I WAS happy to get back to Karachi, to its familiar sounds and smells, and to my family and friends, and I was back to my routine, as if, I had never left. China had made a deep impression on me. If there is even a modicum of sensitivity in a person, a stay abroad for a reasonable length of time will affect his thinking. If nothing else, it gives one something to compare with, to look at one’s own country differently, no longer as an absolute, but in the context of the bigger world.
It may not re-fashion one’s general attitudes, but it will certainly cause him to be either more accepting or less accepting of what was considered standard fare. It is possible that one can return more convinced of the rightness of one’s beliefs, get an affirmation that one’s way of life is more rewarding spiritually and emotionally than the way of life to which one has recently been exposed. So far so good.
But one can also be disturbed, cracks can appear in certainties, there can be doubts that we haven’t got it right and the country lacks a driving force, lacks a national purpose, is lagging far behind and the gap is not narrowing. Even as I was still in China, I was beginning to define my intellectual position to it.
One could not, obviously, come to any conclusion for to do so would have required either a great deal of self-confidence or a great deal of arrogance. The Revolution was still young in China, it was in a state of wild triumphalism. It was still travelling hopefully, and it was impossible to foretell what it would be like when it finally arrived.
How long could they sustain their trained oneness and steel discipline? But a lot depended on one’s own system of values. It is not true that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Did I want Pakistan to become like China? In some respects, yes, and in other respects, not. But that was impossible. It was all or nothing.
I wrote a series of ten articles for my newspaper. I began the first with the following words: “For those who believe that if you close your eyes to the People’s Republic of China, it will somehow not be there when you open them, I have bad news.”
In these articles, I tried to take on all the myths and all the negatives. There had been a great deal of propaganda that the coming into being of People’s China had been preceded by the killing of millions. This, my Chinese hosts did not confirm nor deny. “Revolutions are not a tea party,” I was told, and another replied, when I asked him what was his estimate of those killed, “less than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” I remembered telling him that what was being justified was that two wrongs did make a right!
The Chinese had not abolished human nature no more than the ‘Free World’ had. The atavism of cruelty was far too deeply ingrained in the human race for even saints to be entrusted with absolute power. There had to be checks on authority, and I was told that the people were the check. This came in the category of romantic nonsense though I did not tell that to my hosts.
WAS there freedom in China? It depended on what was meant by ‘freedom’. China was a heavily regimented society. No one could march to his own drummer. If by freedom is meant individual liberty, to write one’s own sonnets and sing one’s own songs, it did not exist. The Chinese appeared to have no free choice, and decisions were made for them. The State was all, sovereign in every respect and monarch of all it surveyed.
The Chinese communists did not suddenly snatch away individual liberty and gave nothing in return. My hosts told me that they were under no obligation or compulsion to accept Western values as “a self-evident good”. There were other freedoms that were more compelling and more urgent than political freedom. Food, clothing, shelter, education, security, freedom from the tyranny of rapacious and barbaric warlords — these my hosts felt were more important at that particular time of China’s history.
“YOU must judge us by what it was like before we took over,” I was told. This was arguable, I told them. Was it not possible to achieve all these without destroying the individual? But even I was not convinced. The hungry only dream of bread. The poor can never be free. Better, at least, that he should have something in his stomach and something to wear and a roof over his head.
Did China constitute any kind of threat? Did it have designs on its neighbours? Did it covet their territories? Was it a colonial or imperial power in the making? I had asked these questions of a high-ranking Chinese official. I had told them that many people in the world thought that China was expansionist and would ultimately embark on a militant, proselytizing mission to convert the people of Asia to communism.
He had looked at me and smiled. “You should read history,” he had said, by way of friendly advice. “You don’t export revolutions. You just don’t open a letter of credit on a Chinese Bank and order a revolution,” he had said. He gave me his personal example. He had joined the Communist Party while he was studying at college. After he had graduated, the Party had assigned him to pulling rickshaws on the streets of Shanghai and indoctrinating other rickshaw-pullers as well as helping them in their problems with the police, write letters and petitions for them. “I did this for 18 years,” he said.
He was telling me that every country and its people must make out their own destiny, must tailor their system, political, economic, social to the uniqueness of their national personalities. Certain plants will grow in certain soil. “Revolutions come from within. They cannot be imposed,” he had said.
China was not a country that was wrapped up in dreams and it was not building castles in the air. They understood the magnitude of the task confronting them, a task made more difficult by the open hostility of the United States whose propaganda against it was relentless. I found the Chinese a confident people and they were not tortured by self-doubts. I had asked one of my hosts whether he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. “Not yet,” he had said, “but I hope to be one. It is my ambition.”
I had thought back to the McCarthy years in the United States. The dreaded question, asked with menace, used to be: “Are you now or have you even been a member of the Communist Party?” The slightest pause would put you on a hit-list. One man’s meat was another man’s poison.
Would I want Pakistan to take the same route as China if one could roll back the years? I would not. I wanted Islam to be the guiding star, its moral directions, its social philosophy, its dynamic message of the dignity and equality of all. But there was much that we could learn from China; discipline, hard work and commitment. Would I want to live in China? I prized individual liberty too much.
There had been a re-alignment in my social values. The list of my desires and material wants had shrunk. I was now convinced that there were no absolutes, and the categorical imperative was a foolish political posture. I came back less bigoted. It was obvious that I had not become an expert on China in the few weeks that I had been there. But I was better informed. And was able to separate fact from fiction.
It did not take me long to get back to my routine. When I went to Zelin’s Coffee House, I realized that something like it would not have been possible in China. Nothing had changed, not even the price of our lunch which remained at Rs2 and ‘Pista’ Khalid was still raving about it, accusing Akbar Fazalbhoy of outrageous profiteering.
One of the regulars at our sessions had been an American diplomat called Chris Van Holland. There were other American diplomats, but he was the quiet one, preferring to listen rather than muck in the animated, heated and often hilarious discussion.
Chris asked me whether I would have lunch with him, and suggested the ABC Chinese restaurant on Elphinstone Street. I was a little surprised because the ABC was a restaurant non grata with the American Embassy. This was because it had displayed a flag of the People’s Republic of China when a leader had visited Karachi, and had been given a tumultuous reception by the people of Karachi. The Americans had felt that the gesture betrayed the political sentiments of the owners. A little bit of McCarthyism?
I agreed and had no doubt that he wanted to talk to me about China, to pick up any crumbs of information. But I think he found that he had wasted his money on the lunch. I told him whatever I had to say about China in the articles I was writing. “It’s a great country, Chris,” I told him, “and it’s not likely to disappear.”
And I added some more cheerlessness and said that the United States had not hurt China by refusing to recognize it. The Chinese had made this a rallying point. I also told him that I had learnt to use chop-sticks and demonstrated it when my egg fried rice and sweet-and-sour beef arrived. But if it was any consolation to him, such a luncheon meeting with his Chinese counterpart would not have been possible. It would have been more formal.
