For decades, various Chinese officials and outsiders have reassured the world that the country’s Communist Party leadership eventually planned to open up its one-party political system. The regime would undertake major political reforms and liberalization, it was said, to accompany the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s. It was merely a question of choosing the right time. Writing in Foreign Affairs two years ago, John L.
KIEV--Like many Ukrainian politicians, prime minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko relies on fortune-tellers and TV psychics to bolster her embattled spirit. Several years ago, one such mystical specialist compared birth years, personality types, and other intimate details to confirm what Tymoshenko had suspected since the 1996 release of the movie Evita.
Trotsky
Robert Service
Harvard University Press, $35
When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous from there. “Pitting his brain and will against the despotic rulers of a great empire, fully conscious of the power, the resources, the cunning and cruelty of his enemy, Trotsky had one weapon at his command--his ideas. His courage never faltered; his will never broke.”
TPM and others are having a lot of fun over the fact that George W. Bush is heading out on the motivational speaking circuit. And, I agree that, even when you consider that other politicos such as Colin Powell, Elizabeth Dole, and Rudy Giuliani, have been doing gigs with Zig Ziglar and his ilk for years, there is something kind of undignified about a former president appearing on that stage.
Arthur Miller
By Christopher Bigsby
(Harvard University Press, 739 pp., $35)
I.
Arthur Miller could hardly have hoped for a more sympathetic biographer than Christopher Bigsby. He is the director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the author of a long commentary on Miller’s work and a book-length interview with the playwright. To write this biography, Miller granted Bigsby exclusive access to his papers, including unpublished manuscripts, and sat for what Bigsby describes as “many hours of interviews” over a twenty-five-year friendship.
The annals of Sino-American relations have seen more than a few celebrity-diplomats: Henry Kissinger, a young Richard Holbrooke, and, of course, the current secretary of state. But, unless the record has been lost to history, none has ascended to this rarefied plane of geopolitics while running the Office of Management and Budget.
And yet, there was budget director Peter Orszag rushing to a lunch with Chinese bureaucrats on a Monday in late July. To his surprise, when Orszag arrived at the site of the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the Chinese didn't dwell on the Wall Street meltdown or the global recession. The bureaucrats at his table mostly wanted to know about health care reform, which Orszag has helped shepherd. "They were intrigued by the most recent legislative developments," Orszag says. "It was like, 'You're fresh from the field, what can you tell us?' "
Sometimes nothing is more enchanting than disenchantment. I had the good fortune to have been born late in the intellectual wars about Marxism, and far away from the Marxist tyrannies, and I never was a Marxist; but when I was a student I suffered for a while from the suspicion that the Marxist tradition contained important truths, and that only it contained them. Marxism, after all, explained everything; and I was not yet smart enough to hold this against it. The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one--infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga; and I wondered also whether it might go with my Jewishness. (Enter Borochov!) And I record all this with embarrassment, so as to praise the memory of the great man who embarrassed me. He died last week.
Kazan on Directing
Edited and with commentary by Robert Cornfield
(Knopf, 368 pp., $32.50)
It has been said that the upcoming Olympic Games will effectively open up China to the world--and thus to democracy--and that the members of Communist Party's inner circle, knowing that China will be observed and scrutinized as never before, will find it in their best interests to present a good image of their regime.
In reality, we find that the exact opposite has occurred.
They have expelled the poor and the unproductive from the cities.
They have accelerated their demolition of the "hutongs," working-class neighborhoods, in the center of Beijing.
The Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, Low Company
By Daniel Fuchs
(Black Sparrow Books, 927 pp., $24.95)
PRAGUE
The enormous mass movement that has essentially overthrown Czechoslovak communism rose up with amazing speed. By the last week in November millions of people had participated in demonstrations across the country. Yet as recently as October 28--Czechoslovakia’s independence day--dissidents could bring only 10,000 people into the streets. These brave souls had scarcely unfurled their pro-democracy banners before truncheon-wielding police were chasing them through Prague's winding Gothic lanes. Three weeks later throngs of hundreds of thousands of people were routine in Wenceslas Square. In a matter of days they brought down the Communist leadership and dispatched the Party toward permanent oblivion.
This article was originally printed on October 12, 1953
