Orwell in China: Big Brother in Every Bookshop オーウェル中国 にて ビッグブラザーがすべての書店に
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Volume 11 | Issue 23 | Number 2 | Article ID 4127 | Jun 09, 2013 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Orwell in China: Big Brother in every bookshop オーウェル中国 にて ビッグブラザーがすべての書店に Michael Rank As I was researching Nineteen Eighty-four in Chinese, I wondered whether Orwell ever wrote about China. His interest in India, where he was born in 1903, is well known, and he served in the Burma Police after leaving school and before becoming a writer, but my guess was that China didn’t concern him greatly. But when I went to the British Library to check in his massive, 20-volume Complete Works [CW], I was surprised to discover that he wrote quite a Orwell at the BBC lot about China and its fate under Japanese occupation, in particular when he was working for the BBC’s Eastern Service during World It so happens that a neighbour of mine was a War II. close friend of the Empsons and a couple of years ago she introduced me to their son And of direct relevance to this article, it turns Jacobus, who has written a book about his out that he asked his publishers to send a copy parents’ unconventional marriage and his of Nineteen Eighty-four to his colleague, the childhood in Peking. Jake tells me that not only did at least one copy of Nineteen Eighty-four literary critic William Empson in Peking, where arrive safely in Peking, but that he remembers he was teaching English literature. When he his parents reading it so eagerly that “they had was seriously ill in a sanatorium into tear it in half so they could both read it at Gloucestershire in 1949, Orwell wrote to his once!” (J. Empson, email to the author, 8 March agent Leonard Moore: “William Empson in 2014). China has asked for a copy of 1984 [sic]. I think it might be wise to get two copies sent, one Orwell had written three months earlier that “I from London and one from New York. He had vague ideas of writing [to Empson], but already seems uncertain as to whether his thought it might be embarrassing for foreigners in China to get letters from outside at the letters are being opened, so could you ask both moment. Hetta, Empson’s wife, is or used to be publishers not to enclose the usual card saying a Communist, & he himself is not particularly ‘Compliments of the Author’, as this might just hostile to Communism, but I doubt whether conceivably be embarrassing to him.” Helpfully that would do much good under a Chinese he gave Empson’s address as 11, Tung Kao Communist régime” (letter also from Fang, Near Peking Normal University, Peiping Gloucestershire, to his American publisher 9, China (30 August 1949, CW, vol 20, p 162). Robert Giroux. Orwell adds that “I have been 1 11 | 23 | 2 APJ | JF horribly ill for the last month or so…” 19 May cruelty that came to his attention at the BBC. 1949, CW, vol 20, p 117). Orwell seems to have With unusual insight, he dated the beginning of been somewhat bemused by the Empsons’ World War II not to the German invasion of departure for Peking, and in another letter to Poland in 1939 but to the Japanese invasion of Giroux, he says: “I’d like to know what he China. “[The war] started, properly speaking, in [Empson] has to say about “[King] Lear,” (a 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, reference to Empson’s recent essay on Lear, and the League of Nations failed to take action. Tolstoy and the Fool). He has disappeared into From then onwards, we have seen a long series China the way people do…” (14 April 1949, CW, of aggressions … [I]t was inevitable that Soviet vol 20, p 84). Jake says Orwell’s assessment of Russia, however anxious to remain at peace, his parents’ political stances is accurate. “My should sooner or later be drawn into the war on mother was a member of the Communist Party the side of the democracies. It was inevitable from 1937 until 1956, so Orwell was quite that Britain and China should ultimately find correct in her case – my father’s political themselves fighting on the same side, whatever opinions were more nuanced, as they say these differences there may have been between them days, but he could have been rightly described in the past …” Predictably perhaps, Orwell does as a sympathiser – wearing his Chinese not seem to have been sympathetic to the communist uniform when attending aCommunists, and gives the Nationalists the conference in the U.S. in about 1950, for credit for China’s success in resisting the instance.” But despite Orwell’s suspicions Japanese. He notes that when the Japanese about the Empsons, he did not include them in invaded Manchuria in 1931, “China was in a his famous (or infamous) list of allegedstate of chaos, and the young Chinese republic communists that he drew up for thewas in no condition to resist. Six years later, Information Research Department, a branch of however, when the invasion of China proper the British Foreign Office, a year or two before began, order had been restored under the he died (CW, vol 20, pp 240-259). This list of leadership of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek, and a 135 “crypto-Communists & fellow-travellers” powerful national spirit had grown up.” Orwell sparked a furore when it finally came to light in adds that the main reason the Chinese kept on the late 1990s, with some denouncing Orwell fighting against enormous odds is that “they as a government informer and others defending are fighting for their liberty, and the will to him because he viewed the Communist Party as surrender does not exist in them” (16 May a totalitarian menace. The list includes1942, CW, vol 13, p 324). comments such as “Half-Caste...Main emphasis anti-white but reliably pro-Russian on all major He also noted that “This is [Japan's] third war issues”.. Empson was a highly influential of aggression in 50 years. On each occasion literary critic who taught in Peking and they have wrenched away a piece of Chinese Kunming in the late 1930s and returned to territory and then exploited it for the benefit of teach at Peking Normal University from 1947 two or three wealthy families who rule Japan, to 1952, witnessing the last years of the with absolutely no regard for the native Chinese civil war and the Communist takeover. inhabitants” (17 January 1942, CW, vol 13, p 127). Orwell’s main interest in China was related to its attempts to resist the Japanese, who had It was surely Japanese cruelty towards the first invaded the northeast in 1931 and the rest Chinese that angered Orwell the most. “By of the country six years later, and he voiced his almost universal agreement it is a regime of anger in several BBC scripts. He was appalled naked robbery with all the horrors of massacre, at the eye-witness stories of extreme Japanese torture and rape on top of that. The same will 2 11 | 23 | 2 APJ | JF happen, or has already happened, to all the ‘Chinese’. I have also in most cases substituted lands unfortunate enough to fall under‘Burmese’ or ‘Oriental for ‘native’, or have put Japanese rule. Perhaps the best answer to the ‘native’ in quotes. In the dialogue, of course, I propaganda which the Japanese put out in India have left these words just as they stand. When and other places is simply three words LOOK the book was written a dozen years ago ‘native’ AT CHINA” (13 March 1943, CW, vol 15, p 28). and ‘Chinaman’ were not considered offensive, but nearly all Orientals now object to these In Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell envisaged a terms, and one does not want to hurt anyone’s world divided into Eurasia, Eastasia and feelings.” (21 November 1943, CW, vol 15, p Oceania which are continually at war against 338). each other, and shortly after the end of World War Two he envisaged how “More and more Of course “Oriental” is now almost – or just as – obviously the surface of the earth is being objectionable as “Chinaman”, and the words parcelled off into three great empires, each “racist” or “racism” would be bound to crop up self-contained and cut off from contact with the in any modern discussion of such terms, but outer world, and each ruled, under oneOrwell was surely ahead of his time in his disguise or another, by a self-selectedsensitivity to such issues. The word Negro is oligarchy.” now archaic, but in Orwell’s time it was a word of respect, and he insisted (more than once) “The haggling as to where the frontiers are to that it should be written with a capital N: in a be drawn is still going on, and will continue for review of a special supplement to New some years, and the third of the three super- Republic magazine, entitled The Negro: His States–East Asia, dominated by China–is still Future in America he highlighted how “the potential rather than actual,” Orwell declared. facts it reveals about the present treatment of “But the general drift is unmistakable,” he said, Negroes in the U.S.A. are bad enough in all adding rather puzzlingly that “every scientific conscience. In spite of the quite obvious discovery of recent years has accelerated it” necessities of war, Negroes are still being (‘You and the Atom Bomb,’ Tribune, 19 Oct pushed out of skilled jobs, segregated and 1945, CW, vol 17, p 320).