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The Year of the Rooster by Guy Sorman. Full Circle Global. Pages 302. Rs 495.
It should be no surprise that a mere 1 per cent of the billion Chinese are members of the Communist Party. The voicelessness of the overwhelming majority overshadows the numerically massive membership. Further, a steel curtain—worse than the Iron Curtain of Stalinist Russia of the 1930s—hides it. Sorman starts his crusade against the cover-up of the real China with the record of the Jesuits 400 years ago. He asks as if in jest, but tellingly, ‘What the Jesuits, Jean-Paul Sartre and today’s businessmen have in common?’ The answer is ‘supplanting the reality of China and founding Sinology as an ideology’. The dig at Sartre is hilarious, but not off the mark, "Receptive at all times to the aesthetics of violence, (Sartre) embraced Maoism without having gone there." Totalitarian societies are notorious in impressing (conning?) eminent writers and philosophers. George Bernard Shaw gave a pat on the back to Mussolini for bringing punctuality to Italian trains. Stalinist Russia made no less a person than Bertrand Russell turn a blind eye to the deportation of tens of thousands of peasants and others to ‘special camps’ in Siberia. There is a qualitative difference. The military offensive against the struggling Soviet regime by Great Britain and France, among others, in the name of restoring to the throne the infant heir to the deposed Russian emperor, had won the support of Western liberals for the Soviets. The Second International, comprising Social Democratic parties, including the British Labour Party, stood solidly by Lenin and Trotsky. Later, the Iron Curtain was impenetrable because there was not even a radio link with Russia. Travel to the country was barred, except to those taken on conducted tours. Ultimately, in the 1990s, the communication revolution pierced the Berlin Wall, bringing down with it the Soviet empire. Likewise, in the case of China, starting with Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China on the Communist Party, when they were a guerrilla army in the 1930s, with profiles of Mao Zedong (reformed spelling), Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao and others, there had been a steady flow of glowing accounts by Western scholars. Besides Japan and the Kuomintang, corruption was the Communists’ main enemy, which had further endeared them to many in India. The Tiananmen Square outrage of June 4, 1989, was a turning point in recent Chinese history. Raw youths like Wer Kaixi, whom Sorman met in self-exile in Taiwan, had led the half-a-million throng, which demonstrated in May in the run-up to the mowing down of 3,000 persons—according to the official figure—by the Chinese soldiers. But it was not in vain because, in the words of Weir Kaixi, "since Tiananmen, the Chinese gained in self-respect, both in the way they view themselves and the way the world views them". A shocked world put Beijing on the mat for the outrage, with the West and many Asian and African countries joining the chorus of disapproval. Sorman spent the first day of the Year of the Rooster with Wei Jingsheng, one of "the most well-known " Chinese dissidents, who was banished to the USA. On the last day, he was in Beijing with Jiang Rong, "China’s most popular novelist". The authorities dare not deport or silence him because he has countless websites, which his interlocutors access. The communication revolution has also become a tool of Chinese dissidents. Sorman concludes the book with a prognosis, outlining four scenarios. Ruling out another revolution, he dilates on three scenarios—economic collapse caused by precipitous drop in American consumer demand and fall in the rate of domestic savings, a direct military regime to stem the chaos, structured and gradual transition to democracy, desirable, but unacceptable to the party, and finally, authoritarian status quo, which suits the party, but not the people. The Year of the Dog did not yield a new China, despite the hopes engendered by the Year of the Rooster.
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