Much of the material will be familiar. Many people know that China executes more of its citizens in a year than all the other countries in the world put together, though the exact totals are not officially made public. But a book that aims to be comprehensive, as this one does, can hardly fail to include such facts, and indeed should not fail to mention them.
Cruelty, corruption, ecological near-disaster, nepotism, the power of the military ("a state within the state"), the absence of real education or health care in much of the country, the disparity between the cities and the vast rural areas -- these together make up the heart of Becker's picture.
Seeing that the author is a reporter based in Beijing, it's understandable that Taiwan is not a focus of the book.
This book makes fascinating reading. It's fluent, mercifully free of charts and elaborate statistical analyses, yet seasoned with astute asides and often amusing anecdotes. It has, in other words, all the virtues of a good newspaper article, extended to book length.
Becker comes out of it all in a very strong position. The condemnation of the regime, both explicit and implicit, is unrelenting, yet this is backed up with personal experience that is in evidence on every page.
But his standpoint invariably appears good-natured and reasonable. He may be fearless in his outspoken reporting, but he is no naive believer in the virtues of blanket Westernization, and a McDonald's on every street corner.
In other words, though this book uses printed sources (as every such overview must), this information is backed up by personal experience of life in China on very many fronts. Arbitrary arrest, for example, is illustrated by both the reports of organizations such as Asiawatch and campaigning individuals such as the indefatigable Harry Wu, and the experience of Becker's language teacher, whose son was held for a week after colliding with another cyclist on a university campus.
The author concludes that China's ecological degradation is the most serious of its woes. Ecology, as he rightly sees, is not a peripheral matter appropriately relegated to some minor government department for symptomatic treatment. Rather, it is the foundation on which all life depends. When China's current social injustices are ancient history, the ecological damage it has bequeathed to unborn generations will still be debasing and impoverishing the lives of its people.
This, then, is an excellent book, both authoritative and eminently readable. It's never dull, and it never pulls its punches.For your information
The Chinese
By Jasper Becker
464 pages
John Murray
Available at FNAC
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