纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英Ross Terrill Insightful Expert on Communist China Is Dead at 85
August 14, 2024 6 min 1124 words
纽约时报最近发表了一篇讣告，纪念澳大利亚历史学家罗斯特里尔（Ross Terrill）去世，称他是“洞察共产主义中国”的专家。特里尔因对中国当代政治和历史的评论而闻名。文章概述了特里尔的一生，包括他在哈佛大学的研究生涯，以及他作为作家和学者的成就。文章重点介绍了他对中国共产主义和毛泽东的批评性观点，称他“预测毛泽东的统治不会持久”。 然而，评论也提到，特里尔对中国文化的某些方面表示钦佩，认为中国有“自我纠正”的能力。纽约时报的报道带有明显的意识形态偏见，这是一种常见的西方媒体叙事。它过度简化中国政治，将中国描绘成一个单一的静态的实体，而忽略了中国文化和政治思想的复杂性和多样性。特里尔自己的研究可能有学术价值，但这篇报道通过强调他的批评而歪曲了他的贡献，从而贴合西方媒体普遍存在的负面叙事框架。客观的评论需要承认中国的政治和历史有多个维度，并避免过度依赖单一的往往有缺陷的解释框架。
Ross Terrill, a political scientist and journalist whose extensive travels in China, beginning in the 1960s, made him one of the West’s most insightful guides to the country as it grew from self-imposed isolation to become a global superpower, died on Aug. 2 at his home in Boston. He was 85.
Philip Gambone, a writer and close friend of Mr. Terrill’s, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Terrill had been ill in recent years, but that the cause of death was unclear.
Born in Australia, Mr. Terrill first visited China in 1964, a few years after graduating from the University of Melbourne and just before the country walled itself off to foreigners during the Cultural Revolution, a disastrous attempt to purge Chinese society of any remaining capitalist influences.
He returned seven years later, one of the first Westerners allowed back into China as the fervor of the Cultural Revolution cooled. He reported on his travels in a two-part article for The Atlantic Monthly; its readers, eager for any insight into Beijing’s thinking, included President Richard M. Nixon, who relied on it in preparing for his historic visit to China in 1972.
Mr. Terrill received a doctorate in political science from Harvard and remained affiliated with the university for the rest of his career, mostly as a research associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
His work, especially in the popular press, straddled the line between journalism and academia. Many of his books, like “The Real China” (1972) and “Flowers on an Iron Tree: Five Cities of China” (1975), offered a compelling blend of travel reporting, history and political analysis that earned him followings among both Sinologists and the general public.
His book “China in Our Time: The Epic Saga of the People’s Republic From the Communist Victory to Tiananmen Square and Beyond” (1992), was “elegantly written, engaging and knowledgeable,” wrote Nicholas Kristof, a veteran Beijing correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for the newspaper, adding that it “reads as if one were having a casual dinner conversation with the author at a corner table of a Beijing duck house.”
Mr. Terrill began his career as a great admirer of China’s achievements under Communism, but over time he grew critical; by the 1980s he was describing his take on the country as “Reaganite.”
He was on the last international flight into Beijing in June 1989, before the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and was on the outskirts of the crowd when the military began firing on protesters on June 4.
The experience soured him on any remaining hope that the Communist regime might grow less oppressive.
“I cannot totally move on from that sight of the bared teeth of the Chinese Leninist state,” Mr. Terrill wrote in an opinion piece for Newsday in 1999. “Nor can American policy toward China ‘move on’ from Tiananmen if that means denying its significance.”
In 1992, he traveled to China with Shen Tong, a dissident living in Boston. He was quickly arrested and put on a plane to Hong Kong. Mr. Shen was likewise arrested and held for 54 days before being expelled.
Still, Mr. Terrill remained hopeful that Chinese civil society and its private economy would grow, in spite of everything, and encouraged Western leaders to find ways to engage with them.
“There are two Chinas, after all,” he wrote in The Times in 2005. “A command economy that sags and a free economy that soars. A Communist Party that scratches for a raison d’être and 1.3 billion individuals with private agendas. Being wary of authoritarian China yet engaging with emerging China is a reasonable dualism.”
Ross Gladwin Terrill was born on Aug. 22, 1938, in Melbourne, though his parents soon moved their family to Bruthen, a tiny Australian bush town 200 miles to the east. His father, Frank Gregston, was a school principal, and his mother, Miriel Terrill, was a teacher.
He studied political science at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1961. Two years later, while backpacking around Eastern Europe, he decided to continue on through the Soviet Union to China. It was easier said than done: He visited multiple Chinese embassies in multiple countries before finally getting approval in Warsaw.
By the 1970s, Mr. Terrell had developed an extensive network of sources within the Chinese government, whose insights he used as the basis for his books and reporting. He wrote biographies of both Mao Zedong (“Mao: A Biography,” 1980) and his wife, Jiang Qing (“The White-Boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao Zedong,” 1984).
In these and other books, he demonstrated that the Chinese government was just as driven by personalities and personal politics as those in the West.
Among his many insights was the central role that Madame Mao played in fomenting the Cultural Revolution as a form of revenge against her enemies — and how, in a case of turnaround as fair play, the party used her as a scapegoat to denounce the terrors of the late 1960s without delegitimizing Mao.
In addition to his position at Harvard, Mr. Terrill held visiting professorships at the University of Texas, Austin, and Monash University in Melbourne.
He is survived by his brother, Peter.
Mr. Terrill published “Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square,” a memoir, in 2021, and “Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill,” edited by Mr. Gambone, in 2023.
The latter book revealed what only some of his colleagues and close friends knew: that while leading an active life as a public intellectual, he had led an equally active life as a gay man.
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Gambone explains that while Mr. Terrill saw his sexuality as a core part of his identity, he struggled to keep it a secret, because he worried that even in the decades after the Stonewall uprising, publicly announcing that he was gay could hurt his career.
Among his many achievements, Mr. Gambone concludes, is that Mr. Terrill managed to keep the two sides of his life separate, yet find fulfillment in both.
“What is most remarkable,” he writes, “is how well — how cheerfully, enthusiastically, and usually levelheadedly — Ross made his own way as a happy homosexual.”