This memoir picks up where the last China memoir I read (and reviewed on Amazon) left off, Peter Liu's
Mirror: A Loss of Innocence in Mao's China
, recounting that author's 30 years in the Chinese penal system until his release in the late '70s (actually late '80s as he was kept in prison another decade but given a livable salary for his labor). Robert Davies lived an exciting several years in Xinjiang running bars and tourism ventures and marrying a Uighur woman before he was arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for 8 years.
Those years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade with all kinds of foreign characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of foreigners to be made an example of. The continuities with Liu's earlier prison saga (also on falsified charges as a "Bourgeois Rightest") are striking. The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control - but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace! "Re-education" camps from whatever time period in China, prisons, schools, etc., differ only in the degree to which they seek not merely to change your way of thinking but to erase your personality altogether and substitute sheer empty-headedness. There is never any "re-education"; there is simply mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. "Education" is not much more than "re-education." I taught in Chinese universities for 11 years, including some of the best, and what they all have in common is their dulling, addling effect on students' minds, resulting in their incapacity to think, to grow knowledge, to develop long-term memory structures and critical faculties. This is accomplished by constant and incessant short-term memory tasks, continual repetition and recitation occupying all hours of the day (starting in early childhood by parental-enforced study routines), and various Pavlovian reward/punishment systems extended throughout higher education (even postgraduate students are fined for all manner of minor infractions). So why all the fuss about high-achieving Chinese high-school students? Of course they perform better than most students around the world on tests and exams because that's ALL they're trained to do; once out of school they forget everything they've learned.
From the worst prisons and gulags to the best universities, there is an unbroken line of continuity in this psychological coercion and micromanaging of the population. I don't imply that the American prison system is much to brag about, with its cesspools of gangs, male rape, HIV and hepatitis C and the highest prison population in the world. By comparison the Chinese prison system is actually better in some ways, as it keeps prisoners busy (often employing them in slave labor to make toys for export to Western countries). This is why I'm pessimistic that China will ever really open up in any substantive way: they've been dumbed down to the extent that they lack the imaginative capacity to change. However, the fact that both Peter Liu and Robert Davies survived with their mind intact is very reassuring and reason for optimism in the creative human spirit. I have met enough wise-eyed Chinese as well to know that the system doesn't destroy all minds. Apart from these lessons, I should add that Davies' account is very well-written and highly readable and an excellent general introduction to Chinese culture and society - from within the belly of the beast.
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