By MICHAEL FORSYTHEAUG. 14, 2014
Photo
Pierre Ryckmans, who used the pen name Simon Leys, first
traveled to China as a student in 1955. His once romantic view of China
dissipated when he learned of the Cultural Revolution.CreditWilliam
West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian-born scholar of China who
challenged a romanticized Western view of Mao Zedong in
the 1960s with his early portrayal of Mao’s Cultural Revolution as chaotic and
destructive, died on Monday at his home in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.
His daughter, Jeanne Ryckmans, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Ryckmans, who was better known by his pen name, Simon
Leys, fell in love with China at the age of 19 while touring the country with
fellow Belgian students in 1955. One highlight was an audience with Prime
Minister Zhou Enlai. The man-made famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his
Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and ended about the time of Mao’s
death, in 1976, were still in the future. There was much to be admired in the
new China.
Yet pursuing his studies of Chinese art, culture and
literature in the People’s Republic itself was not an option for a Westerner,
so he settled in Taiwan, where he met his future wife, Han-fang Chan. He also
lived in Singapore and Hong Kong.
It was in Hong Kong during the late 1960s, when it was still
a British colony, that Mr. Ryckmans (pronounced RICK-mans) began to follow the
turmoil just across the frontier, reading accounts in the official Chinese
press about the Cultural Revolution and talking to former Mao supporters who
had escaped it.
He began to find that the romantic view of Mao harbored by
many Western intellectuals — as a progressive if flawed champion of the masses
— was completely at odds with the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution, which
sought to eradicate Chinese cultural traditions and Western capitalist
influences and replace it with a Maoist orthodoxy. The movement led to purges,
forced internal exiles and whipsaw shifts in the political winds, and it
compelled Mr. Ryckmans to step into the arena of political commentary.
“Until 1966 Chinese politics did not loom large in my
preoccupations, and I confidently extended to the Maoist regime the same
sympathy I felt for all things Chinese, without giving it more specific
thought,” Mr. Ryckmans wrote under his pseudonym in “Chinese Shadows,”
which was first published in French in 1974. “But the Cultural Revolution,
which I observed from beginning to end from the vantage point of Hong Kong,
forced me out of this comfortable ignorance.”
His first account, “The Chairman’s New Clothes,” was also
published in French, in 1971, a year after he had settled in Australia, lured
by an eminent Chinese literary scholar, Liu Cunren, to teach at Australian
National University. Mr. Ryckmans wrote the book under the name Simon Leys to
disguise his identity so that he would not be banned from China.
He returned to China in 1972 on a six-month assignment as a
cultural attaché for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing. The wanton destruction of
the city’s ancient architectural heritage shocked him.
In “Chinese Shadows,” he wrote of his frantic search for
some of the most magnificent of the city’s huge gates, which he assumed had
been preserved, even though he knew that the city walls had been taken apart
starting in the 1950s. The gates were gone. “The destruction of the gates of
Peking is, properly speaking, a sacrilege; and what makes it dramatic is not
that the authorities had them pulled down but that they remain unable to
understand why they pulled them down,” he wrote.
The Cultural Revolution, he found, had destroyed the beauty
of Chinese culture and civilization without destroying what needed to be
exorcised: the tyranny of arbitrary rule.
In a telephone interview, Kevin Rudd, a former prime
minister of Australia and a former student of Mr. Ryckmans, called him “the
first of the Western Sinologists of the ’60s and ’70s to expose the truth of
the cultural desecration that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, ripping
away the political veneer from it all and exposing it for what it was: an ugly,
violent, internal political struggle within the Chinese Communist Party led by
Mao.”
Mr. Rudd added, “He was excoriated at the time by
Sinologists who had been captured by the romance which many felt for the
Cultural Revolution in the early days.”
The irony, Mr. Rudd said, is that the Chinese leadership
moved to repudiate the Cultural Revolution after Mao’s death. Many of the
delights of old Beijing — the food stalls, the street dancing on a summer’s
evening — did indeed return, as did an appreciation for classical art,
literature and, finally, the classical scholar Confucius, who had been vilified
by the Maoists. Mr. Ryckmans translated, into English, the “Analects,” the
collection of sayings attributed to Confucius.
Yet he did not change with the times. “It was difficult to
get Pierre to accept that real, sustainable and positive changes had occurred
in the China of the period of ‘reform and opening,’ ” Mr. Rudd said.
More than a Sinologist, Mr. Ryckmans was also a formidable
European man of letters, earning doctorates in law and art in Belgium, said
Richard Rigby, a China scholar and Mr. Ryckmans’s brother-in-law. His lectures,
he added, brought the best of both worlds together.
“He could look at a Chinese painting or maybe something by
Orwell and essays by Montaigne and put them all together into a coherent
whole,” Mr. Rigby said.
Mr. Ryckmans also wrote a novel, “The Death of Napoleon,”
which imagines the deposed emperor escaping from exile on St. Helena and making
his way back to France. First published in France in 1986 and then in English
in 1992, it was hailed as “an extraordinary book” by the novelist Penelope
Fitzgerald, writing in The New York Times Book Review, and adapted into a film,
with Ian Holm and Hugh Bonneville, in 2002.
Mr. Ryckmans was a frequent contributor to The New York
Review of Books, Le Monde and other periodicals and the recipient of several
literary prizes.
He was born on Sept. 28, 1935, in Brussels. Besides his
daughter, he is survived by his wife; his sons Marc, Etienne and Louis; and two
grandchildren.
He also taught at the University of Sydney and spent his
later years writing and sailing. A collection of his essays, “The Hall of
Uselessness,” discussing topics as far-ranging as “Don Quixote” and Confucius,
was published in 2011.
In “Chinese Shadows,” Mr. Ryckmans wrote that even though Mao
and his acolytes would leave the scene, and there would be an inevitable
relaxation of authoritarian rule, the fundamental characteristics of Communist
rule would not change.
“Among various descriptions of Communist China made at
different times, one may note differences,” he wrote, “yet if these
descriptions have been made conscientiously and perceptively, they will show
more than ephemeral journalistic truths, for modifications will be in quantity,
never in quality — variations in amplitude, not changes in basic orientation.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 15,
2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Pierre
Ryckmans, 78, Dies; Exposed Mao’s Hard Line.
