China is fast becoming the new economic engine of the world. They are revving up now, as  we did about 120 years ago, during our time of "manifest destiny" and railroad-enabled continental expansion. The 21st century will be the era of Chinese expansion and swelling GDP.

But China's impulse to economic power has not always been so well-focused; their long plodding  path to world leadership was  punctuated by a few false starts. Two of the most notable of their newfound prosperity's costly pangs were the "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s, and the "Cultural Revolution" of the late 1960s.

These events took place on the other side of the world from where I grew up here in the USA. I had no significant knowledge or understanding of them, being caught up as I was in the bourgeois pop-culture comfort of American childhood and teen angst.

But I have learned something about what was happening in China during those perpetually revolutionary times. Earlier this year, I read a book about it: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. She was a woman born in 1952, the year after me.  This summer I visited Sichuan province, where Ms. Chang grew up and played her part in the tumultuous "Cultural Revolution" as a teenager while I was an American kid.

Her father, Wang Yu, had been the governor of Sichuan province in the early 1950s. He had served the people of China in that capacity as a dedicated, competent communist party official. Ms. Chang writes in chapter 23 of Wild Swans:

"It was then (the early '50s) that the Communists were at their most popular--just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order..."

 But fifteen or so year later her father was denounced and humiliated as a "capitalist roader," someone  whose personal accomplishments and political identity did not fulfill the shifting requirements of chairman Mao's fickle finger of favor.

Why was he denounced after many years as a loyal agent of the party?

Among the many political mechanisms of Maoist control during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s was the regular practice of gathering peasants to denounce former leaders whom the party had determined were counterrevolutionary. In the commune at Deyang, Sichuan, where she lived and worked in 1969, Ms. Chang recounts one such public humiliation that she had witnessed.

"A 'speak bitterness' session was organized for the peasants to describe how they had suffered under the Kuomintang, and to generate gratitude to Mao, particularly among the younger generation." (Wild Swans, Anchor edition, 1992, page 417)

Local party organizers conducted a meeting in which they criticized former officials whose alleged malfeasance and incompetence  had caused a terrible famine years earlier. On this particular occasion, they singled out one cringing forty-year old man--now  working among them as a forced laborer--to be insulted. He had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap program of industrial development about ten years earlier.

But this man had been appointed by the communist party; he was not a Kuomintang leader. The zealous peasants were confused and misled. They pointed to him and proclaimed their accusation: "... that man ordered the (other working) men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields." He had been one of the dedicated cadres who supervised gathering up woks and other metal resources to be re-smelted into industrial goods, thus supplanting essential agricultural works with misguided industrial programs.  

What a dear price was paid for those force-engineered steel products extracted from Chinese productivity during  the Great Leap Forward--famine in the countryside. The same thing had happened 35 years prior in Stalinist Russia.

Such were the meddlesome policies of party-mandated, best-laid plans of proletarian mice and men--and  their vindictive aftermaths during the unpredictable political swings of the Cultural Revolution. This unfortunate official had been guilty of towing the party line, having told his charges that they were "in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food." But now, a decade and a famine later, he was being officially blamed and maligned, just as the author's governing father had been.

Ms. Chang later sought out the humiliated production manager  and asked for his story. He said: "I had to carry out orders... Of course, I didn't want to lose my post."

Just  following orders. Where have we heard that before?

This fickle dynamic of human inconstancy is something to ponder now that the world's cultural revolutionaries of forty years ago are now its financiers.

Be careful, Mr. Hu. Don't let your country suffer the fate of Governor Yu.

"

Mt. Ebal stood warm, dry, and high in the morning sun. The red, gold hues of its boulderous ridges projected starkly into whisper-blue sky. On a soil-laden saddle nestled within the lower, rocky welts a man was digging.

Yesterday, the man had tilled the sandy soil and thrown in manure, which he had gathered from the sheep field. Today, he was hoeing trenches in the dirt.

Setting the hoe aside against a nearby shrub, Yahya Najah lifted his arm, moved the forearm across his sweaty brow, thanking God for another beautiful day. In order to give a moment's respite to his aching back, Yahya stood up straight, looked southward across the valley to Mt. Gerizim. He drew a deep breath, and drank water from a plastic bottle.

 He had lived here since he was a child. Today, he was extending the stewardship of this land that his father had acquired and developed for olive-growing over thirty years ago. Yahya's father, Hassan, moved to this valley in the late '60s after the old Mughrabi quarter, just below the Western Wall in Jerusalem, had been demolished. His family had been planting, cultivating, and harvesting olive trees since his father's arrival here.

He reached into a burlap bag, pulled out several short lengths of olive branch that had been cut the day before, tossed them into the trench he had just dug. Then he grabbed the hoe and covered them with dirt. He moved to the next section of trench and repeated the procedure. Several times he performed the task, until his burlap bag was empty. Having placed this collection of propagation-stock in the dry ground of Mt. Ebal, Yahya watered the new rows with a water sprayer. When the tank was empty, he picked up and strapped the tank on his back, picked up the empty bag, grabbed the hoe, and walked down a rocky path to the garden patch. He would be going into Nablus today to sell vegetables at the market.

After harvesting a truck-full of vegetables, Yahya and his brother, Kader, drove the fifteen miles into Nablus, backed the truck into the usual stall and unloaded their produce for sale.

They spent the rest of that day selling vegetables. In the evening, after most of the produce had been sold, Yahya left Kader to finish their day's enterprise while he took a stroll up the street to get some supper for them. Satisfied to have gathered the increase of their labors, Yahya enjoyed the evening sun as it bathed the busy West Bank cityscape with golden light. As he ambled along, he noticed an American news reporter speaking into a microphone. While passing the scene, and curiously surveying the camera as it turned silently upon a cameraman's shoulder, the farmer's face was projected to television sets around the world. But he wasn't thinking of that; he was looking for a good falafel.

The American spoke into his microphone.

***

Half a world away, Rachel Vinnier saw, for a couple of seconds, the face of a handsome middle eastern man on the TV in the corner of the restaurant.. She had glanced up at the TV while inspecting a case of French wine that had just been delivered to the Jesse James Gang Grille. As she watched, the cameraman in Nablus panned the busy streetscape, and ended his movement with a focus on John Demos' serious face.

"