LOFTER-网易轻博

3

‘Quick! Thy tablets,Memory’

It was to be seventeen years before I returned to China. Seventeen years in which the whole world changed and in which China changed most of all.

The Second World War had come and gone and nothing ever could be the same again.

During the blitz（空袭）I had worked as a surgeon in the dockside area of London, spending night after night operating on air-raid casualties while bombs rained down and buildings blazed. In the mornings, before snatching a few hours, sleep, I would glance outside at the results of the holocaust and would always be astonished to find that much remained standing between the smouldering ruins, and to see the indomitable dockers in their cloth caps going off to work as if nothing had happened.

Then four years in the Army, now compressed into a hotchpotch of vague recollections with a few vivid impressions standing out like poppies in a field of corn.

The Second Front—the Allied landings on the coast of Normandy at last materializing after months of waiting, drilling and marching in lush countryside which, though unkempt, flowered and flourished despite the absence of civilians. Surely the English spring has never been more beautiful than in that memorable year of 1944!

A padre（随军牧师） in my unit, unnerved by the waiting, the uncertainty, the contrast between present beauty and the prospect of unknown danger, put a bullet through his head. We went on arguing, playing poker, listening to the radio and marching. Then, long after we could pitch our tents and unpack our equipment blindfold, we went over.

Grape-fruit juice and real butter on the American tank-landing craft that took us across! Forgotten delights!

Through the surf into the fields of Normandy.

As I write, a torrent of memories comes flooding back, clamouring for space on pages not meant for them. Mostly they are of food or war.

Little copses of wooden crosses sprouting up wherever we pitched our tents and worked for a few days. I had seen many of those who lay beneath the crosses die.

The anaesthetist killed by my side while I was operating. So quickly, so quietly. A mortar bomb fragment tore a tiny hole in the canvas over us, went into his brain and he was dead. An orderly picked up the bottle of ether and kept the patient asleep while I finished the operation.

The galaxy of mushrooms growing in the rich, untended Norman fields, as close-packed as the stars in the Milky Way. With my tent-mate, a first-class cook, I would go out at dawn and fill an Army pack with button mushrooms, disdaining those past their prime. Then at night, over a primus stove, he would fry a duck, ‘liberated’ from a deserted farm-house and cook the mushrooms in duck-fat. Our ridge tent would be full of smoke, for black-out regulations forbade us to lift the flap. He taught me to make potato crisps that don’t stick together. Then, with friends armed with bottles of excavated Calvados, we shared midnight feasts.

When it was peaceful, it seemed as though the peace were absolute and eternal. But when the war roared and raged, it rent the heavens, stripped the leaves from the trees and it seemed as though peace could never return.

My operating shift started at 4 a.m. and I had to struggle to swallow slivers of luke-warm, naked-pink soya sausage.

Later, when our supplies ran out, I was sent into the Falaise gap, where French resistance fighters were locked in bitter combat with encircled German troops, to establish a medical aid post for the French. That night, after setting up the post, I went in search of the local Resistance leaders. I found the building to which I had been directed. All was dark. The windows and doors on the ground floor had been blown in. I entered, flicked my torch into empty, ruined rooms and started to go upstairs. A gun was pressed into my back. 

The Resistance were on the look-out for a collaborator who had betrayed many of them to the Gestapo and they were taking no chances. When I had established my identity, I was taken to an upper room where resistance fighters were sleeping, close-packed on the floor. After a brief discussion on the military situation and its medical needs, we started talking politics. They produced a few pamphlets by Lenin and Stalin, so worn and dog-eared that they were scarcely legible. They were youths who had grown to manhood under the Nazi occupation and they were groping their way towards a deeper understanding of the ugly world into which they had been born. We talked all through the night. They were the survivors of a much larger number who had fallen before Nazi firing-squads or had been tortured to death. They yearned for a better world after their national foe had been defeated and they were looking for the way to build it.

I, too, was feeling my way forward politically.

In Holland we took over a German hospital for high-ranking Nazi naval officers. The low quality of surgical treatment in use shocked me and I wondered how the ordinary German soldiers fared. Yet only a quarter of a century earlier, before the Nazis had mutilated German science and destroyed her best scientists, Germany had led the world in surgery. I was angered by the swaggering arrogance of the captured Nazi officers. They strutted about in their gold braid, Iron Crosses and jack-boots and had the impudence to demand that only pure Aryan blood be transfused into their wounded compatriots. They were, however, easily deflated by a few sharply issued commands.

The war finished and I resumed my career as a civilian surgeon—not in London where I had always lived until I joined the Army, but in Birmingham. 

My experience in the treatment of air-raid casualties and as a military surgeon had given me a great interest in the treatment of injuries and Birmingham had the only hospital in the country devoted exclusively to the treatment of injuries. I worked there for seven years. My family started to grow up. I had a contract for life as a consultant surgeon in the National Health Service. I seemed destined to spend the rest of my days as a surgical specialist in Britain’s second city.

Then, in 1954, we uprooted ourselves and went to China en famille. Apart from a few home visits we have lived in China ever since.

I will not go into the numerous reasons behind our decision to go to China.

Foremost among them was the political reason. I had glimpsed the old China, I knew that in 1949 the Communist armies had finally liberated the whole of the mainland and that now the Chinese people were engaged in the enormous task of building a modern Socialist state on the ruins of one that had been half feudal and half colonial. I was on China’s side. I ardently wished to contribute what little skill I had to an heroic undertaking which would change the face of China and of the world.

One event which crystallized our decision was when my wife and I saw a film of the construction of a dam across the Huai river, part of a gigantic scheme of flood control. Hundreds of thousands of peasants scurried about carrying baskets of earth or stones on bamboo carrying-poles. A shot showed a group of peasants tamping the earth with a huge stone. Time after time the stone thudded down. A close-up showed it striking the earth and also showed the peasants' feet. Their feet were bare.

My wife and I looked at each other. She voiced my thought when she said, ‘They need plenty of accident surgeons there.’ I do not wish to give the impression that our coming to China was in any way based on humanitarianism. Most of the world’s peasants work in bare feet and yet we never thought of going to any country except China. It was a question of how, in a particular situation, one could make one’s best political contribution.

Ever since my student days my political convictions had been getting stronger and more firmly based in Marxist theory. I had never wished to be an armchair theoretician, but a combination of circumstances sharply restricted my opportunities for political work. I knew that China was at the crest of an upsurge of the people and that events there would have a direct impact on every other country in the world, including my own.

Our ‘plane touched down in Peking—not at the new enmarbled International airport but at the homely little airport, no longer used, near the Summer Palace. We had to wait a few hours for some other arrivals, and from the moment of landing we felt enveloped equally by the warmth of the autumn sunshine and by the friendship of the people. No stiletto-heeled, charm-trained air hostesses here! Just pig-tailed girls with rosy cheeks who smiled because they were happy and who made guests feel welcome because they liked them. One of them caught a praying-mantis（螳螂） for my six year old daughter, and tied a length of plastic thread from one of her braids round the insect’s leg so that the little girl could play with it and feel at home.

We have been in China for fifteen years. Fifteen years of immersion in the tasks of the present; of study; of progressive identification with the road taken by the Chinese people; of deepening appreciation of their great qualities and of their outstanding leaders; of change in our environment and in ourselves, sometimes imperceptible, sometimes sharp and painful; of slowly growing understanding of the laws governing the movement of society.

Now I rummage into the recesses of my memory and recapture some of my early impressions.

Inevitably they are tinged with a hindsight which I shall allow to emerge whenever it makes things clearer, for I am only gradually coming to realize that beneath China’s calm exterior, there have been tensions, currents and cross currents, an unseen implacable struggle. These are being revealed by the Cultural Revolution which, as I write, colours and dominates all one’s thoughts and actions.

A few days after arriving in China I watched the National Day Parade on October 1st. I had never before experienced such a mass demonstration of unity, joy and confidence. Half a million marched and one and a half million watched. Chairman Mao and other Party and government leaders, distinguished guests from abroad and what are called in China, ‘democratic personages’ which means Chinese who are not in the Party but who are representatives of progressive strata of the Chinese people, stood on the marble balustrade atop the massive, red-ochre Gate of Heavenly Peace and reviewed the parade.

Block after block of workers, peasants, students, professional workers of all kinds and ordinary Peking residents marched proudly by, carrying banners, scarlet flags, models of everything from locomotives to outsize turnips, statistics of what they had accomplished and what they intended to accomplish. Some of the peasants were a little undisciplined. They had come a long way to see their beloved Chairman and they wanted more than a fleeting glimpse of him. So when they saw him, they stopped, waved and shouted and the Chairman waved back.

The military contingents, impressively precise in their marching, carried weapons of an excellence that contrasted strikingly with their simple cotton uniforms, devoid of badges of rank, epaulettes or decorations. . . . A few years later, this suddenly changed. The armymen appeared in smart gaberdine with shining leather belts and straps, badges of rank, epaulettes, medals, peaked caps and all the trappings of the type of Army with which we are familiar in the West. No one knew why. Some said it was a sign of increasing prosperity. Others that it was inevitable that the People’s Liberation Army should sooner or later come into line with other armies, including the Soviet army. Some of us were not too happy about it. The army that had marched eight thousand miles from the South-East to the North-West of China, that had torn the guts out of the mighty Japanese Imperial Army, that, armed with millet and rifles and an invincible, militant, revolutionary ideology, had defeated a Kuomintang army of eight million bristling with the best that the US could produce, had worn simple cotton uniforms, cloth shoes, and no distinctions of rank. Why start these things now? At the time we did not know the answer but now we know that it reflected the struggle between the capitalist and socialist line in military affairs. The capitalist line, in a nutshell, was to rely chiefly on weapons, equipment, military discipline and training; the socialist line was to give first place to the unity between the army and people, the unity between soldiers and commanders and, above all, to the political consciousness and self-imposed discipline of every soldier, sailor and airman.

After prolonged struggles, the socialist line of Chairman Mao won out and the Chinese army today again wears cotton uniforms, has no distinction of officer rank and is the most politically conscious army in the world.

One of the remaining impressions from my first National Day parade is of the music. Knowing only a vulgarized Western version, I had expected that Chinese music would be incomprehensible or even repulsive to me. It was not so. When I first heard the swelling chords of the *East turns Red’ fill the huge square, the sweetness and majesty of the melody evoked a very strong response. But the tune that really gripped me by the throat was the old army song which bears the cumbersome title ‘Three Principles of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention’. It is a jolly jingle of great verve and zest which draws its power from its associations. It is as much a part of the People’s Liberation Army as the simple red star on the soldiers’ floppy cloth caps. It originated way back in the 1930s when most armymen were illiterate peasants. 

Until then, practically every army that the Chinese people had ever known had supported itself by robbing and looting. The Red Army was different. 

The people were its allies, its kinsfolk. Nothing was to be taken from them, no inconvenience caused them. Regulations governing the conduct of armymen were put to music, to a tune so simple and catchy that every soldier could sing it on the march until it sank deep into his consciousness. And to kill two birds with one stone and learn some Chinese characters at the same time, the marching soldiers would carry boards on their backs with one character from the song written on each board, so that each could learn from the man in front.

Soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army no longer need to learn characters in this way, but the spirit of the song is as alive today as when it was first sung and for millions of Chinese it symbolizes those characteristics which make the People’s Liberation Army so dear to the people.

Another outstanding impression from my first National Day Parade came right at the end when the marchers had all gone by and the vast Tien An Men square seemed momentarily empty. Then from the back of the square, where they had been patiently waiting for hours, tens of thousands of Young Pioneers rushed forward towards the Gate of Heavenly Peace, towards their beloved leader, releasing doves which circled in the sun-drenched autumn air and a myriad of balloons which soared into the blue canopy of the sky. Rosy cheeked, red-scarved, cheering lustily, full of vigour and happiness, they surged forward like a tidal wave, the rising generation of New China, the generation that would continue the herculean task for which so many millions had sacrificed their lives.

I felt a painful lump in my throat and looking round me I saw tears in many eyes.

I started work a few weeks later.

At first I cycled to the teaching hospital to which I had been appointed, the road taking me over the long marble bridge separating the ancient artificial lakes called respectively the ‘North Sea’ and ^Middle South Sea’. When the Tibetan style Dagoba in Pei Hai (North Sea) park was wreathed in morning mist the scene was entrancingly beautiful.

By contrast, the hospital was dark and gloomy. It had been the headquarters of the Japanese military intelligence organization and thousands of patriotic Chinese had come to an heroic but painful end within its walls. Hospital beds were crowded close together for this was before large-scale hospital building had started in Peking. Patients’ friends and relatives added to the general overcrowding and I felt indignant when a sheep-skin coated peasant hawked noisily and spat on the floor. Thinking to shame him, I fixed him in a disapproving stare and glanced repeatedly at the spittle on the floor. He was puzzled by my disapproval and he too looked down at the floor to see what harm his spit was doing. Certainly my performance did nothing to shame him and looking back on it across the years, I do not feel proud of my own behaviour. Spitting is a bad habit and one day it will go, but I had no right to expect that within five years of Liberation this centuries-old custom would have disappeared. This may well have been the first time that the peasant had ever been inside a building that had anything other than an earthen floor. 

Spitting must be eliminated but there are many more important things to eliminate first. And the way to set about it is by patient education and not by angrily miming disapproval.

Soon afterwards I witnessed a dramatic success by a traditional Chinese doctor. In accordance with Mao's insistence on the need for doctors of the modern and traditional schools to co-operate with and learn from each other, there were traditional doctors on the staff of every hospital.

I had been consulted about a young woman who was suffering from a dangerous blood disease as a result of which she was bleeding copiously from the gums, bladder and vagina. She had lost a great deal of blood and was in a dangerously anaemic condition. The accepted modern treatment for this condition is an operation to remove the spleen, but in spite of repeated blood transfusions and the use of every drug known to modern medicine, she was thought to be too weak to withstand the operation. My advice was that, since operation was the only thing that could save her life, we would have to run the risk. Accordingly, after a really massive blood transfusion, we operated very speedily while the blood still ran into her vein.

She stood the operation well, but after it, to our dismay, still continued to bleed. When it looked as if there were no hope, the relatives asked us to call in a traditional herbalist doctor.

He stood by the bedside, tall, bearded and dignified, accompanied by his apprentice. Placing her wrist on a velvet cushion, for several minutes he felt first her right and then her left pulse using his index, middle and ring fingers. 

The apprentice produced a brush and an ink block and the herbalist, after a few moments contemplation, wrote a prescription in beautifully formed characters that covered a whole page. We asked how many doses she should take and were told, ‘Only one. We will be back to see her tomorrow. She may need a different medicine then.’ Later I learned that traditional doctors, unlike their modern colleagues, seldom prescribe more than one dose of medicine since they reason, very logically, that if the medicine is effective, the condition will change after the first dose and if it is ineffective, there is no point in continuing with it.

Within twelve hours she stopped bleeding. We were astonished and delighted, but when the old herbalist called again the next day he was not at all surprised and in a matter-of-fact way, prescribed a different medicine to build up her strength.

Within a few weeks she walked out of the hospital, cured and healthy. 

Of course, it is possible that it was just a coincidence; that she might have been on the point of recovering when she took the herbalist’s medicine. 

Doubts of this kind are inseparable from every new form of treatment and in fact it is extremely difficult to prove the efficacy of any drug. But my impression is that such cures happen rather too frequently to be explained by coincidence and it is more likely that Chinese herbal remedies may some­times succeed where modern drugs are ineffective.

In addition to the usual run of recent injuries which I had been accustomed to seeing in England, I also saw many old, neglected cases of which I had no previous experience. They were a legacy from the almost total medical neglect of the labouring people before Liberation. I saw dislocations of the hip, elbow and shoulder which had remained unreduced for ten years and more; fractures that had united in positions of extreme deformity or had not united at all; joints that had become stiff as a result of no treatment or bad treatment; tuberculosis of bones and joints that had been allowed to run riot. I saw patients who had lost limbs years before and had made their own artificial limbs because none were forthcoming from any other source. I saw a youth whose penis had been chopped off by a landlord because his father couldn’t pay the rent. I saw a girl from Inner Mongolia who hadn’t been able to sit or squat since childhood because of scarring of the buttocks due to a burn.

In the old days, these patients had no hope of getting treatment. Now they could come to Peking from the four corners of the land and they presented a challenge to our little corps of medical workers, lacking in numbers and in skill, who had the responsibility of treating them. As for myself, I was regarded as an expert, but I was seeing such cases for the first time and had less experience of them than those I was supposed to train. I had to go to school all over again, learning from my colleagues and my patients and applying my previous experience to new problems. I was spurred on in this by the urgency and magnitude of the task which confronted us.

I had not been long at work before it became clear that meetings, big and small, played a very important part in the life of the hospital staff. Some were confined to a single ward, others involved everyone in the hospital, from the directors to the laundry workers. We sometimes discussed local matters such as why an operation had failed to achieve the expected result, who should be nominated to attend a conference for model workers, how a complaint by a patient should be dealt with, how we could increase the number of beds without additional staff or additional building, how we could improve the efficiency of the out-patient department, etc., etc. Sometimes we discussed national or international questions such as why agriculture should be regarded as the foundation of the national economy and industry the leading factor, what role the health service could play in supporting agriculture, whether we were satisfied with our Trade Union, why the Chinese government aided newly emerging countries, and whether medical workers could make a contribution to such aid, etc., etc.

At first I was impatient of these incessant meetings which took up much time and interfered with our work. Gradually I understood their value and importance. Many of the problems discussed could have been quickly settled by a decision from above and if this had been done, we might have got through more work. But the policy of the Chinese Communist Party is that, no matter how pressing the immediate tasks may be, long-term interests must always take precedence over short-term interests and unless the persons actually concerned have had an opportunity to debate problems and formulate policy, decisions handed down from above are liable to be wrong. Moreover, unless those who have to operate a policy are convinced of its correctness, it is likely to remain a policy on paper only. In the long run, the key to high working efficiency is to make correct decisions on the basis of unity of purpose, after a detailed examination of all the facts and a full democratic consultation of those involved, and to ensure that everyone understands and supports these discussion。

This is also the style of work of the People’s Liberation Army. During the long years of war, before every battle, commanders and men got together to discuss the situation and to work out suitable tactics and strategy. And the more urgent the situation, the more necessary it was considered to hold such discussions.

Facts have proved that this method of work has great advantages.

A problem that I encountered early in the course of my medical work in China was the reluctance of relatives to permit post-mortem examinations or anatomical studies to be carried out on patients who had died. Such examina­tions are invaluable for checking on the correctness of the diagnosis and treatment and are an important method of raising standards. But age-old beliefs and customs do not disappear overnight and most Chinese are still unwilling to allow the bodies of their dear ones to be dissected.

While on a home visit, I once mentioned this to an old missionary doctor who had taught anatomy in China for several years. He told me that in his time there had been no such problem; the Kuomintang authorities were willing and able to supply an unlimited number of fresh corpses from their concen­tration camps for Communist suspects. The only trouble was that they had usually been beheaded. When the inconvenience of this was pointed out to a camp commander, he immediately offered to strangle them instead.

A kaleidoscope of street scenes flash back into my mind.

The relaxed and happy people, purposeful but out-going, self-respecting and respecting others, calling each other ‘comrade’ because they felt like

comrades.

The adults dressed in an austere uniformity which led me into many per­plexities for I often could not tell if I was talking to a cook or a professor.

Only the babies were really well-dressed with their fur-trimmed bunny-rabbit hats and quilted cloaks of shiny red silk.

The women, for so long oppressed and despised, now showing their new­found freedom in the dignity of their every movement. The old women, with tiny triangular bound feet, better dressed than the others, velvet hats with jade ornaments on their heads, hair tied in a bun, wearing padded trousers even before the weather turned cold.

The children, full of fun, overbrimming with joy. It is rare to see children fight or cry in Peking and even rarer to see them scolded or hit. If a Western child psychologist were to investigate the reasons why juvenile delinquency is so infrequent in China, his inquiries would lead him into areas where he would not expect to venture, for the chief reason is that the ending of exploitation has greatly reduced the social tensions and insecurity which in other societies make themselves felt among all age-groups and provide the soil' for juvenile delinquency.

Another reason, not unconnected with the first, is that in sharp contrast both to the despotic parents of feudal China and to the apocryphal Western mother who despatched her husband to ‘see what the children are doing and tell them to stop it’, modern Chinese parents, in their sane, meaningful society, respect their youngsters and trust them to do the right thing.

They are by no means pampered, but are respected as human beings having their own abilities and desires. I remember travelling on a very crowded bus during the hard years when, due to a succession of natural calamities and other reasons, grain was scarce and eggs were even scarcer. A baby, less than two years of age, was sitting on its mother’s lap, hemmed in by tight- packed, swaying standing passengers. The mother shelled a hard-boiled egg and gave it to the baby. His little fingers could hardly grasp the slippery egg and I was fearful that it would fall. But the mother had no such worries. 

Slowly and carefully the child ate the egg, catching every crumb, until it was all eaten. I think that most Western mothers, who travel in greater comfort and who can buy eggs more easily, would not have trusted the child as much as this Chinese mother did. They would have resisted the child’s desire to feed himself and tension would have built up between them.

Chinese children are loved by the whole family, not in a possessive way as flesh and blood of particular parents but as lovable human beings in their own right. Grandparents often do more than parents in bringing up babies, and older children, even those from neighbouring families, also do their share and do it willingly because they want to and it is the normal thing for them to do. When I worked in a leprosy village in the south of China, I loved to watch the nurses come home in the evening from the island in the river where the lepers lived, to the settlement where we all lived together. Before coming home they would have bathed and changed their clothes to avoid the risk of infection. As they came up the path, the babies they had left behind in the care of grannies and grandpas would run towards them, be swept up, kissed and cuddled and passed from hand to hand. The children didn’t necessarily run to their own mother but to any mother. And they got the same loving welcome whoever they went to. I often found it difficult to tell which child belonged to which mother. Some so-called experts in the West would deplore the apparent lack of a ‘special child-mother relationship’ and conclude that this must be ‘psychologically traumatizing’, but the relationship between children and parents was excellent, the children were happy, co-operative and full of fun and were growing up into thoroughly well-adjusted adults.

On the streets, a complete absence of beggars, vagrants, teddy-boys and prostitutes. In the shops, fixed prices, no persuasion, scrupulous honesty and no bartering. What a contrast with Shanghai 1937!

Road-side stalls roasting chestnuts in mechanically operated cauldrons, filling the air with mouth-watering fragrance. It seemed strange that in China, where so much is done by hand, chestnut roasting should be mechanized.

The variegated traffic. Buses and trams packed until it seemed that they must burst at the seams, clanking and clattering along pot-holed roads. Today, the buses are still tight-packed but they no longer clatter for the roads are smooth and they are mostly trolley buses. As for the trams, they have all but disappeared.

Pedicabs had already replaced the rickshaws of yesteryear and they, too, are now giving way to motorized tricycle taxis.

Donkeys pulling carts laden with great piles of vegetables, hammocks of sacking suspended beneath their buttocks to catch the precious manure and keep the streets clean.

Cars and taxis hooting furiously.

Bicycles galore. It is said that Peking has more bicycles on the roads than any city in the world and those who know say that Chinese-made bicycles are rivalled only by the best British bicycles.

There even used to be camels in the suburbs of Peking, bringing in coal from a mine on the far outskirts. My children used to delight in seeing the camel processions, the young camels, unladen, ambling beside their supercilious elders for training in road sense. I have seen no camels in Peking for many a year.

An old-style funeral at the corner of the lane where we used to live. Everything the deceased could possibly need in the after-life, houses, money, food, servants, horses, cattle and much else had been beautifully made of papier mâché（法,指纸质模型） and bamboo, all waiting to be burnt on the day of interment. A tent had been erected where a round-the-clock hot buffet was available for mourners and others. Buddhist monks chanted prayers and played strange and noisy musical instruments. On the last day, the musicians really let themselves go and went in for all kinds of antics such as playing the trumpet through their noses.

Such funeral ceremonies, reeking with superstition and costing so much that the bereaved might be plunged into debt for years, are no longer to be seen in Peking. Now the emphasis is on simplicity and the trend is towards cremation. Grave mounds, which wasted much agricultural land and interfered with ploughing, are, with the descendants’ permission, being flattened and the coffins moved to public cemeteries.

Old-style Peking opera, unchanged for centuries, all about emperors, courtesans, long-dead statesmen and ghosts. Gorgeous costumes, stylized acting and singing, librettos so archaic that the incomprehensible words had to be projected on to screens at the side of the stage. The shows went on for hours and the audience's lack of interest was shown by the incessant hum of conversation and cracking of sunflower seeds. And the noise! The singers competed with bands composed largely of gongs and deafening cymbals. 

I saw my first Peking opera in company with a devotee and at one point, while a singer was trying hard to make himself heard above the din of the orchestra, for no apparent reason the audience suddenly burst into applause. I asked whether it was because he had broken through the sound barrier, but my companion, unamused, replied that it was because he had sung very well.

Old-style opera has now been superseded by operas on modern themes. The singing, the movements and the quality (though not the quantity) of music are largely unchanged, but the gorgeous costumes have gone and the content is completely transformed. The audiences now are much bigger, more attentive and more enthusiastic than they used to be, for what they now see reflects a life they know, that they themselves are building.

The modernization of Peking opera, like much else, involved a struggle between two lines; between those who clung tenaciously to the past, who wished to glorify long dead despotic rulers, and their hangers-on, who were insensitive to new needs and new thinking, who used the theatre either as a brake on progress or as an escape from reality; and those who understood that for the theatre to flourish it must throw off the shackles of the past, march in step with the people, serve their needs, satisfy their desires, entertain and inspire them.

The parks. Centuries-old pines, propped and supported, their hollow trunks filled like carious teeth cared for by a good dentist. White-skin pines, tall, smooth, and elegant as a lovely woman. Huge ginko trees（银杏）, dating from the Tang dynasty or earlier, representatives of a nearly extinct species, their leaves fanshaped with no central vein, their fruit much prized by Chinese herbalists. Storytellers holding their audiences entranced. Children’s palaces where youngsters can do anything from making plasticine（橡皮泥） models to running real hydro-electric stations. Halls for chess, for singing, dancing, reciting verse, play acting, making music. Halls for the people. Open air theatres, teashops, fruit stalls. Lakes for boating, swimming, fishing and, in winter, for skating too. Exhibitions for those who like to combine relaxation with edification. On one occasion I entered what I thought was a display of Chilean art to find myself in an exhibition on the cause, spread, consequences and prevention of measles!

The extraordinary honesty of people in New China. I never lock anything up and nothing has ever been missing.

A prominent former Labour MP who visited China told me how he had tried unsuccessfully to get rid of a pair of slippers he didn’t want. As he left his hotel in Peking for a tour of China, he put the slippers in the waste-paper basket, but just before the train pulled out of the station, the hotel floor attendant came running along the platform and threw them in through the window. After a day and a night on the train, he wrapped up the slippers and put them under the seat. The next day they turned up at his hotel. He threw them out of his bedroom window but a passer-by picked them up and handed them in. He returned to Peking by air and left them in the car that drove him to the airport. A few days later, they were delivered to his Peking hotel by registered post. Finally he took his slippers back to England.

My first visit to an agricultural co-operative, long before the days of People’s Communes. I was shown round by an enthusiastic, voluble old man who turned out to be the animal feeder. He talked non-stop for an hour, telling me of the Co-op’s achievements and problems, introducing me to his animals, telling me about their feeding habits. When I asked him if he had been brought up on a farm, his flood of talk came to an abrupt halt and his exuberance evaporated. ‘It’s funny you should ask that’, he said. ‘We never lived in any fixed place. All my family except granny and myself died of starvation while

I was still very young. Granny seemed to keep alive on nothing and as for me, until I was eleven or twelve, things weren’t too bad for there were a lot of camels where we lived and I used to pick seeds out of their droppings, wash them and eat them. It seems that there are some things that camels can’t digest and we can. The trouble was that I had no trousers and when I got bigger it wasn’t decent to go out without trousers. I used to borrow granny’s trousers when she wasn’t using them but she too had to look for food and so we went very hungry.’ He paused for a long time. ‘Until I joined this Co-operative, I never in my life had known what it felt like to have a full belly.’ 

The ability of the Chinese to laugh at themselves and recognize their shortcomings. I remember, in those early days, going to an industrial exhibition. There were proud rows of shining lathes, diesel engines, turbines, cameras, medical equipment and such like, but one large hall exhibited only faulty products. The centre piece was a string of kettles suspended from the ceiling, each leaky kettle dripping water into the one below. There was a pile of enamel wash-basins, so tightly jammed into each other that a fifty kilogram weight couldn’t pull them apart. A shot-gun was on display beneath a cartoon showing a cocky bird on a branch telling a huntsman whose gun had a corkscrew barrel, ‘Try again comrade—you’ll never hit me with that!’ The most telling exhibit was a huge photograph of a young man with a black eye whose grin revealed two missing front teeth. Beneath the photograph was a chest expander with two broken springs.

Enough meandering along the byways of the past, pleasant though I find it to recall the background to the present. I must get on with my main task, which is to sketch those aspects of China’s medical services of which I have personal experience, which throw light on the overall political and social development and which help to explain the source of China’s dynamism and vitality.

I shall not hesitate to show where there have been clashes between opposing viewpoints and tendencies, for such contradictions nearly always have a political basis and it is precisely in the course of resolving them that progress is made.

Neither shall I avoid entering into the political arena for politics are so dominant in the thinking of the Chinese people, and so directly guide their actions, that any book on present day China that fought shy of discussing political issues would be trivial and one-sided.

I shall not try to write an erudite or comprehensive work on medicine in China. The time is not yet ripe for such a book and when it is, it will need a much wiser author than myself to write it.