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(The Week in Review)
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service
    CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In the past two weeks, Americans followed with
dismay the latest chapter in the plight of Andrei D. Sakharov and his
wife, Yelena G. Bonner, the Russian dissidents who were conducting a
hunger strike to protest Soviet authorities' refusal to allow their
daughter-in-law to emigrate. In this country, persecution of Soviet
dissidents frequently becomes front-page news. The Gulag Archipelago,
the Soviet system of forced labor camps, has become synonymous with
the moral horrors of totalitarianism. Dissidents such as the
Sakharovs, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, or Anatoly Shcharansky become
practically household names and American groups often agitate on
their behalf, sometimes with successful results.
    There has been no similar reaction to the widespread political
persecution of intellectuals in China. Probably no more than a
handful of Americans know the name of Lao She, one of China's most
popular writers, who was drowned in the late 1960's by Red Guards in
a Peking lake. There have been no outcries about recent attacks in
the Chinese press on a prominent writer, Bai Hua, who wrote a
screenplay that questions how successful the communists have been.
Bai Hua has been forced to make a self-criticism and his fate is
unclear.
    Have Americans had a double standard when it comes to the Soviet
Union's and China's treatment of dissidents? Merle Goldman, a
professor of history at Boston University and author of a new book,
''China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent,'' believes the answer is
a culpable yes. Other China specialists argue that Americans'
different attitudes toward Moscow and Peking are based on slowness in
understanding China or on the Chinese communists' less brutal methods
of control.
    John K. Fairbank, professor emeritus of Chinese history at Harvard,
does not believe there is a double standard because ''there are real
differences in style between the Russians and the Chinese, even if
the Chinese still have their security police and labor camps.'' The
Chinese have made a ''public confession'' about the atrocities of the
Cultural Revolution, he said, and have made a greater effort to
correct past abuses than the Soviet Union.
    Last week, in what is by now an almost routine ritual, the Chinese
demonstrated their capacity to confess the sins of the past again. In
an article published in the party journal Red Flag, Hu Qiaomu,
president of the Academy of Social Sciences, said that Mao Zedong,
whose views were once held infallible, ''lacked a full understanding
of, and proper confidence in, contemporary writers, artists, and
intellectuals in general,'' and that ''by availing themselves of this
mistake, the counterrevolutionary clique of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing
carried out ruthless persecution of intellectuals.''
    It's difficult to interpret the immediate meaning of Hu's statement.
What is becoming evident is that China's record has been, in this
respect, worse than most Americans knew or wanted to admit. In an
article in the current issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, Mrs. Goldman
charges that ''like those who knew about the Holocaust, my colleagues
and I in the China field did not speak out loudly and publicly about
the persecution of intellectuals'' in the anti-rightist campaign of
1957 and the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960's. ''A whole
generation of westernized intellectuals were decimated,'' she
observes, as were ''universities, research institutes, journals,
libraries and other creative enterprises.''
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NYT CAMBRIDGE, Mass: creative enterprises.''
    There are no overall government figures on the number of Chinese
intellectuals persecuted since the communist triumph in1949, but
there are some indications. A knowledgeable Chinese editor told Mrs.
Goldman, who is also an associate of the Center for East Asian
Research at Harvard, that between 400,000 and 700,000 intellectuals
were arrested, imprisoned or sent to work in the countryside during
the anti-rightist movement alone in 1957-58. The Cultural Revolution
of 1966-1976 engulfed an even larger number of people, including
party officials, army officers and factory managers as well as
intellectuals. The People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper,
once reported that 100 million people were affected by the Cultural
Revolution. In a speech in 1979, Deng Xiaoping, China's leader,
disclosed that 2.9 million people purged or imprisoned during the
Cultural Revolution had since been rehabilitated.
    By comparison, in the Soviet Union today there are perhaps10,000 or
at most several tens of thousands of political prisoners being held
in the Gulag Archipelago, aside from ordinary criminals. That is the
estimate of Joshua Rubinstein, the New England coordinator for
Amnesty International and author of ''Soviet Dissidents, The Struggle
for Human Rights,'' published last year.
    Mrs. Goldman offers several reasons for Americans' greater severity
toward the Soviet Union. For one thing, she noted, it is frequently
said that ''those who study the Soviet Union hate it, while those who
study China love it.'' ''We scholars of China are enamored of its
history, culture and people,'' she said. ''We didn't want to believe
that a country that had developed such a high level of civilization
could be so cruel to its intellectuals.''
    In addition, Mrs. Goldman contends, many Americans wanted to believe
that Mao and the communists ''really had the answer to China's
problems after so many years of chaos, famine and weakness.'' In
particular, some Americans on the far left, dissillusioned by the
Vietnam War and Watergate, looked on Mao's calls for revolution and
egalitarianism as a model for the U.S., she said.
    For those wanting to study in China itself, there may have been
practical considerations as well. As the U.S. moved toward
normalization of relations with Peking in 1979 and as it appeared
possible that China scholars would be able to see the country ''from
which they had been barred since 1949,'' Mrs. Goldman noted, ''most
did not want to jeopardize their chance to get a visa.''
    Michel C. Oksenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan and a
member of the National Security Council under President Carter, says
he is troubled that Americans may have a double standard toward
Moscow and Peking but he believes it is really a matter of American
lateness in comprehending China. The U.S. did not have diplomats,
journalists, or scholars in China during the Cultural Revolution, he
pointed out, and it is only recently, after the normalization of
relations, ''that we are getting a fine-grained feel of China.'' In
historical terms, Oksenberg added, the Cultural Revolution was more
like Stalin's vast purges in the 1930's when Americans who did not
understand the Soviet Union well were not as vociferous as they are
now about human rights in Russia.
    
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