Awhile back, on a long train ride somewhere, I was flipping through an English language edition of Mao’s Quotations (“The Little Red Book”). These souvenirs are sold throughout China in different languages and, although I’d bought copies before as fun little gifts to bring back home, I’d never bothered to read any of them for the sustained length of time that a train ride provides.

For most of my time in China, I have been mentally compiling a growing list of negative observations, not the least of which is what I perceive to be a lack of accountability present through its society: Get caught cheating on an exam? But it’s a misunderstanding. Painters spackle the table and floor because they couldn’t be bothered to use the drop cloth crumpled in the corner? But your ceiling and walls are painted. Poisoning food, water, and air? But China is a developing country. At its best, experiencing this is frustrating; but to register no reaction at all would be to give in to a minor form of apathy all too easily expanded to the major kind.

As I read the book’s opening pages, I couldn’t help but notice that, almost immediately, the concept of “self-criticism” as an important aspect of Marxism-Leninism came up (Chapter 27 is, in fact, devoted to this general topic). I’ve heard stories, although not so much about teenaged Red Guards flipping everything on its collective head, dunce cap clad unfortunates publicly denounced, et cetera. Rather, what little I’ve heard is less spectacularly destructive but still damaging: families paying daily homage to Mao’s picture and reciting passages from his Quotations. Some possibly did so because they bought into it, some because they were told to, and some because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Just the same, as I read out of boredom what these people had read for very different reasons, I began to think.

I do not consider the Chinese to be a stupid people. I do consider the Chinese to be a pragmatic one. How many true believers would there have been (legitimate or brainwashed doesn’t matter) paying homage and reciting? And how many would have been just paying a literal and mindless lip service? From my own limited experience and observation here, I’m of the opinion that that particular see-saw would have come crashing down pretty fast on the side of the latter if it ever got off the ground at all. And I wondered at how much resentfulness this would have caused.

For every negative conclusion that I draw about China, I try to maintain some sort of hope that something will turn up to disprove my opinion but, as time has gone on, I have begun to entertain the idea that I myself may be paying a sort of lip service to this wish. Yet, reading Mao’s book that night, I was encouraged to have possibly been hit with at least one refutation in the form of an entire generation indoctrinated with enough self-criticism to last a lifetime, then finally cut loose from its forced accountability. And that generation, liberated from this particular type of dogma, then having brought forth its own children – who learned from their parents a reflexive insincerity and a permanent resentfulness against being blamed for anything – sent them to continue on in the established path. Should I judge these people so harshly? I don’t know. What I do know is that, reading “The Little Red Book” on the train that night, I saw a glimmer – justified or not – of where their lack of accountability may have come from. And despite all of the negativity that helped to bring this out, I felt then a tenuous and fleeting empathy with them.