The first thing to say about this hard-hitting book is that the title is deceptive. This is not, as one might think, a psychological investigation of the Chinese character, always supposing such a thing exists. Nor is it an assessment of the fruits of ancient Chinese civilization, or an evocation of life in China, Taiwan, Singapore, the extensive Chinese communities of southeast Asia, and Chinatowns worldwide.
Instead, it is a wide-ranging analysis -- social, political and economic -- of life in the contemporary PRC.
Becker is bureau chief in Beijing for the South China Morning Post newspaper, and this book appears to be partly a round-up of his reports from China over the years. A significant percentage of the footnotes refer to the author's own earlier articles. This is combined with other diligently researched material, and it's all held together with more general reflections.
This approach does not in any way detract from the book's tough and uncompromising nature. "I have lost count of the number of times that I have, even as a foreign journalist, been detained or had my documents seized and not returned unless I signed a `confession' admitting my mistakes," Becker writes. He gives this as an example of how arbitrary police detention can be in China. But there may be a more somber aspect to his mentioning of this practice.
He's clearly being watched, and one can't help feeling that, once this book's contents have made their way through Beijing's corridors of power, Becker's time in the country may turn out to be short.
The overall tone is one of censure. He calls Jiang Zemin the "new Emperor" (though he also credits him with once reciting the entire Gettysburg Address from memory to a crowd of heckling students). He insists that "almost everything the state says is untrue." He calls the one-child policy a disaster, something brought in on impulse and with meager scientific forethought.
He insists higher officials are routinely duped by their own subordinates into believing that conditions in China's regions are better than they are. And his roll-call of the high positions held by the children of the country's leadership amounts to a wholesale indictment.
There is praise of a kind as well, however. He points out how Beijing, which had only one major department store in the early 1980s, now has 80 (and Shanghai 70). And he relates how, on the night Deng Xiaoping died, he went to see his house, and found it modest and unostentatious.
"Though he was a dictator," he writes, "it was easy to believe that Deng genuinely hated the grotesque and vainglorious personality cult that Mao had fostered." The sentence encapsulates Becker's entire approach -- outspoken condemnation qualified by an objective reporter's look at the situation as it really is.
There are some brief historical sections. He cites, for instance, the tradition of the Qin dynasty Legalists as lying behind what he perceives as a Chinese tendency to worship the strong man in preference to the compassionate and fair-minded one. But most of the book is concerned with China's current situation.
The book is written to a formula. Each chapter begins with a few paragraphs recalling some memorable incident, or describing an actual scene. This is followed by extensive material on the area in question -- the PLA, the Party, agriculture, the police -- and the chapter is then wound up with some general conclusions.
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