Ross Terrill, Chronicler of China from Mao onward, Dies at 85

The Washington Post

13:55 JST, August 16, 2024

Ross Terrill, an influential scholar and chronicler of Chinese affairs whose travels gave Western readers a rare window into the country in the 1960s and who then spent decades analyzing China’s rise as an economic power and its political crackdowns as a one-party state, died on Aug. 2 at his home in Boston. He was 85.

The death was confirmed by Philip Gambone, a writer and collaborator. Dr. Terrill had been in declining health for several years, but the cause of death was not immediately clear.

As China gradually opened to the West after the widespread repression and isolation of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Dr. Terrill was seen as an insightful interpreter of momentous events such as President Richard M. Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China in 1972.

Dr. Terrill also recognized the importance of the ordinary. He sought out farmers, shopkeepers and laborers to build portraits of China’s successes and failures as the monolithic Communist Party tried to juggle the complexities of a modern state.

“People are always the story,” said Dr. Terrill, whose career included more than a dozen books, scores of articles and decades of academic research at Harvard University and institutions in his native Australia.

His conclusions often veered from Western alarmism at China’s expanding power. He portrayed China as a dynamo with some wobbly cogs – including demands for more political freedoms from the growing middle class and the risks of internal tensions from Beijing’s iron-fist controls that include detention camps for Uyghurs in Muslim-dominated western regions.

“China also lacks a magnetic message for the world that could replace the American brew of democracy, free markets, pop culture, a near universal language, and innovation,” Dr. Terrill wrote in a 2010 essay for the Wilson Quarterly, an international affairs journal. “Beijing’s model of authoritarian-led prosperity may prove useful for minor Third World countries, but Chinese nationalism is empty of answers for most of the non-Chinese world.”

Dr. Terrill first visited China in 1964 as a young backpacker. He had managed to persuade a Chinese consular official in Warsaw into issuing a visa at a time when China was mostly closed to Westerners.

“I boldly asked to see the ambassador to debate whether or not it was a good thing for the world to understand China,” Dr. Terrill recalled. “A senior diplomat emerged from an inner room, smiling slightly. Two cups of tea appeared before us; I made my case.”

He said his zeal to visit China went beyond wanderlust. His grandfather had taught English to Chinese merchants in Melbourne. At the University of Melbourne, Ross Terrill joined groups speaking out against racism. “To be anti-Chinese was as Australian as the eucalyptus tree,” he said of the 1950s.

A newspaper published one of his letters denouncing racial prejudice. A few days later, graffiti was on the street outside the family home in capital letters: “Traitor.”

During his 1964 trip to China, he filled notebooks with his observations. They were turned into a series of stories for the Australian newspaper. In the last installment, he added a prescient take on China’s aspirations. “Long before the present barren era of clashing ideologies and wrenching divisions, China was the greatest power on earth,” he wrote, “so in the future she may become so again.”

After the fervor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution began to wane in the early 1970s, Dr. Terrill returned to China in 1971 as an adviser to Australian Labour Party leader (and future prime minister) Gough Whitlam. Shortly after they finished talks with Premier Zhou Enlai, Chinese attention shifted to a far bigger VIP: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on a secret trip to lay the foundations for Nixon’s 1972 visit.

Back in Australia, Dr. Terrill wrote two long stories for the Atlantic magazine on China. His reporting was included in the White House pre-summit reading list for Nixon. The articles also became part of Dr. Terrill’s debut book on China using the country’s population at the time as a reference point for its potential: “800,000,000: The Real China” (1972).

His later explored Mao’s life and legacy in “Mao: A Biography,” (1980) and the rise and fall of his wife, Jiang Qing, in “Madam Mao: The White-Boned Demon” (1984). Dr. Terrill traced how she and others in the “Gang of Four” were vilified by the Community Party for the abuses of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was officially insulated from responsibility.

Yet Dr. Terrill faced criticism early in his career that he was inclined to see positive aspects of Maoism even as Mao’s obsession with purging foreign influences destroyed millions of lives. Some reviewers took strong issue with characterizations by Dr. Terrill such as his suggestion that Mao’s policies had “in a magnificent way, healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man.” Dr. Terrill later took a far harsher view of Mao and his rule.

“In recent years Terrill has made more sense on China,” wrote political affairs columnist Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1997. “But he refuses to concede that he was once a serial whateverist.”

Dr. Terrill’s outlook China hardened further in June 1989. He was on the last international flight into Beijing amid the throngs of reform-seeking demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Soon, the military violently razed the peaceful encampment, claiming hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives.

“‘Tell the world our government has gone mad,’ a woman cried to me, tears running down her face, as she collapsed at my feet,” Dr. Terrill wrote in a 1999 essay on the 10th anniversary of the bloodshed. “I cannot totally move on from that sight of the bared teeth of the Chinese Leninist state.”

“Nor can American policy toward China ‘move on’ from Tiananmen if that means denying its significance,” he continued. “On June 4, 1989, a hard-line state triumphed over an emerging new society.”

He found himself caught in China’s hyper-surveillance after Tiananmen. In 1992, he sought out a friend, Shen Tong, a Tiananmen student leader who had recently returned after three years in self-exile in Boston. Dr. Terrill was quickly detained and deported to Hong Kong, still a British colony at the time. Shen was held for nearly two months before being expelled.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing – often described as a fanfare to modern China – Dr. Terrill said there were really two countries on display.

“China today is a sharp contradiction between the new economy and an old political system,” he wrote. “Loosened, booming commercial life cohabits with rigid, authoritarian political life.”

Moved to U.S.

Ross Gladwin Terrill was born in Melbourne on Aug. 22, 1938, and raised in Bruthen, a village about 200 miles to the east. His father was a school principal, and his mother was a grade-school teacher.

After fulfilling obligatory military service, he graduated in 1961 from the University of Melbourne with a degree in political science.

Two years later, he set off on travels that led him to China. “Communist China was forbidden fruit in those years. … For someone from rural Australia, China was about as different as you could get,” he recalled.

He received a doctorate in political science from Harvard University in 1970 and forged career-long research and teaching affiliations with institutions including Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research (now the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies) and Monash University in Melbourne.

Among his other books are “Flowers on an Iron Tree: Five Cities of China” (1975); a post-Tiananmen analysis, “China in Our Time” (1992); and a 2020 memoir, “Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square.” In 2023, he published “Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill,” a book edited by Gambone that reveals how Dr. Terrill kept his homosexuality a secret from most colleagues out of fear that his career would suffer.

Survivors include a brother.

To show the paradoxes of China’s Communist system, Dr. Terrill used a joke that once made the rounds in Beijing.

Two women go to court over some dispute. One presents her case, and the judge says, “You’re right.” The other woman makes her counterclaims, and the judge also agrees.

“Those who say China has moved away from communism and those who say China still has a communist regime are both right,” he wrote. “Marxist economics has gone. Leninist politics remains.”