tim's experiment

One of my more easily shareable birthday presents was a translation of a poem:

At the foot of Shade Mountain

The sky, a woolly tent over the wilderness

Blue is the sky; boundless is the wild.

Grass bends in the wind, cattle and sheep showing

Since I first heard of it 30 years ago I have found something strangely haunting about the vision of tall grass bending in the wind, revealing previously hidden cattle and sheep. I would love to see it. One suspects a certain amount of poetic licence here. Grass tall enough to hide a sheep I can accept, but a cow?  On the other hand experience has taught me not to jump to conclusions about these things. I used to think that the odd-shaped mountains in so many Chinese paintings were purely conventional, perhaps partly motivated by the desire to fill a very vertical canvas. Upon coming to Hong Kong, where photographs of Chinese mountains are everywhere, I discovered that the paintings were no more than faithful renditions of some unusual but perfectly authentic pieces of landscape. So I am keeping an open mind on the cow-high pasture. Still the place sounds beautiful, and reading things like this brings on a vigorous urge to get up there and see it.

This urge is then attenuated by reading the daily news, in which the picture of China, while still doing justice to the scenery, also includes currupt officials, violent policemen and a pervasive absence of anything recognisable as the rule of law. It is one of life’s little mysteries that a government which cannot protect the constitutional rights of citizens in the suburbs of its own capital should be so eager to extend its rule to distant islands and provinces. This poroduces a dilemma, particularly for foreigners who have studied Chinese history and culture before making the aquaintance of its modern manifestation. There used to be occasional complaints in Hong Kong that Foreign Office mandarins who had studied up on China developed a romantic attachment to the Tang Dynasty version of the country which was a severe handicap when dealing with the Deng Dynasty. One of my friends who, after growing up in Hong Kong, studied Chinese in the UK, lamented the number of his classmates who were distressed by the discovery that the country they had come to admire in its literary manifestations was in real life a nasty police state.

Of course the situation is in a way much worse for Hong Kong people, who would like to take their place in the great historical epic which is the heritage of China but are all too well aware that the epic has had some nasty moments in the last 50 years and not all of them have finished yet. In this morning”s papers was a story — not at all unusual — about a security firm in Beijing which had been caught rounding up petitioners, robbing and beating them before sending them back to their home provinces, under a business arraangement with the local governments concerned. What, I wonder, goes through the mind of a faithful local left-winger when he reads a story like that? It cannot be dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Like most such stories it comes from a mainland newspaper. One can say that China is better than it was, but when you start from a condition in which politically motivated persecution, violence, murder and even cannibalism are not just tolerated but encouraged as a matter of state policy, then a lot of improvement can still leave much to be desired. I suppose the solultion to the problem is to say that the government represents the country and “my country right or wrong”. G.K. Chesterton observed that this was like saying “my mother drunk or sober”.