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From one China to another* 7
never stop returning and who never go, the mandarins who take flight, and the generals
who flee. Those who are making History have never seen the great imperial cities; they
only know the mountains and the fields; in the fields and in the mountains, the destiny of
China has been decided. For the first time, a capital awaits the pleasure of the country.
History will appear in the form of a procession of peasants. Townspeople think of the
country as an inert space which links the towns and which is crossed and devastated by
armies until, in the towns, they have decided to make peace. But suddenly it reveals
itself: it is living flesh, muscle; within this muscle, the towns are lodged like grains of
urate.Yet the crowds are not afraid. Up there, the eye of America is spinning round in
panic. But on the ground they have known for a long time that the communists have won.
The rich curse Chiang Kai-shek as much as Mao Tse-tung. The peasants want to go back
home: since everything is in the hands of the communists, they might as well go and meet
them in the villages as in the towns. The workers and the poor begin to hope; the
thousand individual waits of the time of Repetition have come together and fused in a
single hope. The rest of the population march in processions and pray for peace: for any
peace. It is a way of killing time. Before joining the bonzes and burning paper wands,
they make the most of the opportunity to put their personal affairs in order. They go and
rub the nose of an idol, for their own benefit; infertile girls press their stomachs against
the stomachs of statues; after the ceremony, in the large pharmacy near the temple,
people will be buying dried pellets which restore ardour to listless husbands and which
warm the feet of wives.
As long as the authorities remain at their post, the crowd stays under pressure. The
police surround it and contain it; but, unlike ours, they rarely strike: this policeman is
getting impatient because they are hemming him in too tightly. He lifts his leg: is he
going to kick out? No, he stamps in a puddle; having been splashed, the people will step
back. But the gentlemen of the Kuomintang will not stay in place; they go off. There are
a thousand left; a hundred left. Soon there will be none. The gentlemen who cannot leave,
yellow men and white men, are pale with fear. During the period of transition, the base
instincts of the population will be let loose: there will be pillaging, rape and murder. As a
result the bourgeois of Shanghai pray for the communists to come; any kind of order
rather than the fury of the people.
This time it is all over. The important people have left, the last policeman has
disappeared; the bourgeoisie and the populace alone remain in the city. Will there be
pillaging or not? Admirable crowds – when they no longer felt the weight of the burden
that was crushing them, they hesitated for a moment and then, little by little, became
decompressed; great masses return to a gaseous state. Look at the photographs;
everybody has started to run. Where are they going? Pillaging? Not even that; they have
entered the fine, abandoned houses and have scavenged, just as, only yesterday, they
scavenged in the piles of rubbish. What have they taken? Practically nothing: the
floorboards to make a fire. All is calm; let them come now, the peasants from the north:
they will find an orderly city.
Remember June 1940, and those funereal giants who raced across a deserted Paris in
their lorries and their tanks? Now, that was picturesque: not much voluptuousness, but
blood and death, and a lot of pomp. The Germans wanted a ceremonious victory. That is
what they had, and the handsome SS officers, standing on camouflaged vehicles, looked