China

From China with Love and Hate

Item: Chinese Shadows
Author: Colin Mackerras

by Colin Mackerras •

September 1978, no. 4

Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys

Penguin Books Australia, $12.95 pb, 220pp.

China

From China with Love and Hate

by Colin Mackerras •

September 1978, no. 4

‘The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge’(Mao Tse-tung, 1941) Except for the word ‘often’, which Simon Leys would wish to be replaced by ‘always’, this statement is one with which he would agree, because by ‘we ourselves’ Mao means the Chinese Communist Party. In this book, which deals with China in the early 1970s, Leys appears preoccupied with four major concerns: (1) He is a deep lover of the Chinese people (2) He hates intensely everything connected with ‘the authorities’. In his view, everything good about China is due to the people, everything bad to their government.

(3) The author is a great lover of the Chinese Tradition, especially its culture. (4) With very few exceptions he appears to see foreign observers of China as beneath contempt. The book is divided into eight chapters. The main ones are ‘Foreigners in the People’s. Republic’; ‘Follow the Guide’, in which Leys relates impressions of visits to several famous cities; ‘Bureaucrats’; Cultural Life’; and finally, ‘Here and There’, which actually consists of snippets of comments with no connecting theme.

Colin Mackerras

Professor Colin Mackerras is a specialist on Chinese history, musical theatre and ethnic minorities, as well as Australia-China relations and Western images of China, and has published widely on all those subjects. He has written or edited over forty books and authored nearly 200 scholarly papers about China.

He worked at Griffith University from 1974 to 2004 and has been a professor Emeritus at the University since retirement. He taught first at the Beijing Foreign Studies University from 1964 to 1966 and has taught there many times since. He has also taught several times at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.

His books include The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770–1870 (Clarendon Press, 1972); Chinese Drama, A Historical Survey (New World Press, 1990); China’s Minorities: Integration and modernization in the twentieth-century (Oxford University Press, 1994); Western Images of China, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1999); China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation (Routledge Curzon, 2003).