Chinese Journey by Jan Myrdal (1965)

Posted on 2022-06-20 by thelittleman

A sensitive essay in photographs and words of contemporary China – Photographs by Gun Kessle

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Over the years, I have collected a great number of travelogues from China and other nations throughout the Middle East and Asia. Probably half of those are still boxed up overseas, likely collecting mildew in the tropical heat, but the other half is here with me now. At the end of 2021, I had a goal of reading through one travelogue per week, and I made it a full…week into that aggressive plan. Well, I’m still going at it, just a lot more slowly than I had first planned.

This photo-journal comes from a three-year traveling experience by husband-and-wife team Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle. It took me a minute of reading to discover that Jan’s the husband and Gun’s the wife, which shocked me a bit. They’re Swedish, so I guess they have an excuse.

Jan describes himself as “a writer, a novelist, a reporter, a critic, a sociologist” while his wife is “a painter, an etcher, a photographer.” (8) Individually, they see the world differently, and these differences have spiced their dozen years of marriage, and yet their conversations are really three-way, between husband, wife, and reader of their books. I thought this an insightful way to introduce this tag-team travelogue and it got me excited for a glimpse of rural China nearly 70 years ago.

The context for this book is important. Published in 1965, it actually takes place during the authors’ travels in and out of China between 1958-1963. The China Jan describes is barely one decade old. Chairman Mao still leads his people from Peking, and his thoughts and writings have yet to be printed and published for the masses in The Little Red Book (that happened in 1964). The nation was in the very midst of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), and his eyes only twinkled with dreams of a true Cultural Revolution (1966).

I say that this context is important, because Jan Myrdal (a child of Swedish welfare) is exceptionally optimistic about the new Socialist Utopia that China had become, where life was constantly improving, starvation had been quelled, people were happier and more productive than ever before, and peace had finally been attained. Take this section as an example, a section which comes after describing some of the painful growing pains the young nation had experienced:

“The enumeration of such [dismal] facts makes the picture of Chinese development gloomy, full of disaster, nearly hopeless…There are also developments to be seen and foreseen that change the picture: innovations in technique raise productivity; unskilled workers in time become skilled workers; in China bad planning tends to correct itself by trial and error. When all these facts and trends are complemented by a more general survey (population and birth/death rates, natural resources, educational system, transport network, capital investments, People’s Commune organizations, etc.), the result is presented as a true picture of Chinese development.” (52, 58)

He also later writes of the progress that the revolutions had made, not only politically and militarily but also ideologically, progress he suggests shows growth and maturity:

Chinese society today is not that society of “brotherhood” of which the original peasant revolutionaries talked…The ideals of the original revolutionaries might already be as far from the present society as those of Thomas Paine are from the U.S.A. (121)

These are all honest appraisals, and I’m not suggesting that Myrdal only shared the good stuff, but his optimistic essays did seem a bit premature. It’s like looking at an infant and publishing a book about how great a leader he’ll be one day. Bold.

The scenes recorded here cover three main areas of travel:

  1. Inner Mongolia
  2. From Loyang to Yenan: Liu Ling Village in North Shensi
  3. Yunnan and the Burma Road: The Disciples

While much from these various essays run together (especially when Myrdal waxes political), the first and last regions are especially focused. In the final section about the Burma Road, for example, the couple had long sought to visit this section of China, because four years previously, they had stood on the other bank of the Mekong looking into a China they hadn’t yet been able to penetrate.

The section set within Inner Mongolia was most insightful as a true travelogue of a China in flux, for it described the progression and settling of a nomadic people now under the caring thumb of Communism. Myrdal holds grand hopes for the Mongol Future, fleeing a nomadic existence for the stability of city life, and now fortunately as true Chinese. “Inner Mongolia is not just the scene of a social revolution in a nomad culture; it is the scene of a social revolution conditioned by national integration.” (51)

How the Mongols would feel about that “integration” a decade later is left unsaid, of course, but what concern should that be to a couple of traveling Swedes? They got their pictures of smiling peasants and shared their thoughts of political reform. They published their book praising Maoist Communism before the 50 million deaths by starvation and execution were reported, so what should they care?

Old travelogues like these are a wonderful thing to read, slices of history captured forever in a way no history book could ever do. I have enjoyed the same with others like Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux (1988), and even when I disagree with the authors’ politics or worldviews, I learn so much through the struggle.

You may have a hard time finding this book by Myrdal and Kessle anywhere, but if you do, I’d be interested to hear your take on it, whether I’m being overly critical or not. Perhaps their other books show a different side of things that I’m not catching here. I’d be interested to learn.

©2022 E.T.

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