- 李敦白2003年在香港亚洲学会的讲话与问答
Remarks at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center
12th Annual Dinner
Sidney Rittenberg, Sr.
Speech and Q & A session.
Hong Kong, September 23, 2003
I would like to express very deep-felt thanks and appreciation to the Asia Society for inviting me and my wife and son to be with you tonight and all of the wonderful, distinguished people that I have been able to meet here tonight, and I look forward to see more of as many of you as possible.
As Ronnie mentioned, I am an American and happy about that, but for the last 60 years I have been going through this, sort of, weird odyssey in China.
I grew up in the deep South, in Charleston, South Carolina, and I grew up hearing the story about three things that Charlestonians -- who have a very special brogue, accent -- three things that Charlestonians share in common with Chinese: first is we eat rice every day; the second is we worship our ancestors; and the third is we do not speak English.
Later on -- this is just incidental information -- later on I gave up a fully paid scholarship to Princeton to go to what then was a much more liberal school, the University of North Carolina, where, thank goodness, I majored in philosophy. This also happened by accident, but I will not go into that.
After Pearl Harbor I joined the US army and I was picked out of the infantry and sent to study Chinese at Stanford. Actually, it is not true; I was sent to study Japanese and we were slated for military government in Japan after the war. Great, but I wanted to come home as soon as possible after the war, so I talked myself into Chinese instead of Japanese, and here was an early demonstration of the special gift of prophecy that I have always had; in only 35 years I was back home.
During those 35 years I went through three really, for me, momentous events: one, I came to know, personally, China’s leaders, from the last Emperor of the Ching Dynasty, Pu Yi, who introduced himself as the world’s only unemployed Emperor, to Mao Tse-tung, Zhou Enlai, the Gang of Four -- that does not mean the Marx Brothers, incidentally, for people that do not know -- Deng Xiaoping and the generations of Chinese communist leaders since, number one.
Point two, I continued an intense study of Chinese thought, Chinese philosophy which I now teach in an American university, and I had an excellent opportunity, an unparalleled opportunity, to develop this line of learning and to apply it during the 16 years that I spent in solitary confinement on charges of being an American spy, which I was not, but that did not really matter too much at that time.
Sixteen years by myself in a little cell, isolated from the world, with a wooden door for a bed and a cold water washbasin for furniture, often going for months on end without seeing or hearing another human being, surviving on bowls of food handed in through a little doorlette at the bottom of the big wooden door; no modern amenities like bars that you could see through.
Sixteen years -- the first year in total darkness -- sixteen years sitting there staring at the only other occupant of the room which was the real threat of madness, sitting there staring back at you every day, filling you with the knowledge that either you get him or he gets you. That was the problem; very little fear of death or anything else; that was the real fear.
Sixteen years, I have to tell you frankly, I hate to sound like a whiner, but I really thought it was too long. But I thought to myself every day, “I am sorry. I am an American. There is no way that you can stop me from loving China. There is no way that you can shatter my belief in the right of every individual to happiness. There is no way you can stop my love for the truth. There is no way that you can turn me into a bitter, twisted person”, every day.
The strange thing is that this outlook often appeared in a strictly American form: the minute the door banged behind me on the first day in that pitch black, dark room, four lines popped into my head from a poem by Edward Markham that my sister used to read to me when I was a sick little boy in Charleston. I do not know where they came from; they were just there, like that. The lines read:
They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took them in
And I thought to myself, “That is the plan. That is the strategy. That is the way out”.
The third thing -- and by far the most important, because it really made my life -- in 1955, emerging on wobbly legs and with halting words from my first six years in solitary, I struck it rich. I met and married my dream girl, my sweetheart, my loving partner through thick and thin, who suffered terribly because of me in labor camps during the Cultural Revolution, without ever once bowing her head. My partner today in business and in life, the wonderful mother of our four children, Yulin, that made my life. Please stand up. Stand up.
Each time after both imprisonments I received profound apologies from the Chinese government, which did everything possible by way of restitution. Our family has now become a myth and a legend in China, which is, of course, very good for our consulting business -- a lot of investment for that benefit to business -- but the best gift that I received from China, aside from Yulin, was the unique outlook that comes with Chinese culture. The only culture in the world that has grown in an unbroken line for more than 3,000 years and which Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shaoqi and their colleagues placed on a scientific basis and brought to new heights in the days before the aged Mao became drunk with power and forgot the principles that he had used so successfully to train his leaders and to win battles against seemingly impossible odds.
So, friends, I want to try to give you tonight my impressions of China’s leaders. We know about the ancient leaders, the emperors. They were usually autocrats, true, but we should remember that the Chinese were the first in the world to set up and successfully manage a great, unified, bureaucratic state; a huge country under central leadership which was able to maintain order and to keep the economy going for centuries at a stretch.
Also we should note that most Chinese dynasties placed a premium on learning and demanded of the officials that they reflect the rulers’ ideas of virtue before all else.
I think that our friend here tonight, Frank Ching, in his book, “Ancestors”, has given one of the finest, most accurate descriptions of daily life in those ancient regimes of China, based on the story of his family.
A strange paradox appears in Chinese history: the Chinese were thought of as an orderly people, even a docile people, with great respect for authority, with great humility, and yet Chinese history is full of palace coups, insurrections, civil wars, revolutions and individual men and women rebels. As my father used to say, “Beware the anger of a patient man”.
Of particular interest to us is that it was rather rare to have an orderly succession of rulers. Almost all of China’s famous Emperors fought their way to the throne; they were not the original crown princes.
This continued to be the case through the warlord period after the fall of the Ching Dynasty; through the Nationalist rule, torn by civil war from the very beginning; Mao Tse-tung’s two anointed successors, Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, were both killed before they could take power. Even with Deng Xiaoping’s two designated successors, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang: one was removed from office and died of an early heart attack while fighting for more vigorous reform; the other still passes his closing days under house arrest just outside the Forbidden City in Beijing.
This was not just something that developed under the Chinese communists; this was the tradition of Chinese history…
Until November of last year, and then March of this year, when a major shift in the national party and government leadership took place peacefully through political consultation by the ruling party, culminating in election by secret ballot among the several thousand delegates at the Party Congress and the National People’s Congress. Now this may not be our idea of an ideal democratic election, but for old China it was a momentous step forward. It shows a kind of institutionalization; it shows a kind of stability and maturity that is enormously important. The world has not yet realized what has taken place.
Interesting, originally all the great China experts -- including this one -- were saying that the new leading team, headed by party General Secretary and President, Hu Jintao, and Premier, Wen Jiabao, would do nothing new for at least two or three years while they consolidated the power of the new leading team. How wrong we all were. Actually, immediately after taking their new seats, new things began to happen, including -- but not limited to, as our American lawyers like to say -- the following: for the first time, the time, the place and the agendas of meetings of the top leaders are published in the newspaper.
Now this sounds like a simple thing, but I assure you, if previously you had asked if there was such a meeting taking place, and if so where and what it was about, you would soon find out that it was not right to ask questions like that. Now, it is published in the paper.
Even more important, the published contents of the first meeting of the Standing Committee -- the nine men who are at the pinnacle of power -- was a new sort of agenda. For quite a while we have had the impression that China’s leaders were focusing on economic growth and on encouraging the new entrepreneurs who drive the growth, both government and non-government. Now something new: these leaders immediately turned their attention to the fact that 850 million Chinese are poor people that live in the countryside, that live in villages, trying to get many of them into business, having great difficulty. They do not live in the bustling, coastal cities with all the gravy from foreign investment and trade.
For his first, major, public statement, President Hu Jintao goes to the tiny village in the Taiheng mountains where Mao had his headquarters during the last year of the final civil war. I used to live there too and I know it well, and I was shocked to find that it is still a dirt poor area where the economy has not developed anything like the regions around the cities. And what did the new party leader have to tell the nation from these old base areas from which the Communists moved directly into the city of Beijing? He demanded that all leaders, especially high-ranking leaders, go back to the old revolutionary tradition of hard work and plain living, hard work and plain living; something new. That they resist the temptations of, in his words, “money, power and lust”, and more importantly, he called on people all over China to keep a watchful eye on the leaders, particularly the high-ranking leaders, to see to it that they cleaned up their act and did a good job; something new.
The most dramatic change was evident during the SARS epidemic. Chinese television showed day after day the new leaders going into the contagious disease wards of the hospitals, talking with the SARS patients, going to the universities, having lunch with the students. Here was something new. That was when people all over China started saying, “These look like our guys. They share our problems. They go to the front line. They find out what is going on. They are not afraid”.
Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have repeatedly called for a new transparency and responsibility in government. President Hu has done away with much of the old imperial protocol and pageantry, and demanded that the press act more as guardians of the public interest, expose wrongdoing, tell the truth about issues that concern the people, and stop paying so much attention to the movements of top leaders.
Premier Wen Jiabao, during the SARS epidemic, several times stated, “The people have the right to information”, the right to information; something new.
They have interceded with local authorities a number of times to protect the rights of legitimate protest on the part of students and others. They have rescinded the regulations under which police in the cities could peremptorily send migrant workers back home. They have called for temporary workers to be upgraded to equal status with regular employees.
Of course, these are all samples. People in mainland China will tell you, most of what is new is still just words. We are waiting for more fundamental changes; absolutely right. It is far too early to pass judgment on the new team. They face far too much bureaucratic and local resistance to change for the change to come about swiftly and smoothly. But look at these leaders. Who are they? They are engineers. China today is a country that is governed by engineers. Look at the Premier, the Vice Premier, the Party General Secretary, look at the governors of the major economic provinces, look at the mayors of Beijing and Shanghai; engineers.
Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao are people particularly who have slogged through decades of working almost anonymously, unknown by most of the country, working in the poorest areas of rural China, who have won support by doing a good job and winning favor from the people in their areas. They were not somebody’s political favorites; they did not buy or wheedle their way to power. They were basically picked for their ability to do the job at a time when China faces serious challenges. Think it over. For all the things that we do not like, for all the things with which we have problems; take this country of 1.3 billion people, can you think of anyone else who could do a better job of keeping those 1.3 billion people united and peaceful, keeping the economy booming, keeping China’s door opening more and more widely to the outside world?
And I think, by the way, the same was true of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin in their time and their teams. They instituted the rule of the qualified engineers on the Chinese mainland to build the economy, to grow the economy, to look for what works, and they ended forever the rule by uneducated, peasant revolutionaries; they ended the era of class struggle; they ended the era in which political rule was consolidated by the ancient method of killing the chicken to teach the monkeys a lesson; and they ended the centralized command economy; and also, by the way, they enabled literally hundreds of millions of Chinese to escape from dire poverty in an amazingly brief period of history.
Now, how long ago was it when, in any Chinese city, there were no dwellings that had hot water, except for very top ranking leaders and, excuse me, foreign experts? Outside of that, Chinese did not have hot water in their homes, a simple thing like that; not to mention the DVD players and the air-conditioning and so on that are all over today, and the 240 million cellular phones of today. Hundreds of millions of people escaped from poverty. Is that significant? It seems to me it is.
So they also do lots of things we do not like. So they also make mistakes. Unlike us in America, we do not make mistakes. So there will be lots of times in the future when we read things in the paper that make us angry at China’s leaders and we think, “Hey, I thought you guys were supposed to be reformers. I thought everything was supposed to be under control. It is not”, and there will be many zigzags, there will be many retrograde acts, there will be many new problems. But the real point is not whether we are angry; the point is whether the Chinese, in their hundreds of millions, are angry.
It reminds me of a sign that I saw when I was a little boy in a little café in a Canadian mining town. The sign said, “You ask for credit, we say no, you get angry. You ask for credit, we say yes, you do not pay, we get angry. Better you get angry. No credit”.
The press tends to take the Three Represents as a big joke. Even many skeptical people in China take the Three Represents as a big joke, but believe me it is no joke. Just think about it this way: what would you rather see in the headlines of Chinese papers every day, the Three Represents or the Four Cardinal Principles? What you used to see was the Four Principles headed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. You do not find that in the Three Represents. You find that the leaders are supposed to represent advancing the culture, growing the economy, benefiting the lives of the people. So, bland though they seem, they are no joke.
Finally, what about Hong Kong? Can I say a word about Hong Kong?
Hong Kong, this diamond isle, this little gem of which there is only one in the world, and I do not think there will ever be another, no matter how Shanghai grows, Guangzhou grows, anybody else grows, there will never be another Hong Kong, I believe.
This little land -- we get really excited every time we come here -- this little land of peaceable, quarrelsome, smiling, bustling, tired, tireless, innovating, money-making Chinese, in Hong Kong. Sometimes I feel talking to people here you have little idea of the impact that you have on the Chinese mainland. Most of the attention is the impact that China has on Hong Kong. My opinion, looking forward into history, that is nothing compared to the impact that Hong Kong has, and will have, on China. Chinese cities, in order to compete with Hong Kong, must adopt many of the ways of Hong Kong.
Just one example: after the Cultural Revolution, I remember coming out of jail for the second time -- it was already getting to be a habit -- what was everyone saying after the bubble burst, the ideological fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution, and people started looking around to see what was really going on in the world? The first thing you heard people say was, “Look at Hong Kong; they are Chinese, we are Chinese. What is wrong with us?” And that was really the thing that started the whole mechanism going.
People of Hong Kong who did without democracy under a highly efficient, British colonial government, who are now rediscovering their Chinese roots, gradually developing a flourishing new economic and political civilization; we love coming here. We feel young, revived, inspired, just watching people chattering and joking in what seems like millions of restaurants.
The Washington Post just carried an article saying that the Chinese leaders’ purpose in dealing with Hong Kong is to prevent Hong Kong’s freedoms from spilling over into the mainland, like a contagious disease. Let me tell you a secret: my understanding is very different. From what I have heard, China’s leaders hope that Hong Kong will become a model for the peaceful, orderly, political development throughout China and I hope that you and China will develop a model of democracy that is not identical with, but much better than, our American democracy.
The Western rights of free speech, free press and electoral choices did not come easy; they were won through centuries of bitter struggle. Since the Magna Carta in England that only gave a few barons the right to present opinions to the king and which the king tried to revoke the next year, 800 years have passed and now we, as free Americans, have the right to choose between George W Bush and the other guy.
Okay, but we treasure every bit of this. This is sweet; this is good; this is intellectually stimulating. We treasure it, but there are three big problems, in my opinion, with our American democracy that I dearly hope the democratic China of the future will avoid, because this vision of a democratic China is what attracted me like a 10,000 year magnet from my first day in China.
Three major problems: one problem is that big money controls most candidates and politicians, and so far the kind of campaign finance reform that is common in European countries is blocked in the USA, cannot get it through. I think Dr Sun Yat Sen’s idea of regulated capital and of prohibiting the control of money over politics seems like a much better idea.
Two, we do not have a one party system. Great, but we have two big parties that have a total monopoly over virtually all political life. It has so far been impossible in modern times to launch other parties with different programs for a successful challenge to their control.
Three, and the result of these two factors is that more than half of our voters have so little confidence in being able to influence policy that they do not even bother to vote. What are you going to do? You cannot force people to vote.
China, Hong Kong, can do much better than that in my opinion. You have good causes; you have good motives; you will not allow ideologues or extremist politicians of any stripe to take advantage of your needs, to push for their own power or their own private agendas. Mainland China’s leaders understand that they must go forward with democratic political reforms, but they have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union, where political reforms were carried out before they restructured the economy, so life was getting worse every day and everybody’s mouth was open and running, so obviously the answer was collapse.
China faces massive urban unemployment, tens of millions, and around 150 million displaced, rural population, so China is on a tightrope. Renewed chaos could result either from failure to carry out timely political reforms, being too slow, too hesitant, too fearful, or from rash, precipitous reforms that unleash untrained and destructive forces. The both of these, Scylla and Caribdis, are the dangers that the leaders have to walk through.
Hong Kong will be a lighthouse of progress, not only for China, but for the world.
Now, thank you very much and I would be very happy to take even the toughest questions and to explain why I cannot answer them. Thank you.
QUESTION: What did Mao tell you?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: It is supposed to be a secret.
No, I think what Ronnie is referring to is that, actually, twice in 1946 I acted as an interpreter with the same message from Mao -- once to American diplomatic representatives, once to American military representatives -- and the message went like this: “We understand that you are helping Chiang Kai-Shek in the civil war. That is okay”. Actually, some of you may remember in those days Mao referred to the United States as his “quartermaster department” and Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops as his “logistical department”, because we were supplying the arms to the Nationalists which the Communists were then taking on themselves, and they ended up rather well armed. But what Mao was saying was, “We know this, but that is okay. After the war is over...”, and he thought in 1946 it would take another five years -- actually, it did not -- he said, “After the war is over, we want to establish normal relations with the United States for two reasons”.
The first reason was that, “You are the only country in the world after World War II that can give us the kind of reconstruction loans that we need to rebuild our country”, and he said, “We are not asking for a hand-out. We are willing to pay at the going rates of international interest. We have gold”.
The second point was -- and I think this is what Ronnie was referring to -- he said, “We do not want to be in a position after the war where we have to depend, unilaterally, on the Soviet Union because the Soviets are our comrades, but we are Chinese communists and we do not agree with them on everything. We need to have good relations with both sides of the world.” And, of course, we were too smart; we slammed the door in his face, and if we had not done that, in my opinion, both the Korean war and the Vietnam war would never have happened, would not have been necessary, and it is even possible that the draconian policies followed after the establishment of the PRC would also not have happened, that things would have been a lot softer; but live and learn.
QUESTION: We know that communism was once your dream in your early life but, during your stay in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution, you have suffered a lot. When did you -- how to say -- when did you wake up from your fantasy dream?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: When was the epiphany? Actually, not until after the end of my second imprisonment, when I began to see what was happening in the world, what was happening in China and I began to understand that previously I had thought the bad things that I saw going on and protested against, starting in the late 1950’s, that these were not happening because local leaders were not listening to the central guidance, were not listening to Chairman Mao; that they were a result of fundamental errors in the doctrine.
For example, things like trying to reach democracy through dictatorship, whereas dictatorship really only produces more dictatorship. Things like trying to develop the economy and provide incentive through a centralized command system of planning which deprives people and managers of incentive. I began to understand these things. The ideals remain unchanged.
It is interesting, when I went back to the States and we published our book in 1993, we went on a book tour all over the country. Down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, there was a man who ran a talk show who was known for being very tough on the people he interviewed. In fact, the little song before he came on the air talked about what a mean, tough guy he was, but since I had spent such a long time in prison in China, he was very nice to me. So we had the first few minutes of talk, then off the air for commercials, then we came back, and he said, “I am sitting here, talking with Sidney Rittenberg, who went to China as a young socialist idealist and is now back and has lost all of his ideals”. So I said, “I never said that. If I had lost all of my ideals I would be a Republican”. And he said, “Wait a minute, I am being very nice to you”.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, you mentioned the land reform as a major turning point of the 20th century in China and we have just had a development of ownership rights in the rural sector in China this year. In March the Land Contracts law was passed, and it has been proposed that this will free up the ability to mortgage land and thereby raise the prospect of enormous money for the next 20/30 years of development. But obviously there is some risk there and I just wonder what your perspective is on the ability of the peasantry to handle mortgages?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Well, I think the first thing to remember is that from the promulgation of a new law to the actual enforcement of that law in the villages can be a very long and difficult process. So it is not going to happen automatically just because a law was published. It is going to take time to implement it and it is going to be a tough job. So, as the new guarantees and the new openings for commercialization of land -- although you still cannot buy and sell land, but you can lease it, mortgage it and so on -- as this system develops and stabilizes, it should, indeed, be a very good market, but I certainly would not think it wise to enter into it hastily before it has stabilized and matured.
Incidentally, I am very proud to say that our Rural Development Institute in Seattle at the University of Washington, RDI, has played a role over the last decade in China in helping the Chinese government to do land research and to develop these new laws, because we are talking about a new market of 800 or 900 million people. That is the real Chinese market, not just the new middle-class in the cities and other urban buyers, the really huge Chinese market is out there in the villages. So anything done to encourage farmers -- this new law, incidentally, it is not just about raising capital; the main thing is that the farmer has little incentive to invest in the land, in developing the land, developing agriculture, unless he feels certain that the land is safe, that it is going to continue to be his. The carrying out of this law will stabilize it for 30 years and that should be a great encouragement to production and to the opening of the market.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, you are one of the handful of foreigners who has lived in China during the Nationalist period, has lived through the policy mistakes and then lived through all the policy debacles of the Communist government. This gives you a very unique point of view and judgment capability. Do you believe that China would be a more developed society and economy today if the Communists had not won the civil war?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: I do not think so. The reason is very simple: at the time, they were the only game in town, only game in town; the only force that was working to unify the poor people, unify the peasants, and to merge the efforts of the students and the middle-class with the peasants so that you ended up with a unified country, an independent country, and a country that could focus its investment powers on developing modern industry, and also carried out, in the first five years, enormous social reforms.
For example, when I first got to China, routinely, every year, there were epidemics of cholera, typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, bubonic plague. In only five or six years these were gone. No more epidemics of those diseases. And the eight hour day, and all the many, many reforms, dramatic reforms that were carried out, this mobilized the energies of the people to have faith in the ability of their country to grow and to prosper.
I do not think there was any other force in China at that time that could possibly have accomplished that. You just did not see any such program, or any such energy, or any such leaders.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, from your remarks to the previous question about property rights, I am inferring that you think that the rule of law, the extension of the rule of law, is necessary for the continued development of China, and I am wondering if you think, if that is true, if that is possible to happen in a fully fledged way, given a one party system which is above the law?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Well, again, as I mentioned, from the passage from a declaration of a legal system to the actual implementation of that system a lot has to go on to make it real, to make it happen.
One of the interesting things about Hu Jintao, incidentally, is that since coming into office he has repeatedly stated that the Communist Party must rule according to the law and repeatedly stated that no individual or no group can place himself, or itself, above the constitution and be a law unto itself. Well, I do not think certainly the latter statement generally was accepted that the Party decision was the law.
Now, people are being told that the constitution is supreme; that no organization, or no individual, can place themselves above it. So what you see is a tendency to try to turn this thing around; to try to carry out political reforms which are commensurate with the needs of the economic reforms, because that definitely, in my opinion, the leading group in China definitely understand and have understood for quite a long time -- it is not just the new leaders -- understand that, without political reforms, economic reform can only go so far and so fast.
The question is who is going to (inaudible)? How are you going to do it in the face of all the problems that exist now, and in the face of no traditions of rule of law? China has always been a country that was ruled by the man in charge, whatever the law says.
Now you are in a period of transition to rule of law. In my opinion, it is going to be a long and slow transition. It is not going to happen very fast.
QUESTION: I would like to raise two simple questions.
Hong Kong was given a status quo for 50 years by the Chinese government, and can you forecast what will happen in Hong Kong at the expiration of 50 years?
And the second question is, at the expiration of 50 years, what is the difference between Hong Kong and Shanghai, in terms of the economic contribution to our country?
I hope I made my questions clear.
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Very clear, that is the problem.
I think the first question -- I think 50 years from now, as I indicated in my talk, 50 years from now I think Hong Kong will be an exemplar, an example for the direction of democratic reform in China as a whole. I think Hong Kong will move first and move farther, and the rest of the country will gradually begin to learn from the experience of Hong Kong. I think this process of studying the political experience of Hong Kong has already begun.
I was here, by the way, on the day of the transfer of sovereignty, when Hong Kong returned to China. I was here as advisor to Dan Rather in the CBS News group, and it was an amazing picture. We had 1,000 American journalists -- only 600 from the UK -- 1,000 from the US, who basically all came to cover the same story and the story that they came to cover did not happen. So they were all, like, all dressed up with nowhere to go. What is the story? What is the story? What is the story?
I think that was, sort of, a sign of the times, that something, what was going on was very different from what they thought would go on. I think that process will continue with difficulty, be a lot of bumps in the road, a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of crude attempts to solve problems simplistically, but I think there will be continual progress and, in the end, the political development of Hong Kong will offer a model for the political development of the mainland, at least in many ways; my own opinion.
On the second question, what will Shanghai look like in 50 years, what will Hong Kong look like? What will we look like in 50 years? I think I have already explained that my gift of prophecy is somewhat wanting, so I would not even attempt to prophesize that, but I will repeat I firmly believe that, both for cities like Shanghai, for Hong Kong, for Singapore, these are more or less permanent factors in the economic world, and in the development of the Far East no one is going to put the other out of business, I don’t think. Shanghai is developing with its own features and characteristics, but Shanghai will not be another Hong Kong. Just as Hong Kong will not be another Shanghai; I don’t think so.
QUESTION: Sidney, much has been written about the private life of Chairman Mao. How credible are these stories?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Well, that is supposed to be a secret. I cannot talk about that!
I think the doctor’s book on the Private Life of Chairman Mao, I think it is about, my guess is probably more than 80 per cent accurate, but we have to remember that he was writing from memory, for one thing; and, secondly, he was very hostile to Mao at the time he wrote it. Thirdly, he deliberately kept himself ignorant of politics, so he made no attempt to understand Mao as a political leader, but only his personal life.
The other thing I would say about it is that I know, personally -- and I would go to court over this, if I had to -- that sections of that book that were placed in advertisements to promote sales were not written by the good doctor. The ones about going to bed with 12 young girls at the same time; about leading dance partners off the dance floor into an adjoining bedroom, that is just tall tales, because I have been on that dance floor, there is no such bedroom. I do not mean that I looked, understand, but -- and here is a thing even more -- anyone that knew Mao, or even saw him, knows that he would not even take a man by the hand on the dance floor, let alone take a woman by the hand and lead her. He was too much of a Confucian in personal style to do any such thing; it was not in character, and I know, from the translators of the original document, these things were done by the publicity agents in America in order to sell books, and were not part of the doctor’s original saying.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, I want to ask you about you. I believe that I heard you once in the mid-1980’s when I was in America. In your life you have gone through several very difficult periods. Each time during that period you were a man of conviction. You must strongly have believed -- well, you are still an idealist, okay -- but you were a man of conviction, but from time to time you moved from one phase to another, sometimes going through very major transformations of the mind. How did you do that? How did you convince yourself that, “Hey, I wasn’t quite right; now I must rethink”?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Well, I think that is part of the Chinese culture that I absorbed over time by being soaked in it, I guess -- and by studying -- and that is that we all grow; our growth is a process, I believe, of learning from our own experience, primarily. We examine what works, what does not work; what produces the results that we wanted, what does not produce it; and from that experience we learn, we try to learn, what our rights are, what our wrongs are; what our shortcomings, what our strengths are; and we try to use our strengths to deal with our weaknesses and to go ahead on that basis; that is a natural process. It certainly does not always work, but that is the process.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, you talked about how the Communists did a better job than anyone else could have in ruling China after they came to power, but they also killed enormous numbers of their own people. Do you have any sense of how many people the Chinese government killed under Mao’s rule and, if you do not have a sense for the number, do you think it was more or less, say, than Hitler?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Well, we are talking about two countries with a great difference in population, you know, so you would have to say, like, you would have to pro-rate it, but to me that is not the only significant thing; there is a qualitative difference.
Hitler believed in the rule -- world domination by a master race. Mao did not believe in any sort of master race or master country. Once, in 1964, when he received delegations from 16 African countries who were still fighting for independence -- so most of them were from guerrilla groups -- he had me come to this meeting and I had no idea why, since it had to do with Africa, and I found out after I got there the reason he wanted me there was, he wanted to make the point to them that a racist approach was wrong.
Here I was, a white man, American, but considered a close friend and trusted, whereas he said, “Chiang Kai-Shek is a yellow man, like me, but he is our enemy. So the white people are your friends. It is only the imperialists who are your enemies”, and so on. So quite different from Hitler, who sent people to the furnaces just because of their ethnic origin, to destroy a whole people. So I think the philosophy, the point of departure is vastly different.
How many people died? Well, the most striking figure I know of is that, in the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward in 1958/59, an estimated between 25 and 35 million people in the countryside starved, partly because of natural disasters, mostly man-made, because of wrong policy. And I think the real crime in Mao’s behavior was, not that he wanted people to die, not at all, but the fact that he thought that he had the right to perform these huge social experiments involving hundreds of millions of people when he, himself, did not know what the result was going to be, but he was trying to find a way for China to develop and to grow prosperous faster. He wanted to do that; he wanted to show the world; so a different kind of thing.
I remember a friend of mine who was an American writer, in 1958 arrived in Beijing, saw the Great Leap Forward, all the false reports on phenomenal increases in production and so on and immediately wanted to write a book about it. And Mao told her, “Don’t do it. Wait five years, because we still don’t know what the outcome of this Great Leap business is going to be”. So he knew that he did not know and still he thought that he had the right to go ahead and do it; social experimentation. Very different sort of mentality from Hitler or Goebbels.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, you gave us a very detailed description of the Chinese leadership and development of the past generations, also the Communist Party was mentioned. Now, how communist is the Communist Party today and, if you were to look ahead, are there more than one party in China in the future, and what would the apt description of the Communist Party of today be, as a matter of fact?
Lastly, where are the key challenges? Are there things that give you sleepless nights, just the same? Thank you.
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Will there be more than one party in China in the future? I think definitely, no question. In fact, over the last decade, the Chinese leaders have continually discussed and had discussions carried out in the Party schools, and so on, about how this could be accomplished. Sooner or later it must happen; it is bound to happen.
In my opinion, the original Communist Party of China that won the civil wars and that carried out the land reform and so on, that Party was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution; it no longer exists. What exists now is an organization that has the same names and the same table of organization and structure, but is in no way comparable to the original Party, either in its own morale and its own training, or in its prestige, in its ability to exercise unified leadership over the country. So it was destroyed.
At one point in March 1967, after less than a year of the Cultural Revolution, Mao decreed that the Communist Party all over China was to shut down, to stop holding all meetings, no Party meetings were allowed. The doors of the Party offices were sealed; no one was allowed to look in the dossiers and the files, except for the army. Only the armed forces maintained an active party organization and in the avalanche of the Cultural Revolution, which was essentially a revolution against the old Party led by Mao, the Party was destroyed. What was restored after, in 1968, when Mao, realizing the situation was hopelessly out of control, he sent the armed forces in to take over the leadership of all government offices, factories, schools, and so on. The armed forces brought back a party organization, but it was no longer the old Party; gone.
I have forgotten your third question.
QUESTION: Are there things that give you sleepless nights?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Oh. Well, actually, I do not have the kind of intelligence that keeps me awake at night worrying over problems, but if I did I think the main worry is really -- and this is very encouraging to me, about the new leadership -- the main problem is the growing gap between city and country, I think. The fact that, while per capita income, average per capita income in the countryside continues to go up, average per capita income in the cities goes up much faster, so the gap continues to widen, and that is a major problem.
QUESTION: Mr Rittenberg, thank you for a wonderful speech. I would like to ask a cultural question, and you quite rightly pointed out that our China, with 5,000 years (sic) of unbroken civilization, I would like to know how this China of traditions and of culture is going to reconcile with this fierce ideology of growth? A country so old and yet so energetic, so raw and so young now; how, in the rural China that you know, which a lot of the traditions still exist of the old China, is going to be integrated and changed, to be absorbed and to be swept into this new growth?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: I think that is a very important question.
China is a country that, in a few decades, has been through the grip and the shattering of three different belief systems, and now is in a position where there is no generally-accepted standard of public morality; there is no particular systematic belief system. But I think one will develop and one will have to develop.
The way it will develop, I think, will be the same way the strategy and tactics for winning guerrilla warfare developed in carrying out the land reform. They will study their own experience -- what worked and what did not work -- and devise a set of guidelines, and a set of tactics to meet the needs of continued development; not just economic, but economic, cultural, spiritual, as well, and political.
Again, since the 16th Party Congress, we have also heard a lot of emphasis put on this idea of spiritual, building a spiritual civilization, not just a material civilization. Again, this is encouraging talk, but so far it is still talk, and we do not know how far, how fast the changes are going to be implemented, but I think sooner or later it will happen.
I really, personally, I have a very strong feeling that, in a sense, the future of the human race depends on China, including the solution of these cultural problems and all the other things that we discussed.
QUESTION: My real question is not a political one, but more of an economic one. With all your experience in Chinese tradition, my question is, with China’s recent entry to the WTO. With all the conditions and terms and timing to fulfill, what is your opinion in the fulfillment, with all the piracy and counterfeit we see so often in this part of the world, how does that affect China’s long-term membership and its credibility as a member of WTO?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: We spent considerable time this past summer consulting Microsoft at their headquarters in Redmond, and one of the things we tried to explain was that what appears to us as stealing intellectual property rights, to most Chinese seems like an act of patriotism. You know, they kept this down for so long, now we have an opportunity to get their technology, what is wrong with that? And, of course, the answer is that this, on the issue of counterfeiting, that companies like Microsoft, in our opinion, need to form alliances with legitimate Chinese software companies to carry on education about the harm that counterfeiting does to the Chinese economy, itself; not to appear like an outsider trying to keep down Chinese software development.
You know if you give people the impression that what Microsoft comes to China to do is to: one, take out money for high priced products; and, two, kill our software industry, that does not make them popular. So I think the issue of counterfeiting is partly a cultural issue, partly it is an issue of making the transition from the early stages of economic growth in China to a mature economy.
I have forgotten the other part of the question. I have forgotten the first part of your question.
QUESTION: How would China fulfill the terms and conditions in the long term?
MR SIDNEY RITTENBERG: Right, well, I think the WTO, it seems to me -- first of all, China’s record to date, according to a report issued recently in the States, China’s record to date has not been bad. In terms of changes made to accommodate the WTO’s system, apparently China has done more than any other country has had to do so far.
However, there are still a lot of problems. Why? Every country, it seems to me, uses the WTO as an arena in which to fight for its own interests, really. People just do not lie back and say, “Okay, we are now all WTO, so we have no problems of different approaches and different interests”, and I think China also does use, and will use, the WTO as an arena to carry on this kind of effort to advance their interest, but at the same time not to get in trouble with the international trading system. A lot of things happen that we have seen in which there is compliance on the surface, but other methods are found of putting things back to more or less where they were.
At the same time, you have to remember -- I have to remember, as an American -- the biggest protectionist country in the world is the USA. Look at our steel industry, look at our textile industry, look at our agricultural subsidies, all of this stuff. So we talk about free trade, but we tend to welcome other people to practice free trade, while we reserve the right to protect our own industry, and particularly the right to protect industry which can generate votes in the next election, like the steel industry in Ohio.
So I do not think we are in a position just to say, “Okay, China, we are watching how you comply”. I think everybody in the world is watching how everybody else complies, and we have lots of problems with the EU also.
touche