China earthquake

Even though I'm supposed, all these years, to have spent my time explaining what is odd about Americans to the British and, if you'll excuse the expression, what is odd about the British to the Americans, I'm always very wary about attributing anything to what you’d think would be my main subject, namely national character.

Years ago, I remember in the aftermath of a terrific argument – I was listening in, I'm too much coward ever to get into a terrific temper with anybody, except, I guess the lowest thing that crawls, namely men who push drugs to school children – as I was saying, I was listening to a terrific argument between a couple of Britons and a couple of Americans which was about some characteristic of one or the other, which one side thought sensible and natural and the other side thought ridiculous. As happens so woefully often in arguments about politics or morals, what each side was really saying was, 'Why can't you be more like us?' It's Rex Harrison's male chauvinist theme song over again, 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' 

I'm wary, I say, about ascribing any behaviour to national character because I have a suspicion that if you take a given character A, born in the middle of Kansas, say, and simply teeming with the blood and initiative of a prairie type, and you transfer him at an early age to Shepherd's Bush. By the time he's well into his teens, he will be indistinguishable from the same character born as well as bred in Shepherd's Bush. Take the same character at birth and transfer him from Shepherd's Bush to the Australian Bush, Outback, back country, and he'll be indistinguishable from the same character who'd been all his life Down Under. 

It all depends, of course, at what age you arrange the transfer. By the time a man or woman is 30, they will not change their character – I don't believe anyone changes his/her character after they emerge from the womb – but, by that time, they've built up a pattern of behaviour and convictions and prejudices absorbed from their native country and, at best, they'll modify them. In other words, I think national character is important not because it exists but because everybody thinks it does and acts accordingly. 

Well, after sitting in on that terrific argument, I remember writing that a belief in national character is the first refuge of the anxious, meaning (as Max Wall would say it) that to put something down to national character is too often the easiest way out of a puzzle. Well, you must have gathered by now that I've been working up to a puzzle which can most conveniently be ascribed to national character. To two national characters. The character of the Chinese and the character of the Americans. 

The news story that, in America, has blanketed everything else out of the headlines and practically rendered invisible our little local hassle between Carter, Ford and Reagan, is the Chinese earthquake. And this emphasis in itself is interesting. I've seen several newspapers from Britain and Europe in which the earthquake is there all right, but it hasn't obliterated the front pages the national or local news. For the moment, we'll let this pass. 

The United States was the first government, I believe, to offer help at once, knowing very well that the Chinese are very efficient organisers and would probably be better than any of us at despatching search parties, water, food, drugs and so on to the victims. Since the army in China is committed at all times to doing routine service to civilians, it has, no doubt, mounted a massive operation which, in the United States, would begin with the goodwill and voluntary energies of the Red Cross but the American government was bewildered at the start by having no information to go on about the size of the catastrophe and the required scale of the rescue effort. 

And this brought up right away a problem either of the Chinese character or, I dare to think, more likely a problem of 'face' in a communist country. For, however differently the Russians and the Chinese present to the foreigner the official picture of their way of life, Western tourists usually talk about the humourlessness, the suspiciousness and strangling red-tape of the Russians, as against the merry chuckles and openness of the Chinese. It's striking to see how both the Russians and the Chinese, in any catastrophe, whether man-made or an act of what some of us unrepentantly call an act of God, how they both retreat into a curious silence and reluctance to tell us the dire facts. It's understandable to us, even if it's lamentable, that they should want to cover up a breakdown in their agricultural plan or the accidental death of a couple of astronauts, it's absolutely predictable that we are not going to hear from them about any palpable blunder of the national government in China, the Soviet Union or Albania, not to mention Romania or even Yugoslavia, but an earthquake? 

Well, the weird fact is that, for the first 48 hours, all we got from the Chinese themselves was that there had been a severe earthquake in the North China Plain and that a couple of French people and a Japanese had been killed. The first hints we got of a mammoth catastrophe came from visiting foreigners who managed to survive. Only when it became as plain as day that the epicentre was through Tangshan, an industrial city with a million population, only then could an ordinary, intelligent reader with a map, let alone a seismologist, begin to suspect that the casualties were bound to run into the hundreds of thousands. Where else on earth would a government of normally compassionate men and women – and we know nothing to suggest that the Chinese are not as compassionate as the rest of us towards their own kind – where else would a government instinctively clamp a censorship on the dreadful facts and figures? 

There is of course the deduceable fact that the colossal damage to Tangshan alone, a mining and power centre, could badly cripple the economy and anything that reveals a weakness in the economy is not revealed by communist countries to us, nor, for that matter, to the United Nations Statistical Department which is more comprehensive in these matters than any other body but is regretfully mum about such things as gross national products, steel capacity, unemployment, crop failures and so on in communist countries for the simple reason that they are not going to tell anybody on the outside. 

Well, I've been reflecting an American irritation so far rather than tracking it to a source or sources. But the first American reaction was one of mixed horror and exasperation growing out of disbelief. Disbelief that we didn't read at once the scope of the disaster and the likely figures about the casualties. And here, a remarkable difference can be spotted between two editorials, one in Europe, the other in America. A thoughtful editorial in the London Times guessed at the scale of the earthquake, noted the probable material damage and then went on, interestingly, about the general regions of China where earthquakes have happened since the sixteenth century and the shock of having one take place in North China, which has never been regarded by experts as a danger zone. 

The leading American editorial took a quite different tack. it noticed as a curious fact that on the day scientists could describe with authority and detail how a machine had scratched the surface of Mars hundreds of millions of miles away, much of the world was wondering about the fate of millions of Chinese and had to depend for their information on bits and pieces, sometimes contradictory, from foreigners in China. Admittedly, it went on, disasters of this apparent magnitude are not easy to describe early or accurately, but China is now an integral state with excellent internal communications, surely the government could have been quicker to report the event? After all, God, or nature, or whatever the force to which this catastrophe may be ascribed, is not an imperialist or a counter-revolutionary or a Soviet agent but there are governments apparently believing that natural afflictions, whether the earth that trembles, the rivers that flood or the skies that produce no rain are reflections upon their own supreme powers. The droughts in Africa might have been countered with less suffering for many many people if the governments had not concealed or obscured the facts. 

It seems – I never knew this – that the Chinese have regularly refused the help in such natural disasters of the West. On what grounds? Well, from three separate accounts I see it says 'on principle.' On what principle? It must have to do with a feeling familiar enough to all of us but one which extends in China from the individual to the government. It's the feeling of not wanting to be obliged or obligated and we know it best in Mark Twain's sharp observation 'the holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime if not asked to lend money.' But surely, as the New York Times puts it, no sensible person with any consciousness of the humanity he shares with the Chinese would feel that such aid should be withheld on political grounds or that accepting it would be demeaning to the Peking regime. What would be a blot on the People's Republic would be the assumption that the less the world outside knows about the tragedy, the better for the ruling group. 

I don't know if this reaction, which in my experience is the spontaneous American one, is naive or not but in such crises, it's noticeable that Americans are the first to forget power politics and, as when Europe lay prostrate in 1947, pour out money and medicine and technology without much thought to the latent powers they may be helping to build up. 

I've seen it said – and it's said by a type of knowing intelligentsia, in Europe especially, a breed which is always on the alert, and usually gets things wrong – it's said that Americans offer instant and generous help to stricken peoples because they are essentially guilty about their wealth. Well, whatever their motives, Americans tend to hear the thunderclap, the earth groan and they ring sirens and rush help at once. 

I may sound as if I'm saying, 'Why aren't the Chinese more like us?' But the question which must affect our view of the sincerity of any relation with communist China, the question is still, 'Why?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.