The Freshening Breeze

The Freshening Breeze

Rewi Alley

New World Press,

Peking, 1977.

ISBN: no ISBN

Rewi Alley (路易•艾黎) [1897-1987] has been described as one of New Zealand’s greatest sons. He served in the New Zealand army in France from 1916 and was awarded the Military Medal. It was on the Front that he encountered Chinese labourers working in slave-like conditions for the Entente Powers on their supply chains. In their company he began to develop an affinity for China and the Chinese people. After the Great War he increasingly lived in China and became a permanent resident from 1927. His earliest experiences in the Middle Kingdom came at a time when the country was being divided amongst war lords intent on tearing apart the new republic that had been established in 1911 by Dr Sun Yat Sen (孫中山). The iniquity and cruelty he saw in and around Shanghai in particular drove him towards the Communist Party. He joined early and remained a member for the next 60 years. Though the New Zealand government treated him with distain as the tensions of the Cold War played out, Alley never swerved also from a deep love of his southern island homeland. He continued to visit when he was allowed. During his 60 years living in China, he became a significant English-language poet of the 1949 revolution, as well as the translator of many Chinese poems into English. All of this was done with praise of what he saw as the great struggle of the Chinese to throw off their colonial oppression and rebuild the glory of their nation. As a revolutionary poet he has written around 17 books of poetry and translated and edited several more celebrating the great voices of Chinese culture.

Coming out of ‘red’ China in the 1970s, in most ways this book is partly what you would expect. It is printed by Beijing Foreign Languages Press (one of the major sections of the Chinese Communist Party’s non-domestic propaganda arm) and its smooth cover with muted colours and its slightly crumbly paper reminds me of a vast bookshop that once stood on Pitt Street in Sydney called China Books. The tomes on the shelves of this place were shipped out from China and were ridiculously cheap. The implication of their cheapness was that they had been published only with the blessing of the Inner Party in Beijing. Still, it was a fascinating shop where for a few dollars you could build up a library of Chinese poetry and pick up substantial works on Chinese philosophy. I went there often. So, my first expectation in picking up a book like this is that it will be more propaganda than poetry. But there are immediate hints that this book will be more than that. The back flap of the cover explains that these poems come mainly from the period 1975-1977. These were tumultuous years in China and encompass the tail end of the Cultural Revolution (which began in ’66), the last days of the Gang of Four, the death of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and the glimmer of the dawn of ‘marketplace socialism’ marked by the rise of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) after the 11th National Congress of the Party in August, 1977. This book also comes immediately after that period where the international diplomatic community were breaking with the exiled Nationalist government in Taiwan and recognising the Communists in Beijing as the legitimate government of China. With all this in play, it is interesting then to examine what Alley says and, just as importantly, what he may be compelled not to say.

One of the major themes here is generated by the fact that many of the early revolutionaries, including Mao himself, are coming to the end of their lives during the 1970s. Alley takes up the cause of celebrating their revolutionary dedication. This book is thus filled with In Memoriams. The first is dedicated to the memory of mayor of Shanghai, and later Chinese foreign minister Cheng Yi (陈毅). Alley concentrates on celebrating his early years

…a fighter who could

write a poem when lying wounded

with enemy soldiers searching

nearby; take an operation

without any painkiller

casually smoking a cigarette

leg tied to a tree (p.4)

There is something about the Romantic daring of the revolutionary that comes through here - elevated by tales of Cheng’s resilience. But we also meet a flaw of Alley’s poetry and that is the gap we encounter between ‘searching’ and ‘nearby.’ Here it might work suggesting a silence as the searching continues close at hand. Yet the tactic of putting these two words on the same line would give heightened immediacy of the search. So, this break decreases the tension? I feel it does. You might think this a small point, but Alley’s line breaks throughout The Freshening Breeze lend a frustration to the reading that has led some to criticise his ‘poetry’ as nothing more than chopped up prose. They certainly disturb the assonance, and this critique is mostly valid throughout the book.

He next celebrates Edgar Snow and his world-renowned work Red Star Over China. He applauds this American’s depictions of the early revolutionaries and the idea that they would help promote a ‘saner/cleaner world to be’ (p.7). Next comes a poem on the anniversary of the death of Dr Sun Yat Sen. Alley re-depicts this man not as the founder of the Nationalists (and the anti-communist party, the Kuomintang) but as a revolutionary whose dream of a free and equal China was hijacked by those who came after him – a dream only fully realised by Mao. Later in the book, Alley’s eulogy to Zhou En-lai (周恩来) ‘In Memoriam Chou En-Lai’ (p.51) breaks into a startling mode of hyperbole right from the opening lines:

Hills over which he marched

bend their heads in grief; rivers

he crossed, cry as they flow;

Zhou is then treated to another eulogy in ‘None Can Forget’ (p.91). In comparison, Alley’s poem on the death of Mao Zedong is muted. ‘In Mourning’ starts slow and modest with the lines ‘Ever does the old/give way to the new’ and concludes suggesting that ‘revolution’ and ‘Mao Tsetung’ are now ‘one and indivisible.’ We are told that because of him, the people have a new way of thinking, but with Mao the hills do not bow their heads, the rivers do not weep. Why might this be?

Beyond the political hyperbole and propaganda, there is beauty here, but it is not always evident at first glance. In ‘Tai Shan’ (p.110), the poet stands on this great central mountain and thinks of the generations past, of courts and emperors who also shared this view of dawn across the plains below. The beauty of this view is then ‘modernised’ when Alley explains how the mountain now looks down on impressive industrialisation projects and these demand from the people living in its foothills to contribute more to their joint project of building a workers’ paradise– it is a full politburo reworking of the Chinese poetic landscape tradition in the gao tai tradition.[1] In ‘Holiday’ (p.142) the poet experiences the very human disappointment that his holidays are at an end, and he must return to work in Beijing. And in ‘A May Morning in Peking’ (p.116) he speaks of grandchildren who:

…talk of school, lessons learnt

and all the little struggles; one

is learning to play the cello,

another to make model aeroplanes,

the five-year-old girl rubs noses

with me, Maori fashion, and then

they pack up and go…

The little girl and the nose rub! How absolutely human this is! It is the sort of detail that the modern reader, less interested in rafts of newly-built communist oil rigs, is longing for from a book like this – what is it to be a New Zealand man wrapped up in the full force of Chinese history and revolution – what poems this theme would make... Alley rarely goes here.

The grace of poetry is that it can use emotion and depictions of beauty and of human interactions to imply that, beneath the turmoil of life, all is well or, at least, will be well. These insights can then be used to deploy a subtler and yet more powerful form of propaganda – one that admits life can be, at times, terrible, but that the human spirit triumphs and, moreover, that in the end, government, or the Party, or the apparatchiks understand this and use it to humanise their society. It is a poetry that can convince us that the struggles there are similar to here – universal human struggles. Perhaps if Alley gave us poems that humanised in strikingly emotional scenes the whole of Chinese society, we would be faced with a propaganda far more potent (and thus much more insidious?) than the clunky stuff we have here. With these little details I just noted, Alley could have more properly seduced us into a new sense of love and respect for China, but he did not. By comparison we could analyse, for example, the stark beauty and deeply emotional human stories amplified by those cineastes referred to as the ‘Fifth Generation’ – film makers who flourished in China from the mid-1980s on. Although Beijing sought to censor many of these examples, these films depict the personal challenges of revolution and social upheaval. The early films of Zhang Yimou, in particular, give us a China that evokes in us sympathy, empathy, and human-centredness - albeit with the intensity of communist history flowing rapidly past in the background. In fact, because of that intensity, it is easier to sympathise with the full gamut of Chinese experiences – from revolutionaries hell-bent on reform to those caught up in the haze of crowd violence. Alley could have given us this and explained in his verse why he still loved China and the Party and kept loving them despite the iniquities laid on him, despite his vehement disagreement with certain policies, leaders, and movements. Alas, instead of telling us of the anguish he must have suffered when his library was destroyed during the cultural revolution, we get instead a short poem on the revisionist intentions of the Gang of Four (‘Divide and Rule’ p.104). And instead of considered introspection on one person’s reaction to the great forces of history, we get, in ‘Autobiography 14’ (p.22ff) pages of unjustified optimism drawn from Alley’s tour of the country – as though its economic development is commensurate with his own personal life journey and that the results of a five-year economic plan should be the central theme of a poem. It is a socialist realism that turns quickly dull, insensitive, and machine-centred.

In these troublesome pieces of blinkered verse-reporting, he tells us how well (newly occupied) Tibet is faring and how other indigenous minorities in China are all doing fine under the Han-focused transformation of the nation. In this way, he remains blind to numerous indigenous struggles and how voices of dissent are drowned out under the imposition of the Han monoculture. He reports in 1977, as no doubt Beijing would report today, that all is well amongst the middle kingdom’s ethnic groups. This is sad stuff coming from a man whose first name was given to him by his activist parents to honour Rewi Maniapoto, the Maori military leader who fought for indigenous rights against the encroaching British colonists of 19th century New Zealand.

This blinkered optimism comes up in ‘Visitors’ (p.148) where New Zealander visitors arrive in Beijing, sit down for tea and beer, and put their questions to him:

“Why New Zealand values would be

of use to China today?”

“How could the ‘gang of four’ gain so

much power?” “Why do you give us success

stories only, not those of struggle?”

The answers come, with some power, in the next poem ‘Shanghai Underground’ (p.151). Here Alley carefully replicates the horrors of colonialism and capitalism before 1949 – “sleeping quarters a loft/over machines; if too sick,/then thrown out at night/to die on some rubbish heap…”. Obviously, the greater solution to this Western exploitation is revolution but the immediate relief for these souls, he says, came from ‘the flashing eye of /[left-wing story writer] Lu Xun, the quiet, steady smile/ of Soong Ching Ling [a founder of the Republic in 1911 - who then became a central female force in Communist governments after 1949].’ These were the figures who that gave support, he says. Did Alley see himself also in this company – as someone who gave support? I think it is interesting to further speculate on how Alley’s identity becomes so entwined with the Party’s progress that he can and will only ever give ‘success stories’ in his poetry. This would have been the answer he gave ceaselessly to any number of visitors from New Zealand.

What I found odd in several poems was the trenchant hatred Alley expresses for Soviet Russia. See, ‘The New Imperialism and the New China’ (p.16) and even more caustically ‘Levelling Up.’ In this latter poem he compares the Soviet leadership to Hitler and asserts that they have betrayed the legacy of Lenin (pp. 54-56). But all this begs the question, if in France circa 1916 Alley came across not Chinese labourers slaving behind the front lines, but indentured Tsar-oppressed Russians, would he have relocated to their land and taught himself Russian instead of Chinese? Would he have enmeshed his identity in that revolution as much as he did in China and so become an apologist for Stalin, a celebrator of Khrushchev, and use his poetry to whitewash the horrors of, for example, the Chechnyan relocation in the way that this book celebrates the invasion and cultural erasure of Tibet? This is not too hard to imagine given the attractiveness of Stalin to a range of Western intellectuals from Breton through to Sartre before and during World War II. And from his position in Russia would he have written poems of scorn about the parochialism of China’s communists? No doubt.

Perhaps we should assume that just as Mao became synonymous with ‘revolution’ so too did Alley. This becomes most clear at the end of the book when we read ‘The First Eighty Years’ (p.177) as a self-justification:

China gave aim to life, a cause

to fight for, each year more richly;

a place in the ranks of the advancing

millions; how great a thing has this

been, what bigger reward could one

imagine than that which has come

to me, and now sustains!

This poem reads as if it were a poster printed by Beijing Foreign Languages press with rosy-cheeked revolutionaries bearing red flags into the dawn of a new era. The Freshening Breeze is worth reading if you want to look at how a poet straddles the line between slavishly replicating Party ideology and, without much self-reflection, capturing how his own identity has grown inextricably into the project of revolution. And to such an extent that he could not see that this revolution was part liberation, part horror story, part death, and accompanied with too much cultural erasure. There is no doubt that this book is propaganda in full flight, but there are slivers of light where Alley himself sneaks through and occasionally there are snapshots of beauty. Here, poetry submits awkwardly to ideology, but it is interesting to see the ways in which such subjugation can never be total.

[1] Note here the Cao Dai etymology