The Chinese way
The Chinese way China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Oxford University Press, RRP$16.95, 192 pages China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom, by Richard Baum, University of Washington Press, RRP$29.95, 336 pages Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China, by Martin King Whyte, Stanford University Press, RRP$27.95, 264 pages The China Strategy: Harnessing the power of the world's fastest-growing economy, by Edward Tse, Basic Books RRP$26.95, 256 pages Books about China are coming off the printing presses faster than Guangdong factories can churn out iPads. If the world was mesmerised by China's rise before the global financial crisis, then that fascination is all the more intense following the dislocations that have cascaded across the western world. The feeling – premature as it might be – that the US is now in possibly terminal decline has focused attention all the more on its only serious challenger for superpower status. Polls show that many Americans already think, erroneously, that the size of China's economy has surpassed that of their own. Many wonder how the world will accommodate a resurgent China confident in its ability to regain what it sees as its ordained place in the global hierarchy. When Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, first took a class on Chinese history in the late 1970s, it was not considered an essential topic of study. “Getting a clearer sense of the past and present of the world's most popular nation seemed purely optional,” he writes. China was then a communist society only just emerging from the fog and chaos of its Cultural Revolution. It retained the air of an exotic land of half-forgotten glories – ancient writing, faded dynasties and the invention of gunpowder. But China can no longer be treated as exotica. It is now a country with more millionaires, more mega-cities, more internet users, more skyscrapers and a higher emission of greenhouse gases than any country on earth. In short, China has forced itself into our consciousness. It has become incumbent on us, if we presume to know anything about the world, to try to understand it. The author says the goal of his book is to “help normalise discussions of China”. It is a worthy aim and one to which all four of the books reviewed here aspire in their diverse ways. If Wasserstrom's is a “China made simple”, the other books might be categorised as a memoir, a piece of academic research and a business book. But all four share an ambition to write about China as it is, and to avoid the clichés (inscrutable) or false dichotomies (threat or opportunity) that have dogged much literature on the subject. Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a 30-year veteran of China studies, seeks in 135 brisk pages to chart the flow of Chinese history and to explain its present. Remarkably, given the brevity of the undertaking, he makes a decent stab at it. The book, which takes a question-and-answer format, has a clipped, slightly didactic style. The clear implication is that these are things that any educated person ought to know. For example, the Taiping uprising (1848-64), an insurrection that cost more lives than the contemporaneous American civil war, is described as “probably the most important 19th-century event whose name is not a household word in the west”.
The latter half of the book gives way to a discussion of contemporary China, particularly what Wasserstrom regards as common US misperceptions. It contains interesting, slightly quirky, diversions that turn out to be the most stimulating parts of the book. In one section, for example, he argues that it is more helpful to think of China in terms of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than George Orwell's 1984. “Orwell emphasises the role of fear in keeping people in line, while Huxley pays more attention to how needs and desires are created, manipulated and satisfied.” Higher living standards, mass consumerism and an explosion in public access to media (so long as it does not cross certain political lines) are more reminiscent of the former novel than the latter, he says. Richard Baum's China Watcher is an intellectual romp through one distinguished American scholar's half-century engagement with that country. His book reminds us just how unknown China was in the first decades |
The Chinese way