How the Nazis brought about the end of the Cultural Revolution

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (World Affairs Press, 2006 printing)

Zheng Yifan tells of going to Germany in the early 90s for an international conference on Trotsky, where he was informed that he was unqualified to join the discussion because, given that Trotsky’s works were unavailable in Chinese, he had obviously never read any of them.

Zheng replied that Trotsky’s major works had actually been translated in the early 1960s. In fact, he had personally written summaries of most of them for the Central Propaganda Department.

The translations belonged to a category known as “grey books” (灰皮书), translations of foreign political and sociological texts not intended for public circulation. Limited-circulation translations of foreign literary works were known as “yellow books” (黄皮书). In the early 1960s, when China was engaged in an ideological battle with the Soviet Union, its party leadership needed to read “revisionist” works in order to understand and combat the arguments of the opposition.

The books and their translators were addressed by two Chinese newsweeklies this summer. In a lengthy New Century Weekly feature on the genesis and influence of yellow and grey books, Zheng Yifan explained how the “grey book” project grew out of a mission to translate the works of Trotsky into Chinese:

Although at the time, China was fiercely anti-Trotsky, some of our party’s leaders weren’t too clear about what Trotsky really stood for. So the mission was handed down to the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau.* Two people in the bureau were mostly responsible for the work: Lin Jizhou and myself.

The distinctive design of the books was due to Kang Sheng, who said that a glance at the grey covers would tell you that they weren’t Marxist works.

The endeavor was halted by the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Central Propaganda Department was revealed to be “the palace of the prince of hell,”* and many of the translators who took part in the grey and yellow book projects were accused of working to further Trotskyism and oppose Stalin. Although the books were initially suppressed, they gradually

A China Newsweek article focuses on one book in particular, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (第三帝国的兴亡). Translated into Chinese in 1965, after the high tide of grey books in 1963-64, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a “grey book”: it had a slightly more interesting cover design than simply black text on a plain grey background.

The article translated below describes the book’s translation process, how various editions reflected the changing ideological climate, and the influence it had on youth of that era who devoured copies that were surreptitiously passed from hand to hand.

“Internal books”: Red flowers smell sweet, and so do white ones

by Luo Xuehui / CN

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” This famous line is quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In 1925, the American journalist William L. Shirer arrived in Germany and began reporting on Nazism.

In 1945, the Third Reich collapsed, and an astonishing number of secret documents were uncovered for the world to see. In addition, there were personal diaries, top-secret memos, and confessions by war-criminals prior to their execution. Relying on what he had personally experienced, Shirer spent five and a half years writing his book.

One of the top-selling history books in the world, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has sold more than 2 million copies in hard cover and paperback. In China , the “internal” translation and private circulation of the book started in 1965 and gradually opened itself to the public. This reporter consulted five editions of the book and discovered that the June, 1983 printing carried a number showing that at that time, circulation had already reached 400,000.

The birth of an “internal book”

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1965 edition, published by WAP for internal circulation

“I never imagined that there’d eventually be so many copies of that book,” Zi Jinru told China Newsweek. This graduate of the Southwestern Union University (西南联大) was head of the Western Group at World Affairs Press (世界知识出版社) and served as editor and proofreader of the book’s first “internal” edition. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich won the American Book Award in 1961, and after Zi learned of the book’s reputation through internal channels, he wanted to publish it. Considering the length of the book and the difficulty of arranging translators however, he had to put that idea aside.

Coincidentally, Dong Leshan, a graduate of Saint John’s University in Shanghai, had also discovered the book. Before the revolution, this future master translator had been employed at the Information Office of the US Embassy in China, and after the liberation, he worked as a translator for the Xinhua News Agency. Later, he was branded a rightist and transferred from his position as translator to work teaching basic English to classes of cadres. His monthly salary was cut from 167 to 69 yuan, so he had to take on freelance work to support his family. Dong discovered The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the English-language stacks of the Xinhua library and loved it so much that he spent two weeks reading straight through the original, and then immediately wrote a letter recommending it to World Affairs Press.

Zi Jinru took charge of the book. He had Dong work on an excerpt, which he found acceptable, then set about having him translate it. Because the book was a massive tome that would run to more than 1.3 million characters, the publisher decided that nine people would cooperate on the translation. Dong himself did 200,000 characters and was responsible for the overall editing.

Dong Leshan died in 1999. His wife Ling Wanjun is still alive in the US, where China Newsweek spoke to her by phone. Ling recalled that their home had just one desk, borrowed from the Xinhua property manager. Dong used it for translation during the day, but at night he had to let his son use it. That small desk was later reclaimed by the property manager, who wanted to take back their apartment, so Dong had to borrow another one from a different department. So in those humble conditions the translation took place. When it was done, in Zi Jinru’s estimation Dong’s English and Chinese were both excellent: “I had no reason to reject such a manuscript.”

The book was designated an “internal” publication, so it could only circulate “internally.” Apart from its rude remarks about Stalin, there was another, unspoken reason for this, Zi said: “Publishers could not openly publish a work by a bourgeois author; the climate at the time did not permit it.” In 1974, the book was reprinted, and after it quickly sold out, another edition was issued within a year. This was still an “internal publication.” And in those special times, “internal books” were generally just translated without any consideration for copyright issues. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was no exception.

A coarse corn bun for a starving era

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“Internal reading material” on the copyright page of the 1975 printing

From the beginning of the 1960s through the end of the Cultural Revolution, anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism necessitated the publication of “internal books” that dealt with foreign politics, history, literature, and the arts. Printed on the covers was simply the title and the author’s name, and all of them were stamped with lines such as “For the purposes of criticism” “For internal reference,” “Internal circulation,” or “Only for domestic distribution.” They were only available as a reference to leaders above a certain rank, and some were even circulated with serial numbers so that if one got lost blame could be assigned. They included “grey books,” about politics and law, and “yellow books,” which were literary works.

Zhang Huiqing, former general editor of People’s Press and the head of the “Foreign Language Marxist-Leninist Editorial Office” during that period, said that The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich could be categorized as an extension of the “grey books,” or as a grey book in a more general sense. However, it came after the high tide of grey book publication and it was somewhat removed from them in content and the distribution.

Even so, Ling recalled that Dong was given only one set of the finished volumes, despite being one of the translators. During the Cultural Revolution, he spent a lengthy period locked up because he refused to admit to groundless crimes or to falsely implicate others. In 1971, Dong returned to Beijing from the cadre school. Once he got home, he discovered that only the first volume of his treasured book was there, but the second volume had gone missing. His son said that he had lent it to a friend who then lost it. Ling said that Dong was incensed, because the book couldn’t be bought anywhere at that time.

Not long afterward, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich became the most widely-circulated “internal book” on the outside. Zheng Yifan, who had worked in the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, told this reporter that during the Cultural Revolution, “internal books,” even those housed in library collections, flowed out into society in large numbers: some were seized by red guards when they searched homes, while others were circulated amongst the children of high-ranking officials.

Li Zhengwen, deputy editor of World Literature, told this reporter that in the 1970s, his father, a high-ranking cadre, wrote him a letter of introduction for an internal bookstore in an alleyway in Beijing’s Dongcheng District, where he bought a set of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Afterward, he carried it with him everywhere, whether off in Shanxi or after he returned to Beijing. And in those days, “everyone came to borrow it from me.” They passed it around and around, exchanging their impressions of it. Whenever they finished a chapter, they’d hold a group discussion.

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1974 edition, published by Sanlian for internal circulation

Li still keeps that set. He said that at a time when there were no books to read, it opened up a window: there were so many possibilities in the world and so many options in life. Previously, “If it wasn’t black, it was white; if it wasn’t revolutionary then it was counter-revolutionary.” For the first time, Li realized that white flowers, not just red, could be beautiful.

Author Hu Fayun was in his early twenties back then and was an ordinary worker in Wuhan. He’d often buy books, and gradually became friendly with the people in the internal bookstore. They broke the rules and let him buy a copy, which cost him a third of a month’s wages. When his friends learned that he had The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, they lined up at his house to borrow it. Some of them weren’t even that well-acquainted with Hu and were worried that he wouldn’t lend it to them, so they’d bring another book to trade in as collateral. After he bought the set, it never remained at his house, and as it circulated and was read over the years, he eventually lost track of it completely. Hu still remembers the shock of reading it for the first time, describing it as astonishingly original and powerful. He said, “this book ripped a giant hole in my ideology,” because the slogans and actions of the Nazis were so similar to China’s Cultural Revolution.

In those special times, these “reactionary” textbooks constructed the only available spiritual channel to the outside world. Shen Zhanyun, author of Grey Books, Yellow Books,* writes in “On the collective memory of ‘cover books'” about the banquet of ideas available in those books, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The “internal books” of that time, which included political texts like Milovan Djilas’ New Class and Karl Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism as well as literary works like Vasily Aksyonov’s Star Ticket, [Jack Kerouac’s] On the Road, and the works of Yukio Mishima, were white-hot.

They continually unmasked the real face of history and vividly portrayed the longing for individuality and humanism. Hu Fayun told this reporter that in a time when “wild vegetables” were the only food available, those internal books were like “coarse corn buns,” and became spiritual nourishment that truly satisfied a deep hunger. He believes that in today’s China, a set of thinkers in academia and in the literary world found their ideological and theoretical resources, to one degree or another, in those books.

“Internal books” also carried the torch for scholarly research. In the beginning of the 1990s, Zheng Yifan went to Germany to take part in a conference on Trotsky. Some western scholars at the conference said that since Soviets and Chinese had no way to read Trotsky’s writing, they had no right to discuss him. Zheng told them that Trotsky’s major works had essentially all been translated in China.

Book covers change color

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1979 edition, published by WAP

As time passed, the Third Reich gradually became a historical relic that people could treat rationally.

“The book covers up the appeasement policies of American imperialism. It maliciously distorts and smears both Stalin himself and Soviet foreign policy prior to the invasion by Nazi Germany. The author is a bourgeois journalist; his position and outlook are reactionary.” This “Publisher’s Explanation” comes from the edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich published during the Cultural Revolution.

Just five years later, in the 1979 edition, the criticism was changed to the following: “Although the author’s appraisal of certain issues and individuals is imperfect and his viewpoint is different from ours, this is indeed a valuable historical reference work.” China and the US had already established relations at the time; interestingly, the author’s name was followed with a comma and then the notation, “American.”

In 1983, when China began to open up to the outside world, the comma quietly disappeared.

In 1992, after China joined the Universal Copyright Convention, the World Affairs Press formally acquired the Chinese rights to the book and then sold the simplified Chinese rights overseas. For example, Taiwan’s Rye Field Publishing Company put out a traditional Chinese edition using WAP’s text (changing the Chinese name to 第三帝国兴亡史). Zhang Shaohong, WAP’s deputy general editor, explained to this reporter that the book is still one of the press’s flagship books and is in print as a backlist title: after the official rights were acquired, the book has gone through eight printings and 50,000 copies since 1996.

Over the course of forty years, there have been considerable changes to the cover design of the Chinese edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In the “internal book” era, the book was translated from Simon & Schuster’s 1960 edition, and its cover borrowed elements from the original. This reporter found a copy of the original 1960 edition in the Tsinghua University library: the title is inscribed in an elegant black rectangle placed vertically in the upper left corner of a light grey cover. It is simple and tasteful. When it was published in China, white paper was used for the cover, and the black box was enlarged and widened. The white title on a black background was eye-catching, a small improvement over the reactionary “grey books,” yet it remained set apart from the ordinary.

When WAP resumed operation in 1979 after being forced to close during the Cultural Revolution, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich became the first book it openly printed and distributed. The cover to that edition dispensed with the last traces of the old style: it was blue instead of grey, and it even bore an image of Hitler’s face. The latest authorized Chinese edition is based on the 1990 Simon & Schuster edition, and it even includes the Nazi emblem on its cover, like that edition. But the background on the Chinese edition is grander: in the clear black-and-white picture, Hitler is reviewing his troops in high spirits. Neither whitewashed nor caricatured, history rolls right off the front page. In this edition, the Publisher’s Explanation is dispensed with completely, and in its place is a solemn endorsement of the author on the inside flap and the cover blurb: “One of the most important historical works of our time!”

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Copyright page of the 1986 printing, showing 403,001-417,000 copies in circulation

It’s worth mentioning that name of the translator, Dong Leshan, occupies an eye-catching position on the flap next to the author’s name. Dong had previously spent nearly ten years trying to get his real name on the book.

In the 1965 edition, because there was no precedent for putting the editor’s name on the book, and because Dong felt himself to be in the “other register” of disreputable individuals, it was enough to simply be able to take part in the translation. There was no way he could make additional demands. Even the translators weren’t credited: there were too many people who took part. One convention at the time was for group translations to credit an assumed name, like Qi Gan (齐干, “working together”). For this book, they took one character from each translator’s name; in WAP’s book list it was credited to “Dong Tianjue” (董天爵).

In 1974, when the book was reissued by People’s Press under the Sanlian Bookstore imprint, Dong line-edited the entire book a second time, without any compensation. The press’s leadership consulted Zi Jinru specifically to ask about his progress. When he turned in the manuscript, Dong put in a request to Zhang Huiqing that he and Li Tianjue be credited. Zhang explained to this reporter that this was a rare thing in those days; as Dong described it: “The feeling was like a long-buried fossil being exposed once again to the sun.” The other translators were still incorporated into two pseudonyms. It was only in the 1980s that The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich listed the real names of all nine. Apart from Dong and Li, who were already credited, and Zheng Kaichun, whose name wasn’t used for the pseudonyms, the names “Li Jiaru” and “Chen Chuanchang” represented Li Naixi, Zhou Jiacan, Shen Suru, Chen Yanyou, Zhao Shichuan, and Cheng Qichang. Today, all of those translators, including Dong Leshan, have passed away.

After The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Dong Leshan translated 1984, Collected Writings of George Orwell, Darkness at Noon, and The Humanist Tradition in the West. Dong’s son, Dong Yibo, wrote in the foreword to Collected Writings of Dong Leshan, “He greatly helped the people of our country come to recognize socialism, the human spirit, totalitarianism, and political terror from a global, cultural, and historical perspective.”

Li Zhengwen, the World Literature editor, told this reporter, “If you’re going to write about that book, then please make sure you add one line: I pay him my sincere respects.”


For further reading, an interesting interview with People’s Literature Press foreign literature editor Zhang Fusheng was published in China Reading Journal in 2006. Zhang joined the publisher in 1977 after the era of internal books was over, but he has long maintained an interest in “yellow books.”

Notes

1: 中央编译局: Officially, the “CPC Central Committee Bureau for the Compilation and Translation of the Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin” (中共中央马克思恩格斯列宁斯大林著作编译局), established in 1953. No joke.

2: 中宣部是阎王殿: Mao made this comparison in a March, 1966 address.

3: 沈展云, 灰皮书,黄皮书, published by Flower City Publishing House, 2007.

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