To Mr. Tovey

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Nov 24, 2009 at 19:41

I'm not so sure that China and the Chinese are all that inscrutable. I assure you, after many years in the Far East speaking with people and even reading what they've written, they find us pretty inscrutable, too.

And, when it comes to Marxism, the current line you'll hear from a lot of non-official Chinese is, "Mr. Marx lived a long time ago, and things have changed".

China went Marxist the same way most of the West went Marxist: you use the words "science" and "socialism" in the same breath, and you'll have anyone who came of age ca. 1919-1936 by the nose. I'd really like to put a notebook and pen in V.S. Naipual's hands, stuff him into a time machine, and send him back to interwar China. He'd come back with a pretty acid account of the birth of Chinese Communism, I'm sure, and very unflattering portrait of its founders as typical half-baked, third world ignoramii.

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