[Dialogue] 9/09/10, Spong: China Revisited, Part I

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Thursday September 09, 2010 

China Revisited, Part I

I first went to China in 1984. In that year we could only visit Hong Kong and the New Territories. The Cultural Revolution, led by the "gang of four" and fueled by those called "The Red Guards," had thrown the nation into a paroxysm of paranoia from which it was still emerging. Suspicions ran high. The mentality of the Red Guards was that anyone who still in any way resisted the revolution was guilty of treason and anything that reflected pre-revolutionary China was subject to their destructive fury. Foreigners were not welcome either. On that trip, the closest one could get to China proper was to walk in the New Territories to the border itself that was guarded by soldiers of the Red Army with their guns at the ready position. Massive red flags were mounted on every parapet and were flap ping noisily in the breeze.
I went to China again four years later in 1988. The change was impressive. By this time, Mao Zedong had been dead for ten years and China had moved on. It was still a Communist nation, but serving the people not the revolution had become the pressing agenda of the government.
The great and disillusioning realization that I had in 1988 was in regard to how deeply my image of China had been created for me by American propaganda. The China I saw in 1988 was a far cry from what the press, the media and the government of the United States projected. I felt the same way I had felt when I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin episode that had been used to justify the massive build up of American forces in Vietnam was a fabricated event with no basis in reality. It was similar to the feeling I would have years later when high officials in the Bush administration in Washington had justified the invasion of Iraq on the basis of Iraq's development and possession of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and that had also turned out not to be true. I shall never forget Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's comment that if we did not destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the next terrorist attack would be marked by a "mushroom cloud." Most of the citizens of the United States do not travel abroad and sixty percent have never applied for a passport. So the majority of Americans are at the mercy of the way the world is interpreted to us by the policies and spokespersons of our government. Today the vehicle for communicating that perspective is the media, including three competing twenty four-hour-a-day news channels that hype every story in search of ratings. The China I saw in 1988 was very different from the China about which I had read in my newspapers and heard about on television.
This second visit to China was some 25 to 30 years after the Korean War had finally ended. In that war, Chinese soldiers had poured in endless waves across the Yalu River and they had succeeded in driving the American army, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, out of North Korea and almost into the Pacific Ocean. When the fury of this attack was over, the American forces held only a tiny defensive perimeter around the South Korean port city of Pusan. It was one of the worst defeats that America had absorbed in its history, costing huge numbers of casualties and ultimately ending General MacArthur's magnificent military career at an unprecedented low point. MacArthur blamed his defeat on the fact that the Truman administration had tied his hands by not allowing him to attack the build up and supply lines north of the Yalu River, but the fact was that in communiquéés after the dramatically successful Inchon invasion, he had informed the Truman administration that there was no chance the Chinese would enter this war. He was profoundly wrong. MacArthur was removed from his command by President Truman and a great political debate ensued in America, as always happens after a military miscalculation and a political defeat.
For President Truman, the dominant issues behind his decision not to attack China itself were twofold. First, he did not believe he should involve the American military in a land war on the continent of Asia where would-be conquerors have historically been absorbed by the conquered until they have been drained of their power. Second, he was convinced that an attack on China would bring the Soviet Union into the conflict and World War III would be unavoidable. So the Truman strategy was to recoup and resupply the army and thereby to drive the Chinese and North Koreans out of South Korea after which they would seek a political settlement. That was in fact done and it was under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower that the Korean War was finally brought to an end.
In order to perfume this defeat and to save face, however, it became necessary for this country to portray China as a significant military power. That was what became both blatantly and obviously false to me when I saw China with my own eyes in 1988. Militarily, China was a paper tiger. The China I saw was no more than a third-rate military power. Economically, it was a disaster. Its communication system was primitive. Its army had massive numbers of well-equipped soldiers, supported by Russian tanks. It had, however, almost no navy and its air force, made up primarily of Russian MIG fighters, was hardly a match for a major power. China's public streets were filled mostly with bicycles and a few motor scooters because cars were very expensive and thus extremely scarce. China's highways were largely untraveled except for dated trucks carrying produce from population center to population center. Many, if not most, houses in that year lacked both electricity and runni ng water. The highly touted "Great Leap Forward," engineered by Mao from 1958-1961, had been a colossal failure, resulting in massive starvation that cost the lives of more than forty million Chinese people. The later "Cultural Revolution" from 1966-1976 resulted in the persecution, death and displacement of millions of Chinese and the destruction of much of the artistic heritage of that country. The corporate memory of those events left the Chinese people traumatized and those memories were still present in 1988. There was nothing I saw in China then that gave any evidence of it being a "great power," let alone a military power It was important, however, to American military and economic interests for China to be viewed as a huge threat that must be contained. Led by what came to be known as the China Lobby, defending Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek from Communist aggression became the Holy Grail of the American anti-Communist stance in the eyes of such figures as Senator William Knowland of California. In the presidential election of 1960, defending two relatively insignificant islands off the China coast, Quemoy and Matsu, became the cause célèbre in the debates between Senator Jack Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. All of this kept the American "military, industrial complex," the power of which President Eisenhower had warned America about in his farewell address, going at full speed.
My second 1988 realization, derived from seeing China with my own eyes, was that from the vantage point of the masses of the Chinese people, the Communist revolution had brought great hope. American propaganda at the time made it difficult to admit that Communism was capable of anything good. China surely had a long way to go in 1988, but they had begun the march forward.
One window into that future was especially visible to me during that visit came when I saw a section of Shanghai, once known as "Millionaires Row," where the 19th century drug barons had built palatial homes with the profits from the opium trade that they controlled from the days of the Opium Wars. These huge mansions were juxtaposed to the squalor in which the Chinese poor lived. The Communist revolution literally grew out of this gap between the rich and the poor and closing this gap was a major motif of the revolution. The Communists, in their victory, had confiscated these houses to the distress, I'm sure, of their owners, turning them into buildings dedicated to the educational and artistic expression of the children of Shanghai.
One mansion was transformed into a temple for music. Here piano and violin lessons were given to China's children along with instruction in all of the other instruments from clarinet to saxophone, from viola to flute and even drums. Thus this mansion began to ring with the youthful sounds of music. In another of these mansions, it was voice and choral music that was the focus. Children as young as six and as old as eighteen were learning the music of their culture and the classics of the world and were even being heard in concert! At another of these mansions, the acrobatic arts were the focus. Today China is world renowned for its skill in acrobatics with Chinese teams roaming the world, putting on performances. Much of the expertise and success of Chinese artists and gymnasts today is a direct result of this emphasis that I noted on "Millionaires Row" some 22 years ago. I recently attended a chamber music concert in Western North Carolina in which each of the musici ans in the quartet, now in their thirties, were natives of Shanghai. A government willing to invest in its children as deeply as I saw the Chinese government doing in 1988 is a government that not only has a vision, but that also believes in the future of its nation. I was amazed and impressed in 1988 when I heard nine-year-olds playing both the piano and the violin at advanced concert levels; when I saw acrobatic feats performed by twelve-year-olds that were breathtaking, and when I listened to teenage choral groups that reminded me of Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, a reference that those of you my age will recognize. For those younger, it was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
These two things were new insights for me in 1988, but these insights were destined to pale beside the things I saw in my visit in 2010. To that story I will turn in my next column. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Dr. Mary Sommerfeldt from Baltimore, Maryland, writes:
I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that both my husband and I, Catholics, have been enjoying your newsletters and your books. We have evolved away from the institutional church's thinking (although we still go to church and sing in the gospel choir) and look to scholars like you to inspire and inform us. A Presbyterian friend of mine with whom I have shared your newsletter asked if I would pass this question on to you. Would you please give it some consideration?
The attached letter came from Bill Millen:
Pastor Terry Jones and other members of the Dove World Outreach Center, a Florida church have planned an "International Burn a Koran Day" this September 11. 
Pastor Jones writes: We are unconvinced that the "nice" church is winning against the Kingdom of darkness. God and God's people were not always sweet and loving to people and practices that were evil. We hope you will be interested in the book "Islam is of the Devil," a challenge to the Christian Church in general to come out of sleepiness and apathy. We hate the Koran. This letter concerns me on many levels:

Lumping all of Islam as evil
Inspires hatred of a group of people
Burns more than a book — it burns a way of life, a people.


Dr. Mary Sommerfeldt from Baltimore, Maryland, writes:
I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that both my husband and I, Catholics, have been enjoying your newsletters and your books. We have evolved away from the institutional church's thinking (although we still go to church and sing in the gospel choir) and look to scholars like you to inspire and inform us. A Presbyterian friend of mine with whom I have shared your newsletter asked if I would pass this question on to you. Would you please give it some consideration?
The attached letter came from Bill Millen:
Pastor Terry Jones and other members of the Dove World Outreach Center, a Florida church have planned an "International Burn a Koran Day" this September 11. 
Pastor Jones writes: We are unconvinced that the "nice" church is winning against the Kingdom of darkness. God and God's people were not always sweet and loving to people and practices that were evil. We hope you will be interested in the book "Islam is of the Devil," a challenge to the Christian Church in general to come out of sleepiness and apathy. We hate the Koran. This letter concerns me on many levels:

Lumping all of Islam as evil
Inspires hatred of a group of people
Burns more than a book — it burns a way of life, a people.





Dear Dr. Sommerfeldt and Bill Millen,
Thank you for your words and for bringing to my attention the letter from Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center.
That letter expresses an ignorance of what Christianity is that is breathtaking to say nothing about its ignorance of Islam. It is an attitude that reeks of tribal religion in a pre–modern world; it plays on the fears and hatred that tribal religion always engenders and it ultimately leads to the dehumanization of the book burners.
Islam has been instrumental in creating some very beautiful lives, while at the same time fundamentalist Christians have frequently revealed the very attitudes Pastor Jones seems to be condemning in the Koran. I remind my readers that it was the states of the Confederacy known then and now as the Bible Belt of the South that fought to preserve slavery, then to establish segregation and finally to save segregation with fire hoses, police dogs and murderous church bombings to save segregation. Remember that the final civil rights conviction for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, MS, was handed down only a few years ago on the Reverend Edgar Killan, who was described as an ordained Baptist minister and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Christianity like Islam and every other religious system has produced members who are anything but ideal.
Pastor Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center do not understand the basic teachings of Christ, who enjoined us to love our enemies, to bless those who persecute us. Love alone transforms hatred. The kind of hatred Pastor Jones advocates never breeds anything but more hatred.
This action is an embarrassment to the Christian Church and, on behalf of many Christians, I apologize to the world and to Islam for this outrageous behavior emanating from those who claim to be the followers of Christ.


– John Shelby Spong






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