What do Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes have in common? These French writers admired Mao Zedong, the tyrant responsible for a famine in which 40-50 million people died. He was responsible, as well, for the Cultural Revolution, which had a death toll of around two million (some observers put the figure much higher) and cost untold suffering and destruction. “When it comes to Maoism,” the late China scholar Simon Leys once said, “some members of the French intellectual elite have easily beaten the world record for stupidity.” Simon Leys was the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, a prescient Belgian who taught for many years in Australia and died two years ago.
For stupidity about Maoism, the prize should go to the French philosopher Alain Badiou, who wrote, in 1977, “there is only one great philosopher of our time: Mao Zedong.” Badiou, who headed the philosophy department at the École Normale Supérieure—the most prestigious institution of higher learning in France—remains a Maoist. Writing in 2009, Leys quoted a letter from a friend who was angry that “criminal Maoist lies manage to endure. . . . Look for instance at the popular success now enjoyed by the ‘radical’ thinker Alain Badiou, who prides himself on being an emeritus defender of the ‘Cultural Revolution.’ ”
Of course, stupidity about Maoism was not limited to French intellectuals. In 1984, Leys was appalled by “the spectacular blunders of nearly all the ‘contemporary China’ specialists.” He quoted John King Fairbank, the influential China scholar who taught at Harvard: “The Maoist revolution is, on the whole, the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries.” Many China scholars, Leys said, knew what was happening in China but were reluctant to condemn Mao’s policies. They spoke of “the China difference,” arguing that it was wrong to look at China through the lens of Western values; but, wrote Leys, “things happened in Maoist China that were ghastly by any standard of common decency.”
Simon Leys (1935-2014), who wrote in both French, English, and Chinese became interested in China in 1955 when he traveled there as part of a student delegation. He studied Chinese history and culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He also talked to refugees, read newspapers from China, and subscribed to China News Analysis. In 1970, Leys moved to Australia, where he taught in Canberra and Sydney.
In the 1970s, Leys published four studies in French about Chinese history and culture, but did not become well-known in France until 1983, when he appeared on Apostrophes, the popular French television show about books. The other guest was Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, an Italian who had written two books extolling Maoism, and Leys declared that it would be charitable to call her latest book “utterly stupid,” otherwise he would have to call her a fraud. (Nine years later, Macciocchi, who sometimes taught in France, was awarded the Legion of Honor by President François Mitterrand.)
Leys was, however, a great admirer of George Orwell, and in 1984, he published a book on the subject: Orwell, ou l’horreur de la politique. Just as Orwell had attacked Stalinists, Leys castigated Maoists. Discussing Roland Barthes’s writings on China, Leys quoted Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” And in an essay on “The Intimate Orwell,” Leys—a devout Roman Catholic—attacked “my benighted co-religionists, cretinous clerics and other Maoist morons” who preached “the gospel of the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution.’ ”
In Leys’s view, Mao’s rule was a disaster and Mao “repeatedly brought the very regime he himself had created to the brink of chaos and destruction.” Moreover, Mao’s China was more totalitarian than Stalin’s Soviet Union: The Maoists “invaded the lives of the people in a way that was far more radical and devastating than in the Soviet Union.” In Mao’s gulag, the “mental pressure” was severe, and Mao’s China was totalitarian from the start: “By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organized lynchings and public executions.”
Leys, like Orwell, did not see himself primarily as a political writer. He wrote a novel about Napoleon and translated Confucius’s Analects. In his last collection, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2013), there are appreciations of Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Georges Simenon. There also is a tribute to his friend the political essayist Jean-François Revel, who “deflated the huge balloons of cant that elevate the chattering classes.”
The Hall of Uselessness also includes essays on two writers Leys especially disliked: André Gide and André Malraux. He called Gide Proteus because he changed his views on many questions; he called Malraux a phony because he concocted a “fanciful military record,” lying about what he had done in the Spanish Civil War. But while he regarded Malraux’s fiction and memoirs as tedious—filled with banal remarks about the human condition—he acknowledged that Malraux had “considerable physical courage.” And though Leys himself was capable of trite language—”at bottom there is only one art that matters, and that is the art of life”—he usually wrote with brio and wit, poking holes in conventional wisdom.
Writing about Evelyn Waugh, Leys said that “to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable,” and Leys himself was irritated by Christopher Hitchens’s critical study of Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, Leys wrote that “bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do.” Hitchens, he believed, was driven by an urge to deface “moral beauty. . . . The need to bring down to our wretched level, to deface, to deride, to debunk any splendor that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.”
Leys had a wide range of interests. In The Hall of Uselessness there are essays on Chinese art and Chinese calligraphy, as well as Don Quixote, the Cambodian genocide, the sea in French literature, and the voyages of Magellan. But in seeking to explain 4,000 years of Chinese civilization to a Western readership, Leys had a difficult task. One essay was entitled “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past.” But is there one Chinese attitude? Leys qualified his title: Though China’s “dominant ideology—Confucianism—extolled the values of the past,” he wrote, in pre-imperial China there was a “movement to obliterate the past.” The Cultural Revolution had antecedents.
The Chinese, Leys always pointed out, have not tried very hard to preserve their past: In some cities, more than 95 percent of historic and cultural relics were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; yet Maoist vandals “found only rare targets on which to expend their energy. . . . The disconcerting barrenness of the Chinese monumental landscape cannot be read simply as a consequence of the chaotic years of the Maoist period.” For many Chinese, Leys argued, the past is not a real past; it is a “mythical Golden Age” marked by civil harmony. Chinese authorities have often invoked this mythical past in order to condemn the “recent past—that is, in fact, the real past.” But in contemporary China, the recent past is forbidden territory.
Reviewing No Enemies, No Hatred (2012), the collected essays of the Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, Leys agreed with Liu that the Chinese authorities “are enforcing a rigorous amnesia of the recent past. The Tiananmen massacre has been entirely erased from the minds of a new generation—while crude nationalism is being whipped up from time to time.” Liu, serving a prison sentence “for inciting subversion of state power,” argues that most Chinese citizens prefer not to think about the recent past: “A huge Great Leap famine? A devastating Cultural Revolution? A Tiananmen massacre? All of this criticizing the government . . . is in their view, completely unnecessary.” For many, thinking about the recent past is a waste of time, and writing about it is dangerous.
This past May, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, the People’s Daily broke a general silence on the subject, declaring (according to the New York Times) that the Cultural Revolution was “totally wrong in theory and practice.” Of course, it did not also say that Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution: China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has made it clear that Mao is still to be praised. Indeed, some observers believe that Xi may be transforming himself into a cult figure like Mao. Howard French, a China watcher at Columbia University, reports that “days before the anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution . . . Tiananmen Square was the scene of a theatrical extravaganza that combined revived radical rhetoric from that era with twinned images of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping.”
In 1984, Simon Leys wrote that “Mao’s mummy” lies in the “huge and grotesque mausoleum in the heart of Peking.” More than three decades later, the mausoleum remains the number-one tourist attraction in Beijing, where you pay your respects to the Great Helmsman by filing past the embalmed corpse and then entering a gift shop where you can buy Mao pins, Mao rings, Mao busts, and Mao bracelets.
Westerners have long argued that economic reform in China would inevitably lead to political change. Leys disagreed. He and Liu argue that contemporary China is a post-totalitarian dictatorship: Xi Jinping wants the Chinese to revere Mao, but ignore his policies. Can the Chinese leadership ever do away with Mao worship? Not if it wants to remain a Communist state. In 2012, the year Xi Jinping came to power, Leys wrote that “after more than twenty years of ‘reform,’ the only feature of Maoist ideology that is being unconditionally retained by the Communist Party is the principle of its absolute monopoly over political power.”
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.
