Real Ideals and False Hopes: Seeing China in the Vietnam War — with Orville Schell
55:51 Share

Hello listeners, welcome to the Peking Hotel podcast. I'm your host Leo. This is a podcast about people's stories with China and how to live and think about China's present, past and future. Now, I really struggle with this episode. Is it really worth doing a third episode on Orville's oral history? In case you didn't know, I'm currently collecting oral history of foreign China specialists and previously done two episodes already on Orville Hsiao. Yes, Orville is an interesting speaker with

deep knowledge and experience. And he has a China related career spanning over six decades. He's a writer who published for the New Yorker, New York Times, New York Review of Books, and even a documentary producer of one of the most famous films on China, namely

Gates of Heavenly Peace, the definitive documentary of Tiananmen Massacre. And he's currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. But is it really worth doing a third episode? Is it really necessary? After some internal deliberation, I decided, yes, it is worth doing.

because this one talks about a topic I've not heard anywhere else, namely the connection between the Vietnam War experience and China warships in America. Now, the impact of the Vietnam War on a whole generation of American scholars, journalists, activists, diplomats cannot be overstated. Whether you were in it, for it, or against it,

The war mobilized the whole society, especially the young generation through conscription, into the orbit of Vietnam, Asia, and the Cold War, and turned many against the American government and the concept of the West.

It was in this greater context of Cold War revisionism that China watching began to emerge in America. So a generation of prominent China scholars, mostly born in the 40s and 50s, who were undergrads and PhD students at the time of the Vietnam War, they grew out of the Vietnam War, they studied, organized, protested, wrote articles, denounced professors, and traveled to Asia.

The Vietnam War informed the consciousness of China watchers then, and its legacy continues today well beyond the field of China studies itself. Anyway, I should only review enough so you want to listen on. So with that, here's Orville Schell on his experience in the Vietnam War and China.

We're in Indonesia and you just got kicked out of Indonesia and now you didn't want to go back to Harvard. You thought that maybe you would explore the West side of America. Ford Foundation hooked you up with Berkeley and they took you in for a PhD, but you didn't stay there all the way. I did. I stayed through my orals and I was going to write a dissertation. I was going to write it about John Service, who actually was in Berkeley.

ran the library was one of the three, four guys who was up in Vietnam during the Chongqing days. Very nice guy and got really beat up by McCarthy period. But you're constantly flying to Vietnam and you were even flying in military planes with your brother. Yeah. And then I went with him and that's when I wrote that article, "Cage the Innocence." Yes.

With General Olsen dropping bombs whenever they saw a hut on the land. I've heard about Vietnam War, but I've never properly read an account like that so vividly. What was it like for you witnessing all that in the plane? And the generals, the majors talking as if nothing, let's just bomb here, bomb there, we'll have to clear our... It was surreal. And you should read my brother's book called The Military Half.

because I only wrote a couple articles. He wrote a whole book on it. Vietnam was divided in four battle corps. And the first corps, they call it I Corps at the top, just below North Vietnam. Almost the whole province was what they called a free fire zone. They fired artillery around the clock. Didn't matter who was there. What they said was we told the people to get out, a little like Gaza. And if they don't get out, they must be unfriendly. And so these

Forward air controllers, which I went out with, would fly around looking for any human activity, a hole in the ground, anything. Someone working in a field that got caught and they'd call in the fighter bombers and bomb it. I remember one time, this is the time my brother and I were there together, and Jonathan, he met me at Saigon Airport. We were both in Hong Kong together.

He'd come down early and spent a week or two up in the little Ford air control planes. And he got to Saigon airport to meet me. And he said, "Oh my God, where's my notebook?" And he lost all of his notes from his two week trip. And I said, "God, Jonathan, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?" He said,

We're going to go back. Another two weeks. So we did. But the story is much more interesting than that. Many, many years later, somebody called him up. When he got back from Vietnam, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense, asked him to come to the Pentagon, put him in the basement and said, write down everything you saw.

because I think we had some friend that had told him that we'd seen these incredibly nightmarish things, and he did. Then, at some point, quite a while after that, someone called him up and said, "Did you know that your notebook from 19-whatever it was in Vietnam, we found it in the CIA archive?"

My brother was always leaving things places. I don't think they stole it. Because we used to stay in these military bases. You stay in the officer's club or something and he would just leave stuff. His whole life he left stuff. And the CIA picked it up? I guess the military got it and sent it off to the CIA. But they did not want to return it to him.

I don't know if they knew who it was. Maybe they just figured why we should give it back. We got it. Why did the Pentagon call him in, though? Because the White House science advisor, who'd been the president of MIT, was a friend of my parents, told McNamara that he had heard that Jonathan and I had been down there. And we'd seen some things that he thought McNamara needed to know about. All right.

To McNamara's credit, he did this. And years later, when I was at Berkeley, I had him come to Berkeley for a conversation. And I found him very repentant, very regretful about what he'd done. He was a very smart, not a bad man, but boy, he made some big mistakes.

It's interesting how the whole Vietnam War experience is obviously such a resounding moment in the formative years of a lot of the China specialists during those years. Because we trusted our government. And that had, I think, the unfortunate effect of making us more willing to wonder if China didn't have some answer. To trust other governments. Since

We were so against our government. The tendency was to think China's against our government. Maybe they have some answers. But since we couldn't go there. He imagined. It's classic projection. I don't think I ever thought China was the milk of human kindness, but I think it was a deep

For being against the Vietnam War. Yeah.

Please do. He says, "Dear Mr. Shill, I consider it a rare privilege to be a United States citizen. With privileges come obligations. When our nation requires the services of its young men, I think it's their duty to respond. One cannot be selective supporting one law of one's country and denying another. The Selective Service Act is the law of the land. To refuse induction under the law demonstrates a disregard for that law.

I have no difficulty in answering your letter. I would sign no such statement. I'm going to sign some. You actually framed it. I'm putting it in your library for perpetuity. Why not? There was an account online somewhere. I read in one of the articles where you were being drafted

And you told the reserve manager, you and your brother, you guys were pretty anti-Vietnam War. And you basically intimidated them, saying you couldn't imagine the kind of article we're going to write if you actually do send us there. I said, please send me back.

You can pay for my trip and you can pay to keep me there and I'm going to write articles you will regret the rest of your life. And they did not draft you. They did not draft me. But you went anyway. Then I went back on my own, but not with them. How did that work? You made your attitude clear.

You still worked your way through the military. No, that I'd turn my draft card in. But sometimes I remember one battalion commander, we ended up with this battalion up near Da Nang Battalion. There's like five, six hundred men. And this guy was about to go out on an operation and we're going to go out with him. He was so gung ho. Because in those days, and this is McNamara's great fault, the military didn't just take orders from the White House. It did that, but it also justified the war.

generals like General Westmoreland and Abrams were constantly being used to make propaganda for the war. I suppose they had to keep their morale high. I don't know, but it's not like the military now that doesn't meddle in policy. They tend to be professional. They do what they're told, but they don't

turn into propagandists, which I think is good. But these guys got hooked into it. And it was a really difficult time in American history. And when I first went to Vietnam, 1961 or two, I was very supportive of the war. And I thought, oh, at last the Americans are learning how to fight guerrilla warfare. Learning from Edward Lansdale, who had been the British general who had beaten the

Chinese communists in Malaya. And they had all these strategic hamlets. They were moving people into them and all kinds of stuff. And I thought, okay, this is good. But the more I stayed, the more I watched, the more savage it had been, the more justifiable it seemed to me. It wasn't winning, just killing people.

Vietnam War was when I suppose that was a moment of enlightenment, a political awakening for a whole generation of Americans. That was the year, the time of counterculture, the human rights movement, came the war. You guys were frustrated, were disillusioned about

American politics, American government, and you looked to the East as a potential mysterious place of hope and worthy of exploration. I would say there were some people who I think like Jane Fonda, North Vietnam was a place of hope. I didn't quite go there, nor did I see China as a place of hope. I was curious to know, I was

deeply skeptical but curious to know if there was another way of being in the world besides capitalism, Vietnam wars and American empire. But I have to say I was not a communist sympathizer but I wanted to see it. And it's so interesting that the other way at the same time of Vietnam war, American empire, American capitalism was the cultural revolution. Yeah the worst.

The worst. The Cultural Revolution killed, I don't know how many times more than the Vietnam War. It was the worst, the darkest moment in, if not the whole of Chinese history, which I think it has a good contender for, at least one of the worst moments, probably the worst moments in the whole of 20th century, and certainly in the People's Republic.

I think that's right. And I think we did not see it as clearly. And certainly people like in France, the old Godard and...

all these existentialists and didn't see it as clearly as we should have. That's why I really deeply respect a Belgian writer, Simon Leys, who is a French speaker. He wrote his book at the same time of your book. Yes. In the People's Republic. Yeah. And I think he got it much more right than I did. Cultural Revolution, the Westerners,

like yourself did not know a whole lot about? I think we didn't understand deep savagery of it. We knew it wasn't pretty, but there were a few people who I have to say I'm very admiring of.

who did understand it. And I think Simon Leys was one of the most insightful people. He figured China out before the Cultural Revolution when he was cultural attache in the Belgian embassy and wrote Chinese Shadows. What did you make of the American understanding of China during that period?

I thought the Americans knew so little about just the way it was to be there. I think that book was probably as good as I could do because I was just looking from the outside in, but I don't think it was very profound.

Which book? The one you wrote with Joe Escher? Well, the book that came out of all my New Yorker articles. People were just hungry to know what did the place look like? What do people do? What do they wear? It was such a terra incognito. But as I look at it now, and I haven't looked at it for a long time, I wish I had been much more skeptical. But the price at that moment of skepticism, at least in that world that I had been taken to China in, was very high. I got a tape

from Karma Hinton just trashing me. And she wasn't even on the trip, but because she felt it was her family's trip for me being not sufficiently respectful and being too negative and destroying the friendship.

and destroying the possibilities maybe of further contact, further trips. Do you see repetitions of the same pattern of behavior between Americans then and Americans throughout the periods and Americans now dealing with the Chinese Communist Party? I think that when Nixon went and then

Carter and Deng got together, there was a huge willingness just to forget and to say, okay, the revolution's over. Deng's waved his wand. It's all good. And I think a lot of Chinese felt that way too. I was very skeptical, though, I have to say. You see it in my books because I remember when the Sui, Gung, and Yuanzi came out. The four basic principles. I didn't ignore it. And I, when Discos and Democracy, I think I started that book. I don't know if you've seen that. I have.

I love that book. Bai Feng and I were standing out in front of the library in Beijing University with the statue of Mao. Yeah. You remember that? He knocked down. It hadn't been knocked down yet, but it was shortly thereafter. Yeah. But on the walls of all the buildings in front of that little grassy place, there were all these Cultural Revolution slogans beginning to come back out again. They were painted over. The paint was peeling.

And I started the book saying, boy, that's a good metaphor. This isn't over. So it wasn't as if I was deluded, but basically I like to be hopeful. I don't want to die in despair. So, and it was a good run. God, it was fantastic. We had some amazing friends and experiences and things that you could do in the open and publications that were amazing.

really exciting. Like what? What was that Shanghai Jingji Dabao? It was really, really amazing. And there was Nanfang Zhuo Mo and things like that later. So there were signs that made you feel that the trend was good.

Even People's Daily and Guangming Erbao, all party newspapers, they were pro-democracy and reporting on... In 89, they were. But Guangming Erbao, they had some really interesting things. Even had Fang Lijue writing in it. And Liu Bingyan, well, they was in People's Daily. And they had, what's her name, came to Stanford. Dai Qing, she was writing in Guangming Daily.

In some sense, the dissident writers will be incubated by the system. They were. So we should be forgiven for hoping the trend could somehow, even though we might have been... That is the big watershed moment of Tiananmen, obviously. Yeah.

and then the legacy and the aftermath. Yeah, that was really... But, you know, Jiang Zemin did bring reform back again in some modest way. I told you about being on that trip with Clinton. It was one of the most extraordinary things I've seen, him and Jiang Zemin at the press conference.

And Jiang Zemin bringing up Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhism. And them laughing and... Live on TV as well. Live on radio and TV all across China. It was incredible. Yeah, it called me a little bit naive, but that's why I admired...

People like Simon Leys. They saw clearly in the moment what everyone else didn't. They knew there was a steel toe in this boot and it wasn't going away. Americans, include myself in this, if given a possible chance, we like to be a little idealistic and hopeful. That is the strength of America. And it's also our naivete.

I suppose that is a blessing.

that helps you skip over much of the difficulties that would otherwise be pretty insolvable in many ways. We don't want to live in despair, right? And America, it is its genius that it keeps going forward and has some hope. I think that's what's so depressing about the present is that we may be running out of hope in our own

dream. The great tragedy for people like Simon Leigh would be that they were right. They knew what was going on, but it would have been impossible to convince others of his insight because others did not share his experience. They did not. And you go back and you look at some of these French television debates that he had with the left wing. He's dead on right. And they're just so fucking wrong. There you were at Berkeley.

mingling between the Vietnam War and the Bay Area. You did your oral examination. You wrote The China Reader with Franz Schurman. You wrote More Than China with Joe Eshrick, your friend from Harvard. It was almost a standard word by word communist historiography. Partially, I don't

to blame it on Joe. But we had taught a course together at Berkeley, and that was sort of the height of the Vietnam period. I don't really remember where both of us were, but we were trying to write this for young kids and trying to, as I recall, give them some reason why they should try to understand what's going on in China, just to say, take a look. But I think it was one of the more naive things I've written.

And I think it's a theme repeated by other sinologists who, when you into the field, wanted to get away from whatever Washington orthodoxy that was about China and wanted to be educated and enlightened about what was actually going on in China and almost isolated.

invariably they turned to the official version of the communists of Beijing. We didn't have another version. We had nobody there. We had no first experience. And, you know, when I finally went there in 1975, the only person I knew or had a contact with was the Le Monde correspondent, a guy named Alain Boucq.

who was a complete communist running dog, as Le Monde was in Cambodia. So a lot of these left-wing people from Canada, but mostly from France, who could go to China, were people who were very sympathetic to the Mao. So it was very hard at that point. And people like Simon Leys were suspect because he was sitting in Hong Kong reading newspapers. I have a whole shelf here that I want to write an article on about China lovers.

There's Felix Green, there's Jan Myrdal, there's Jack Chen, there's Alberto Moravia, all of these people. They all wrote these fawning books on China. I want to go back and look at them and see how do we get so much so wrong. The European intellectuals were in a way the worst because they had a tradition of socialism. Yeah.

That's their thing and got exported to China. So they couldn't quite believe that China's version of socialism was fascism. Americans didn't. We were just sort of stupid. We're anti-communist, but we got sick of anti-communism because that turned into a brutal massacre of McCarthy. So there was a kind of a swing in the opposite direction. But the Europeans did have Stalin, didn't they?

And they loved them. The Humanité, the French communist newspaper, was in bed with Russia to the end. There was a long tradition of overlooking stuff in different versions in each country. And you started this thing called the Committee of Concerned Scholars. Yeah, that was a group mostly focusing on Vietnam, at least for me. But then there were some people that went on to my great chagrin to attack people like Fairbank. For what?

I can't even remember. This one guy who'd been to Harvard, Jim Peck, wrote a bunch of articles about that he maybe hadn't appreciated the colonial nature of America. And we had a big conference and I invited to come out and speak with Owen Lattimore. And we got shouted down.

Ovin Lattimore was an intellectual, was a diplomat that got purged during the McCarthy era. And unfairly, I thought he was a very interesting man. He's the guy who did all this work on China border regions. So it was a bit like Edmund Club, would you say? No, he did a lot of stuff out in Xinjiang and Mongolia, joining caravans. He spoke Mongolian. He grew up.

He was a real sinologist. Yeah, he was. There's a whole book up there I wrote an introduction to about it. And that was really heartbreaking. And finally, I can't remember what they were yelling about. Sort of like the wokes today. I just said, under the circumstances, we can't have a civilized discussion. I had to cancel the whole session. Committee was set up.

in response to the war. And then it metastasized out into a critique of certain China specialists. Did the committee have a major impact on policy, on social affairs, on culture? It certainly had an impact. I'm not sure how much, because at that point, it was Lyndon Johnson and Nixon and Vietnam. I can't even remember who was president, when and what, but...

It grew out of the sense that somehow Asian studies didn't want to reckon with what was going on in Indochina. That was its sort of animating spirit. I didn't quite get it. Well, why we were bombing Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. And as Asian China specialists, should people be working for the government, like advising the CIA? Or I can't remember all the details, but that was its sort of animating beginning.

I suppose the committee's answer would be no, right? Yeah. In those days, whereas now I think people feel very differently, the sense was that you should not be advising the government as an Asian scholar. Yeah. Because they're...

what's going on in Indochina. That was a huge, big wound. And even though people might have been anti-communist, which I was initially, when you actually saw what was happening, it seemed to be just giving new energy. Yeah. Did you ever think about going into politics? Not really. No, you think? I don't think I'd make a good diplomat. I don't think I'd be good in the White House or the State Department. And I don't want to put up with the bullshit of running for office. No?

I want to say what I think and you can't do that. So I think you have to be very careful. How would you describe your younger self actually? Were you a nerd? Were you outgoing? Were you hugging everybody? I was a very uncertain young man. I didn't know what I was doing. You go to a big place like Harvard. I mean, you went to Oxford.

you feel utterly insignificant. I think the challenge of students is to try to find some good mentors, find their way, gain a certain confidence, but not arrogance, that they actually understand something and try to do some good work writing. But I think in my early days, that was always way beyond me. I didn't know how to write.

You write so well in your articles. You can learn things. You can learn to play the piano. You can learn to write. Who are the people that taught you? I had fantastic editors at The New Yorker. I had a book editor who's still my closest friend. Understood that the job of the editor is not to get the writer to say what you want him to say, but for the editor to help the writer say what they want to say. And this guy was fantastic. Who's this? His name was Tom Englehart.

He's the editor to lots of your books. A lot of my books, a lot of my brother's books, edits Adam's books, Adam Hochschild. He's not editing now, but he's an incredibly good editor. How do you find a good editor? A good editor is almost like a mentor.

I don't have one now. And I had a wonderful editor when I did the novel and then he died. And I'm looking. But publishing doesn't produce these people now. It's not common. You need to find it on your own or know how to edit yourself. But I've always found writing much more fun and interesting and better end results when you have an antiphonal relationship with a good editor.

But it's very hard to find such a person. I've been really blessed. It takes a long time to get something good. Yeah. You have to edit 20, 30 times. But you became an editor yourself by founding the Pacific News Service. Yes, and that helps. Now we have China Books Review. I know how to do it, but I don't love it.

Yeah, I suppose that puts you on the backseat. I do it because I know it's something that's important to friends, but it's difficult work. But publishing is not what it was when I began. It's very transactional now. There are very, very few people with publishers who are really good editors.

They're very superficial. Can you talk about your time at Pacific News Service? Why did you found it? Well, I did that actually with my editor, Tom Englehart. This is, again, during the Vietnam War, that there were other views around the world that should be expressed, even if we might not agree with them all.

were in their own little sort of airless room. And if you had views, say, from some Asian country or Europe or someplace else, it would be interesting to see how other people were looking at something that we were so locked into. So that was the conceit of it. But it was very much, I think, aimed against what was going on in Indochina and the whole American military machine at that time, which was dedicated to that war.

And you felt a certain insufficiency or a certain dissatisfaction with how the mainstream US media treated the war? It came along, but it took a while. I have to say, during much of the war, the anti-communist part I could get. You need to be effective. You can't just be out killing people. And also bombing empty fields often.

It was so appalling when you saw what was going on. I mean, they had the 7th Fleet off the coast of Vietnam, and they would be firing 24 hours a day, artillery fire, into these free-fire zones, just anywhere. It didn't matter where it went at. It was

different version, more pinpoint bombing with the fighter bombers. And there were artillery batteries all over the coast, up and down Route 1, lobbing shells into these. But it wasn't like there was one circle of free fire zones. It was the whole damn province with maybe one city carved out. And one band on the coast carved out. Crazy. It was truly genocidal. Where are the people going to go?

A lot of them left, but a lot of them got stuck there. That was such a distorting lens, but also an animating principle of so much that happened in the 60s and 70s in relation to China.

How did that impact you as a China scholar? Well, it was distracting, first of all, and it also turned people of my generation so hostile towards our own government that there was a tendency amongst different people at different versions of this

some were very extreme, to sympathize with the North Vietnamese and also even China. Because they were supporting the Northern Vietnamese. So it was the thing that's now metastasized into anti-post-colonial thought, this idea that America was imposing some sort of, I don't know what you want to call it, not a colonial order, and it didn't seem to have any logic. And it wasn't winning. And when you got out actually into the war,

It was even more horrific than reading about it. And they asked a whole generation of young Americans to join, to fight and to risk their lives for such a meaningless cause. 50,000 died. For what? That's why I think in the very beginning, I thought when the Americans weren't yet shooting, they were advisors and they were trying to hem off the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh coming down from the north. And

had this kind of crazy idea of what they call strategic Hamlet's of putting everybody behind a barricade and then they go out in the daytime and farm. I went out to a bunch of those and I thought, well, I don't know, this is at least something because the domino theory had it that Russia and China were going to

And remember, Mao Zedong had this theory of people's war, that they would expand out around the world, occupying country after country by moving in from the countryside surrounding the city. So it wasn't like this was delusional. And this is where really decent men like McNamara became a cropper. They actually thought this was going to happen, and maybe it was, I don't know. But their answer to it ended up being brutal and unsuccessful, and they didn't know how to get out.

but it turned you towards China? Not really. I think some people might have, but I didn't confuse those things that much. It didn't make me love China. I still wanted to just go there and see. There may have been some small part of me that you're a friend of your enemy is your enemy. The enemy of your enemy is a friend. Yeah. I think it's sort of a natural human response in some ways. But no, I didn't think that China was the answer.

And actually, it turned out it was the Russians that were largely supporting Vietnam. China let the trains come across. China was giving some help, but... Well, neighbors never really get along, even though they have the same ideology. Well, China and Vietnam have never really gotten along. Neither is China and Russia. They use each other. But they don't listen to each other. But it's only to say that when Americans have wars, they have distorting influences on...

on all the other geopolitical questions. And the Vietnam War distorted the field of Asian studies in a major way and caused a lot of upset, a lot of internal fighting. And it re-alchemized the notion that scholars, or I suppose even reporters, but mostly scholars, should or should not help the government. So because of Vietnam, what had been something where everybody had collaborated and everybody had felt

perfectly comfortable helping the government. It suddenly became unacceptable and the professors who did want to work for the CIA or do counterinsurgency or advise on Vietnam and things like that were looked at askance as, you know, traitors.

So that did have a distorting influence. So people like Robert Scalapino and Chalmers Johnson at Berkeley, who were deeply involved in US government policy, were looked at as having been doing something unacceptable. Well, by this time the Vietnam War was basically finished. What did you do after the Vietnam War? Well, so then I took a little bit of a break when I stopped going to Vietnam, which is

just before the Tet Offensive. I just didn't want to go back anymore. And I wasn't yet going to China. And that's when I think I wrote that book about Jerry Brown. Yeah, the Californian governor who also ran for president in 1992 and before. And in 77, I think.

I still see him. I just want to take a rest from China and Vietnam. So I did that. You started a ranch. I started pig farming and then it turned into a cattle ranch. And with my partner and did that for 20 years while I was also writing. And I wrote a book, you know, what year, but it was about ranching.

and how modern meat is raised. I suppose that is the period when you had lots of other things going on that weren't Vietnam, that weren't China. You wrote a book on the town that saved itself that recovered from an oil spill. You wrote a book on modern meat to explore how in the meat industry there was an epidemic of different drugs being injected into cows. You wrote a biography of Jerry Brown, who was the

California governor and a lawyer that actually argued against the oil spill. What were you thinking back then? Why did you pick those projects? I think I was a little bit worn out on the Vietnam War and even China because it couldn't go there. And I just got interested in other things. And that was sort of the movement at that point. I had moved out to Bolinas in the countryside. Why did you pick Bolinas? Bolinas is this townhouse.

to the north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Lovely hillside town with a hippie reputation. It was beautiful. And I got involved in a whole thing there to build a sewer and was a sewer commissioner, water commissioner. I just wanted to do some other real things. I didn't really start coming back to China.

until 1975 when this trip I described got organized. So you basically took a whole break from the whole issue of Asia. It was like three or four years. I was still doing Pacific News service, going into the city to do that, but I wasn't daily at the university. I still was involved in some activities, and I hadn't quite figured out if I'd ever write a dissertation. At that point, I wanted to write a book on Lu Xun,

But I never did it. But you talk about Lucien so much even now. I finally did. I wrote a whole thing on him, which we didn't include in Wealth and Power. Why did you not? It's too long. I wish we had actually, because I adore Lucien. I should dig that out someplace and see what I said. That was a kind of an interim, and I moved to the countryside out of Berkeley. I got involved, and I've always liked to work with my hands. I worked as a carpenter building houses,

stuff like that, just leading my life. Was that your existential crisis moment in the whole of your life? No, it wasn't exactly a crisis. I guess I could have gone in any direction. I might never have come back to China if certain things hadn't happened. I don't know what I would have done, but I was just writing. And I'm just looking at the books up there. What else did I write? I guess the one with Jerry Brown took me a couple of years. Yeah.

And then that one I did on the ranch about ranching and meat. And what was the next one? And then I did started going back again. And so that was sort of a hiatus. And I could have easily just drifted off and done something else. But I'm glad I used to like the idea of writing one book on China, one not. Although lately I've just done...

China. But I've written a number of books that have nothing to do with China. You wrote lots of restaurant reviews at the time. Well, I got someone hired me to write restaurant reviews, take my friends out to restaurants. Yeah. I was happy. Free meals? Yeah, free meals. It was fun. It was something totally different. But then the big moment came, Kissinger and Nixon. Yeah. What were you doing when Kissinger went to China? I was just out in Bolinas. Tending

- Pigs and tattoos. - Yeah, and writing my other stuff. And I got preoccupied in this community where I lived and a lot of environmental issues and stopping the building of the town had been divided up into 50 foot lots and would have been like a housing development.

But there wasn't enough water. So anyway, we organized a whole government to stop the building by limiting the water. It's nice that you are playing an active role in the community around you. Yeah. When your life is so used to being to go into the faraway land of China, Indonesia. I felt to come home a little bit and I built a house that I lived in when my first son was born.

And then I moved off to a pig barn and built a whole ranch. I built another house where my eldest son now lives. In Bolinas? Yeah, I built the roads, the corrals, the lake, everything.

I like working with my hand. And then when this trip came to China, Kissinger had set that up in a way. He set things in motion so someone like Joe Eli could start allowing foreigners and Americans to come to China on a limited basis. And that was the basis of the trip that I went on. That was not the only trip happened during that time between America and China. No, there were other trips too that began to... But

All, I think, under Zhou Enlai's five modernizations he proposed back in the 60s. So he took a special interest, I think, in allowing these trips. Well, Zhou Enlai was always a more worldly figure in the communist system. Definitely more so than Mao Zedong. I think that's right. So whatever was going on, China was making little openings for friendship trips. Yes. And professional trips. Yes.

Yes. And there was one that Susan Sherrick and Paul Pickowitz, they went on to meet Joe and I. I think that was 73, maybe? Yeah, probably even earlier. And there were others, various ones. So that then threw the switch again for me back to China, because I was there for over two months. And since I was writing for The New Yorker, I had to really write something. So I was just trying to do something very simple of what I'd seen and heard.

No big policy analysis. I did that and it got published as a book in a random house. Not much happened for a couple of years. And then I went back again, I think in 78. I forget why, but then 79, when my father went with a bar association group, I went. That's the second time. Yeah. The third time. Third time. Third time.

And we went to some prisons and courts and law. Things were just getting a little bit to open up. And Democracy Wall was just going on. And you did have this... And that's when I think I wrote this book, Watch Out for the Foreign Guests. I just started running into people for the first time I could talk to them. I almost went to China with Jerry Brown. We went to Japan. And we got to Japan and did all these things together.

And then I said, Jerry, you should go to China. And he said, well, how do I do that? So I got in touch with the ambassador in Washington. I said, I'm here in Japan with the governor of California. And he'd like to go to China. Just like tomorrow. And they arranged a visa. They did. Yeah. And we're all set. And we took our passports down to the Chinese embassy and something happened. And then some terrible labor dispute broke out in California and he had to come home. That would have been a fantastic. When was this?

1975? Was that 74? Must have been 76 or 77. Okay, that's after your first trip. Yeah. So I missed that one. That would have been really fun. Well, it could have been incredible. Yeah, it was very interesting because he was such an oddball. But how did you get to know Jerry Brown? Well, I decided to write a book about him. He was sort of the hottest young politician in America.

And every anchorman and journalist was up trying to interview him. He's a bit like Gavin Newsom today? Oh, 10th power. Because he was a former priest, Catholic, you

He'd been in seminary, and his father had been governor. Just very exciting to people. Yeah, he was the political hotshot. He was. So I decided I would try a different tactic. I just went up to Sacramento, and I went and I sat in his waiting room for about a month. A month? I don't know how long, two weeks, whatever it was, just watching and see who came in, who went out, talking to the receptionist. And then he started to notice me there.

And he said, you know, what are you doing here? And then he got to be, we got to be friends. And he asked me to come stay in his apartment. He had no furniture, just a mattress on the floor. We're just to hang out, watch him and go around. And then he went, ran for the presidency and went on all that trip. So that was sort of fun. And I had one interesting trip with him. I forget the guy's name, some ambassador from China. We took the train to LA and he was banging on about the Russian bear.

You know, the Chinese hated the Russians then. And that was the real enemy. And that's the reason for the Nixon-Mao love affair. They both hated the Russians. They did. And this guy was even more alarmed, I think, a few years later. So anyway, I don't know.

little involvement with China, but not much. So your first trip to China, 1975. How did that happen? This was a Hinton trip. The Hinton family. Through Zhou Enlai and the Friendship Association. And the idea was to bring youth

But the real idea was to bring lefties. And I don't know what they made of me, but I was a friend of the family. So I kind of came in that category. Well, the identification of leftists, it's not always accurate. I mean, they... No, but their idea was you had to be friendly. Yes. And you had to love the Communist Party and like what they were doing and...

et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, so I went. There were some other nice people. There was one guy who was a very famous string theorist professor at Harvard who I still see and he spoke some Chinese and Carmen's future husband was on the trip and the idea was to go quote work. We didn't do shit. Working farm and in factory. It was all just pretend. Did some work but we were probably more trouble than we were

The idea was, of course, for you to see China. Version of China. Yeah, it's probably the furthest from China. Because, I mean, the commune you went to, Dazhai, it was a model village. I mean, Mao had the saying, industry learn from Daxing and agriculture learn from Dazhai. The thing about model villages is that they are not replicated. They're not one of its kind. And that's the China you got plunged into. I was aware of that and constantly trying to get off of that terrain.

onto some other train. It was impossible. Being taken back by the officials. Yeah, and the people I was with were deeply offended by my behavior. I remember one day in Shanghai, I just said, I'm sick. I don't want to go out anymore. You know, I didn't say that. I just said, I'm sick. So when they all left to do whatever stupid thing they were going to go do, I went on the street and went and got a haircut. That's my favorite story in your book, In the People's Republic. You read that. So, I mean, I just wanted to go out and when I went to North Korea, I got

a haircut too. So I figured whenever I go to a strange place, go do things like that and just see what happens. And tell us the story of the haircut. I was just walking down the street. I think we were staying at the Hongwan Bingwan, which is an old 1930s guest house the party had taken over. Very nice. And so I found some barber shop and I walked in and of course it created complete chaos.

This white guy comes in. Finally, after a lot of phone calls, not knowing quite what to do, they take me and put me in the chair. They want to know how to cut my hair. And I said, do what you think is best. I don't remember the whole story, except that I remember coming up, that when I was finished, I looked like some Czechoslovakian damn engineer, you know. That trip was very confusing. And you tried to rent a bike, too. Oh, yeah.

I did rent a bike. It was in front of where the, what's that hotel? Beijing Hotel? No, it's down the other end. The first... Jianguo Hotel. It was a little shop opposite the Jianguo. And I had a hell of a time renting it. Yeah. Because even though the foreign diplomatic compound was near there, I guess those people had bikes. Anyway, I did get a bike and pedaled around a bit. But, you know, you didn't know where you were going. You didn't know what you were looking at. It was...

And nobody would talk to you. Everybody was kind of scared of foreigners. Not the kids, though? Not the kids, no. But the kids' parents would usually get them in order pretty quickly. So it was a very superficial experience. And I knew it. But I had to write something. So I tried to just be very simple about it.

Well, I thought that is one of the great tricks of writers is that they make superficial experiences profound. I wish that when doing it, I had been a little more reflective. I was somewhat reflective than I was. And I wish I had been a little bit more skeptical. I mean, I'll have to go back and read it again. But again, I don't think it was insightful.

That's the funny thing of that piece. For a Westerner like yourself, watching China, studying China, you felt the piece was somewhat shallow. Because the experience was shallow. The experience was shallow. For me reading it, I felt so touched. And I thought it's actually so telling and so informative and so insightful.

And so even intimate in some sense, seeing through your eyes your first trip to China, the way that you're waiting in Hong Kong. I mean, you've been waiting for that moment for half of your life. Finally, you took a train to Guangzhou, took a plane to Beijing and playing back then was still pretty luxurious. It was the 707. It was the first. Yes. Party cadres in the plane.

People dressed up for the occasion and you arrived in Beijing, you went to a Peking hotel and you were put into, I mean, as foreigners, you were washed by all kinds of communist luxuries that are complete opposite of what the country had offered to its own people at the time. But as foreigners, you really do see a completely different side of China. It has shatterd.

shallow only in the sense that there's a different side. But it's not untrue. It is how you guys were treated. It is what foreigners get to experience. I never got to see China, that side of China. So for me, it is informative in that sense. Well, for you, it may have been more interesting than for an American who wants to know the real deal. But I mean, I tried to get the real deal. And I think you remember the little scene where there was this beautiful girl at the factory.

Xiaofeng or something, I don't remember. I remember when I was in the Mao Zedong had come to the Shanghai Danzi Shang a couple of years before and they kept the theater where he had appeared, even though it had a thatched roof because it was like a holy temple. And so we went in to see, you remember the scene and see a movie? It was at some horrendous boring clock factory. I went in and I sat down and

The next thing I knew, this lovely young woman came in. It was dark. She couldn't see. And she sat down right beside me. I thought, holy shit, what's going on here? This is great. And so I started to try to talk to her. And the next thing I knew, a couple of comrades had come over and they lifted me up out of my seat and they moved me down about five seats to get me out of the way of her. Now, I think that was a perfect representation of the tenaciousness of

The people organizing foreign trips to keep any foreigner as far away as they could from anybody with whom they'd have any kind of real contact. I mean, whether it's political conversation, sexual interest, whatever the hell it is, they don't want it. That, for me, was a real sort of emblematic moment that said it all.

it changed this is shifted in its form it adapted there were lows and highs i mean right now we're coming back to a certain sense of separation invisible war it's not like someone would literally or maybe someone would literally grab you away in the most extreme circumstances but a whole heightened guardedness of the system to not let foreigners know what's going on not

reveal reality, but to try to show the facsimile of reality that they want to show, not the real reality. No, I mean, I think it was very important for me to be in China during that period because I got a sense of what the cultural revolution, what the rules of the game were. You know, the study sessions, the separation of foreigners and Chinese, the do's and the don'ts, all of these things were very important. And so now I also...

could gauge the changes against those cultural revolution goals. And now as we head back into some other era, it's really helpful to have been through these different, very contradictory periods because it helps you judge and reminds you that

China has many forces at work that are constantly churning and changing things. And it will continue, I think, to be that way. And that sense of impenetrability was exactly what got you into China in the first place and got you chasing. And I think I still would be, had I not married by far,

Well, I mean, the 80s did kind of cure things. I did make a lot of really good friends. I had some terrible experiences, even in the 80s. Back to the 70s. Your first trip, you finished it. You went to a Potemkin village. You wrote a book. Potemkin Factory 2 or Potemkin Cities.

Yeah, we went to Shanghai, we went to Beijing, we went to Yan'an, we went to, I think we went up to Liaoning, to maybe Shenyang, something like that. Yeah, and the year before, Zhuo and I died. What did you think back then?

Well, when everybody poured into the square, I thought, this is interesting. The surface doesn't tell everything. Poured in the square after John Lai's death, when people were holding banners suggesting innuendos about how Mosadon and the Ganon fall were.

or corrupt or holding on to power too much. So I thought that was an indication of, I don't know where it would go, but I certainly paid attention. And then Mao died. But I remember then I wrote an introduction to the paperback version of In the People's Republic. And I said something that later on people thought,

I was wrong about, but actually I was right. It turned out to be very, very prescient and predictive. So I wrote, "There are few men in the 20th century who seemed as immortal as Mao Zedong. During his long life of 83 years, he not only survived the vicissitudes of a society and revolution, but is in great measure responsible for that revolution.

protest as he might that there was no such thing as individual genius behind social and political movements, only that of the people, he said. His influence on the transformation of China appeared almost superhuman. It is often seen that Mao had become China. The endless statues of Mao, the chanting of his name, the posters, the red books, even memorabilia, like the red cigarette lighters, emblematized with Mao's

quote seemed to suggest to onlookers that China might be a country so firmly anchored by one charismatic personality that he might never survive his demise. The book you're about to read was written just before his death. While in Peking, I often passed the brilliant crimson and gold gates of Zhongnanhai, where Mao lived and even

And then wondered if it would feel what it would feel like someday for a Chinese to pass by the high walls of this compound, knowing that their chairman Mao no longer lived there. I knew that they would, of course, feel grief and probably also no sense of uncertainty and insecurity. For Mao Zedong today, for most Chinese today, there is no memory of China without Mao.

But while I was trying to imagine this Maoist China, I was stuck in a very forceful way by the fact that even prior to death, Mao had transcended his own personality. He was no passing rock star, no movie idol, or even a John Kennedy, who once taken from the midst, was gone. For Mao had transformed his being completely.

even his personality into a series of careful, thought-out, organized ideas. Mao was a thinker as well as a doer. He conceived of the Chinese Revolution, helped it happen, and in the process he thought that Chairman Mao became inculcated in almost every Chinese. The word almost literally became fleshed.

It seemed clear, even before Mao died, that his death would not erase the way in which he had almost become transubstantiated in his people. And people later said, well,

Don't change it all. My idea was that this guy was there forever, a long time. Well, Deng was his good student. And that's precisely why Deng came to power. He was the picked successor. Obviously, he was also purged and raised again and purged again. And three times he fell and three times he came back. Because he was finally a good enough Leninist himself to be trusted. And his enemy, well, political enemy of some sort, Lin Biao, failed.

in a plane crash. I think Mao and the revolution are there for a long, long time to come. It goes generation to generation, each with a different element passed on, different genetic material comes down, but the effect of a revolution as deep, as powerful, and as traumatic as China's is not going to be something that society gets over and

less than a century. What was the ripple effect of Mao's death in America, in your community, in your network? They thought it was the passing of an era, but more important, it was when Deng started changing things. But Deng came much later. After Mao's Hua Guofeng in Scanner 4, things didn't change overnight. Well, we had Hua Guofeng, and then the Gang of Four went down.

And then Deng Xiaoping came up. It happened pretty rapidly. And people thought, well, okay, that's the end of Mao, the end of the revolution, and we're off on a new track. Clean sheet of paper. Mao himself said...

Which seems to be the repetitive myth about China, that whenever a new leader comes in, that's a clean sheet of paper. Anything is possible. It could be anything, anywhere. It's a new piece at the bottom of the sheet of paper for them to write something, but the past doesn't go.

No, but the fact that people pretend that the past goes away. Well, that was my point. And I got criticized because people actually thought during the 80s the past had gone away. I didn't believe that. I mean, they thought in the 90s the past was gone. Mao told Nixon that let's forget it. Then he told Jimmy Carter we're past it. The past never disappears. The past lives deeply in everything, particularly in revolutionary societies. The trauma is deep and never goes away.

or takes a long, long time away. So I am not surprised now, just to jump to the present for a moment, because we need to stop, you know, that Xi Jinping is another Mao act. He's a re-embodiment of the past. Of some elements of the past, yes, that's right.

Even though he's also iconoclasmic in his own ways, the legacies of reform and opening up, going backwards on a number of issues dealing with the West, with Taiwan, the increasing conservatism. But deep down, it's a revolutionary psychic.

I think there's something deeply in Chinese society and the genetic, intellectual, spiritual and psychological body of the Chinese people that is going to be deeply influenced not only by the dynastic period, but by Mao for a long time to come. And so that's why I think we may have some hopeful reforms, but I think there'll be some deeper element that won't be so easy to disturb, which is exactly why Liu Xun was so depressed all the

I guess same for Mao Zedong when he tried to destroy the past.

When he used metaphors and poetic language to trash whatever that was traditional about China's culture. So Mao Zedong couldn't destroy China's traditional past. And I think leaders now can't destroy Mao Zedong's past. He too, maybe is not as deep as Confucianism and all the rest of it from the traditional period, but he's deep. And he's not something they're going to just erase easily, as we now see.

So that's the end of this episode with Orville Shell. I have more conversations with Orville and will probably revisit when there's a good time for it. Anyway, if you liked what you've just heard, please subscribe to our podcast and sub stack, Peking Hotel. This is a pretty niche media project, so I appreciate any support you give and talk to you next time.