfort and succour to our group of wayward China wannabes.

I was twenty years old and was already deeply imbued with Cultural Revolution indoctrination (I'd been an ironic fan of Peking Foreign Languages Press publications at the age of thirteen when I was at Randwick Boys' High School). I was also staggering equally under the weight of residual hippydom and Eastern mysticism (yeah, I'd studied Chinese along with Sanskrit and Tibetan as an undergraduate at the Australian National University in Canberra).

During nearly four years in China I studied what passed for culture and political science at Maoist universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenyang. When the Gang of Four fell in October 1976, bringing with it the official end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I was working on a people's commune on the Liaodong Peninsula. Our class had been sent there to pick apples for export to the Soviet Revisionists and to learn from the poor-and-lower middle peasants. It was a labour that didn't make us free, although we were told that hard currency from the Soviet had its revolutionary payoffs. If anything, I think the only thing we managed to do was disrupt agricultural production and further the impoverishment of an already hard-pressed farming community.

We heard about the arrest of the Gang of Four on Radio Australia as airforce planes flew overhead, presumably on the way to Beijing to help enforce a state of martial law.

I remember shortly thereafter being invited to dine with the ambassador and fellow students at Xidan in Beijing and then strolling with Steve along the Boulevard of Everlasting Peace that leads to Tiananmen Square. During my years as a student Steve had always been accessible and avuncular, a joyful raconteur ready to indulge us with his lubricious humour and sage counsel. That night, among other things, I recall that he pondered whether the sheer weight of the Chinese bureaucracy-it's arcane and labyrinthine ways, its mendacity and obfuscations, and its craven and mean-spirited machinations-wouldn't one day simply sink the ship of state entirely. But, of course, at the time, he hadn't become a university administrator in Australia, and it was years before we would witness on our own shores the creative anti-governance of people like John Dawkins, Amanda Eloise Vanstone, David Kemp, or indeed the latest tyro of reformist zeal, Brendan Nelson. Surely, their efforts at undoing our own legacy of education are equal to the enterprise of China's erstwhile nihilistic bureaucrats.

As we have just heard, Steve still ponders whether China's statist bureaucracy, for many the be-all and end-all of Chineseness itself, does not still threaten to smother the creative genius of that people. For now the wilful, wildly corrupt and unaccountable nomenklatura of the late-socialist state and their avaricious progeny continue to plunder the wealth of the nation. There are the issues of an unresponsive and secretive bureaucracy, one that believe that having been given a mandate by the people as a result of the revolution of 1949 can act on behalf of the people at all times…

And there are other concerns-and they are voiced in the nation's media now more clamorously than ever before: there has been a disastrous population explosion, there is the hidden danger of tens of millions of unregistered illegal children-uneducated, with no adequate health care or social involvement other than being a source of cheap labour. Environmental degradation continues apace and despite an official will to change the situation there has but little hope of short-term amelioration. And of course, as we have witnessed during the recent 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the political system remains opaque, to say the least. And in the public sphere, NGOs have been infiltrated by government bureaucracies and their agents of influence… When the confidence of the country's leaders falters or the masses prove to be too restive, the tawdry tactics of flag waving and nationalistic hyperbole are trotted out.

The Communist Party still claims itself to be, in the words of the out-going president Jiang Zemin, the ultimate representative of all that is positive, progressive and hopeful in the China. And yet despite the rhetoric, there are indeed some features in the Chinese landscape that make one hopeful for the future….

The press and publishing industries produce a range of works that is unprecedented in post-1949 Chinese history. Mass media in terms of film and television, advertising are part of a boom culture that enriches the expression and creative possibilities of the country. All right, I usually find it all pretty tawdry, but spending more time that I'd like to watching US network television, I often wonder just how bad Chinese telly really is.

Intellectual foment, with public discussions in the media of everything from von Hayek's liberalism and Anthony Giddens' "Third Way" to eco-theories and the latest in critical inquiry, marks the Chinese cultural landscape as never before. And indeed the Internet, as Steve has pointed out, has created a Sinophone world that is even transforming the old publishing world of Taiwan-HK and the mainland.

It is perhaps when contemplating our situation here in Australia that my thoughts tend towards the negative, my voice takes on a more dolorous tone. Once many students of China shared a sense of fascinated engagement with a country that was vastly different from our own, one whose values and institutions were not only at variance, but markedly inferior to those of our own shores. Anyone who is seriously engaged with both China and Australia know that such certitudes are now little more than an unsettling memory.

Here our media enjoys a narrowness of bandwidth that is unique in my lifetime. Our independent and public sources of debate and speech are more constricted and threatened than ever before. And when it is in doubt a grey bureaucracy run by lacklustre ideocrats falls back on national crisis, the sense of embattlement and the fear of faceless foreign terror to stir up a populist response and convince all that their mandate represents the true and abiding interests of the people's will. Of course, I'm talking about the federal government, generally aided and abetted by the supine members of what can only laughingly be dubbed an 'opposition'.

One recalls the outpouring of national grief at the time of the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989 and the generous response to those becalmed in Australia... Remember the human rights delegations of the early 1990s when Australia had the temerity to monitor the human rights situation in China? And, and…. But that was all long before the revival of race-based politics, it was also before we saw the efflorescence of opinion-poll driven demagoguery; and before we realized how the decay of civic values and vision happens: not in a wild flurry of calamitous agitation, but gradually, with insouciance, and even with a measure of self-deceptive willingness.

Shortly before the Bali bombing, the Chinese leader Li Peng-also known by some as the 'butcher of Beijing'-visited Australia again on a pre-retirement tour (I recall acting as the official interpreter for this laconic at a state dinner held in late 1988 in Canberra). Apart from gladhanding pollies and hopeful business types, he was also greeted by pro-democracy demonstrators, acolytes of Falungong and those pesky Tibetan splittists. In an interview of ABC TV's 7:30 Report I was asked what I thought Li's reaction to such confrontational demonstrations would be? I replied that Li would take it all in his stride-after all, he's seen far worse. The more interesting response, however, would surely come from the redoubtable John Howard. Wouldn't he be pondering to himself, Golly, I wish I could take a leaf out of Li Peng's book and bring in the troops and tanks to deal with this lot, and all the other un-Australian protesters I find around the shop! Sadly, my comments were edited out of the aired interview.

Of course, I harbour a craven desire to carry my topsy-turvy metaphor to absurd lengths, but I'll desist for reasons of time, and out of consideration for your patience.

Perhaps my cranky excogitations are the result of having spent the best part of these few years working on a film and website project about China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its significance. As Larry Strange mentioned in his introduction, I am co-directing the film, Morning Sun, with Carma Hinton in Boston. We began our fitful preparations in 1996 and as with any independent documentary project we spent years finding research money and applying for larger grants. As we reach this point in the process-and tomorrow I return to Boston to work on the (hopefully) final edit of the film-we are aware more than ever that perhaps film is the most difficult medium one could use to investigate such a controversial and vexing period as the Cultural Revolution.

In making Morning Sun we have been both emboldened by our own vision of the kind of film we have wanted to create, as well as stymied by the particular limitations imposed on us by the nature and source of materials, the reticence of participants to speak on camera even some twenty-five years after the official end of the Cultural Revolution, and the myriad of other issues that contribute to the difficulties of independent analysis of what is arguably the most controversial period of Chinese history.

Morning Sun attempts in the space of a two-hour documentary film to create an inner history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976). It provides a multi-perspective view of a tumultuous period as seen through the eyes-and reflected in the hearts and minds-of members of the high-school generation that was born around the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and that came of age in the 1960s. Others join them in creating in the film's conversation about the period and the psycho-emotional topography of high-Maoist China, as well as the enduring legacy of that period.

Morning Sun is not a comprehensive or chronological history of the Cultural Revolution as such; nor is it a study of elite politics or of student factionalism. The film essays rather a psychological history. It attempts a cinematic account of experiences and emotions as reflected on by historical actors who themselves were enacting a history that they had learned and wished to recreate in their own lives. It is also a film about the cultures and convictions, as well as the historical events, that created the impetus, language, style and content of the period-the films and plays, the music and ideas, the rhetoric and ideologies, the education and the aspirations, the frustrations and fantasies, as well as the realities and ardour, that a new revolution that attempted to remake revolution itself entailed.

As I said, this project, as much as contemporary events, cast a long shadow over my reflections here tonight.

Having been comedic, tragic and self-promoting in turn, I will end with some final remarks that may help clarify the relevance of my work on the Cultural Revolution not only to the understanding of China and where it is going, but also to our own increasingly plangent and perilous predicament.

The Cultural Revolution after all was the time when this new phase of Sino-Australian history began, and when figures like Gough Whitlam, Steven Fitzgerald and many others had the intellectual and cultural daring to take us out of ourselves and address possibilities that were far beyond the limited horizons of those times.

As I said, Morning Sun concentrates in particular on the youthful generation of high-school students who formed the initial Red Guard movement. To this day, few of them will talk on camera-especially when, like us, you shove a camera into their faces and conduct a five to ten hour interview, as is our wont. We don't have an interview with the man who first called himself a 'Red Guard', although we spoke with his classmates. It is not that he is particularly camera shy, but the Cultural Revolution is a period of his life he prefers to pass over in silence, especially as he was a bit of media star back then: his picture often featured in such best-selling must-read journals as China Reconstructs and the PLA Pictorial.

His name is Zhang Chengzhi, and since his career as a Red Guard activist and after a long stint on the Mongolian steppes, in the 1980s he became a prominent writer of 'ethnic fiction'. Other prominent Red Guard leaders went on to become businessmen-or even in one case a dot.com executive in Silicon Valley. Perhaps you know the comic couplet concocted by the original Red Guards? 'Chairman Mao let us take control; Deng Xiaoping let us make a bankroll' (Mao zhuxi rang women zhangquan, Deng Xiaoping rang women zhengqian)?

Meanwhile Zhang Chengzhi's writing career has flourished. And when Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations appeared in Chinese translation it fuelled the fire of revenant Chinese nationalism and helped a new generation evolve a vocabulary of anti-global and anti-western rhetoric.

Long before we'd heard of al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden, you could read the fundamentalist message of a Chinese-Muslim firebrand (well, if you read Chinese that is). For you see Zhang Chengzhi, creator of the expression 'Red Guard', and a zealous participant in Maoist China's ideological fundamentalism, comes from a Muslim background himself and is something of a born-again follower of the prophet.

A new popular cult of Chairman Mao blossomed in China during the early 1990s when the West was putting pressure on the Chinese leadership over Tiananmen, human rights and a plethora of other issues. At the time Zhang wrote an essay commemorating Mao. In it he wrote:

Despite all the talk of international peace for our ancient motherland of China the New World Order is a pitiless killer and every Chinese will have to face its onslaught one day. In the future world justice will continue to be frustrated and there will be no such thing as compassion; nor will anyone stand up for the dispossessed.

The name Mao Zedong will remain eternally a symbol of rebellion against this new order. His prestige may well gradually rise among the masses once more. Of course, Mao Zedong must be criticized in human terms, but ironically, for Chinese like me who continue to oppose neo-colonialism, the international balance of power makes it necessary for us to look to him as a bastion of human dignity.

It is in this light, for the people of China and of the poor nations throughout the world who are confronted with the new international scene, it is possible that the influence and significance of Mao Zedong will gain a new lease of life.

Of course, that was before Mao bin Laden-or is it Osama Zedong?-came on the scene.

The words of these new advocates of a 'clash of civilizations'-a spurious concept if you ask me, are familiar to all who have and do deal with ideological extremism in China (and let there be no mistake, Zhang Chengzhi is not the sole advocate of anti-western purity in that country). People like Zhang seemed to be of marginal, even comic, interest a few years ago. Today, however, you can easily detect a tenebrous resonance and chilling relevance in their words.

But back to the future of China for a moment. It's population long debilitated by dizzying political movements and economic deprivations is for the moment concentrated on livelihood and wealth creation. But social conscience and concern will no disappear despite the cynical manipulations of the nation's rulers, and indeed the younger leaders recently brought into power have been exposed to a range of ideas and social and political practices that offer possibilities that seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

The level of intellectual inquiry, foment and social concern gives one heart, because Zhang Chengzhi is only one of many writers with mass followings in China today. Perhaps it is on our own shores that we may sense more worrying trends that cast a more worrisome shadow on our own path ahead.

The certitudes of those early years of contact with China have been confounded by history; the values that so many of my generation, at least publicly, held dear and to be self-evident are now under attack or being rejected at every turn. While economics and trade provides a veneer of unity, the underlying worldviews and aspirations of countries in our region are not simple, stagnant or obvious.

I have suggested that there has been a glum convergence over the recent decade or so, one that parodies the 'harmonic convergence' that you may recall was touted in 1987. Remember that was when an alignment of stars promised a coming together of all people of the globe in a mood of sharing, equality and a tremulous group hug. Given the new-agey overtones and bleeding-heart simplicity of it all, many derided that meeting of global minds as more of a 'moronic convergence'.

I am an historian, and much of my time is exercised trying to work out what happened, as well as the multivalent directions and interpretations of the past. As for the future, many have foundered while speculating on 'that which has not yet come', or weilai.

In many ways, for Australia I hope that our past will tell us more about the way ahead than our present.

For China capitalism and the fickle rule of the market is a contemporary reality and a seemingly unavoidable future. It was a future that, in the heyday of Maoist socialism, everyone thought had been resolutely relegated to the past. Now what was once the past-the future was the promise of a utopian communist world-has become the vision for everyone's future.

Meanwhile, I hope that in our own future we will not be subjected to the endless repetition of the tired rationalizations of the present. I hope for a future that moves us beyond our present predicament, one in which we may gain a measure of our seemingly irredeemable past, a past in which vision and humanity, as well as a certain cultural humility, made a better future seem both desirable and possible.