Ruth F.Weiss
[1] To be in China has always meant, paradoxically, to expect the unexpected.And yet, I have — in the altogether 45 years that I have lived in various parts of this huge country —despite turmoils and upheavals known greater continuity and steadfastness than in the nearly quarter century “at home”, in my native Vienna, Austria.
[2] Continuity in life, a motivation, a perspective and a wide horizon — call it what you will, I found it in China! Despite all the shocking things one saw around, there were people who could and did see beyond all the sordidness and injustice who did not only try to understand the world around them but who believed, as Karl Marx taught, that “philosophers have long enough explained the world and our task is to change it!” What had perhaps begun as a faint yearning in my young days in Europe had time and again been crushed in the cradle; in China it was possible to set one’s sights beyond much heavier odds to a better, more just society.
[3] While one met in Shanghai in the early 30’s a lot of business people from all over the globe who only looked for and found sources of gain and crude enjoyment, there were the Chinese, cast aside and neglected in their own country who, led often by invisible threads, discerned a future in which every man, woman and child could assert his or her birthright, a future without foreign domination, without domestic overlordship by bloodsuckers, by leeches in human form.
[4] The people who made it possible for me forwardlooking students and a writer like Lu Xun can, to this day, be celebrated as the seers of a new world, not only a new China.Lu Xun, too, came to believe in such a new horizon although he did not live to see it.
[5] Today, after decades of ups and downs, after the ten years of turmoil and the repudiation of the mistakes which led to this upheaval, the whole of China is looking backward in order to better go forward — to reminisce, to draw lessons from the past.A phrase of the German poet and dramatist Bert Brecht, who has also become well-known in China through his play Life of Galileo staged in Chinese, expresses the problem with which China finds herself faced today: “There’s no more difficult advance than back to reason.”This does not mean that China should return to the bad and backward things of the past.It means she should return to the sound, reasonable road that had been partly enunciated before Liberation in the Yan’an days and spelt out after liberation, but never really followed completely into practice.