After my review of Feather in the Storm last March [Taipei Times, 25 March, 2007] a friend in America wrote to me saying he disapproved of what I'd written "both critically and morally." I had no idea what he meant. As he presumably hadn't read the book, how could he disapprove critically? And as for "morally," I'd merely argued against any more books about what everyone now agrees were the evils perpetrated by the Red Guards. Did he want such books to be produced until the crack of doom? But my friend is a lover of five-star hotels who also claims to be a Marxist (not as an unusual a combination as you might think) so I didn't take his comments too much to heart. Anyway, here is a welcome new book on, yes, China today. It's full of interest, if nowhere earth-shattering.
Duncan Hewitt first lived in China in 1982 while a student of Chinese at Edinburgh University. He's been there much of the intervening time, recently as a correspondent for the BBC World Service. He now lives in Shanghai, his wife's hometown. All in all he's seen some changes, as he not infrequently tells us in Getting Rich First, his survey of life in today's PRC.
The book takes its title from Deng Xiaoping's (鄧小平) slogan, "Let some of the people get rich first," and it attempts to cover everything from the rebuilding of the cities to break dancing, migrant workers to transsexuals, and IKEA to Cosplay (these last two are given extensive coverage). Politics takes a back seat, and instead Hewitt splices together interview material with facts and figures derived from articles and books. The tone is everywhere reader-friendly and accessible, and in fact Getting Rich First has been serialized on the UK's middle-brow radio station, BBC Radio 4.
Hewitt's strength is that he covers a lot of ground. His weakness is that he avoids any real judgments, characteristically informing us that time will tell, that there are many people who would argue this, that or the other, and giving the impression that in "an increasingly diverse society" you can find more or less anything you choose to look for.
Typical is his chapter on the press, entitled "The Half-open Media." Investigative journalists tend to give their stories a "semi-fictionalized" treatment, he writes. The Internet has encouraged some freedom, but there were an estimated 60 people jailed for Internet-related offences in 2005. He informs us of instances where the press has managed to become more open, while at the same time stressing that the Communist Party has no intention of relaxing its control any time soon. There is little doubt of the truth of all this. What becomes slightly wearying is that it's representative of a balancing act that pervades the entire text. Maybe Hewitt learnt the technique from his time with the BBC.
The chapter on rural life is typical of the author's eager pursuit of the middle ground. The Chinese countryside is "nothing if not beautiful - and nothing if not beset with problems." Cliches don't help either. People who try new approaches, and fail, do so "not for lack of trying," while such and such a situation is "far from unusual."
"There is no doubt that the government is now paying closer attention to the problems," Hewitt writes, while going on to detail difficulties that remain. It's all part of a style necessitated by having to link one section to another, cover almost everything, while at the same time avoid being too controversial. It's an aspect of being a journalist trying to write a book about a quarter of the earth's inhabitants while not, presumably, being an expert in anything yourself, that you have to include phrases like "many experts say," and part of the need to endlessly strike balances to claim that while such and such has changed, "for many it may be too late."
The result is that while the book presents no obstacles to late-night reading, it somehow doesn't attach itself to the memory very readily. You see, I am getting into Hewitt's infectious balancing-act habit myself. (It was Samuel Johnson who in the 18th century perfected the "pointed" - ie. balanced - sentence, but at least his sentences were highly memorable).
But enough of this. There is much of serious interest in this book. The success among the young in China a few years back of Taiwan's TV drama series Meteor Garden, featuring four upper-class, "floppy-haired" university students, is vividly described, as is much of China's new youth culture, and the problems it raises for older generations. Hewitt also comments on how the success of TV shows made in Taipei has made Taiwan's "softer, southern-style" Mandarin pronunciation popular with China's TV and radio presenters. South Korean programs, films and popular songs have also been successful there (as they have here), we're informed.
Hewitt, with the instincts of a good journalist, makes a lot of his best contacts. The outspoken feminist and academic Ai Xiaoming (艾曉明), of Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University, is quoted on many aspects of what the book, no doubt ironically, calls "the great proletarian sexual revolution," as is Jin Xing (金星) - "one of the country's leading contemporary choreographers and dancers, and also China's first open transsexual." Jin is quoted as saying, "Some young people ... actually call me China's Statue of Liberty because ... . I did something completely against the mentality of traditional society."
This book deserves praise above all for its range. It doesn't contain any startling new claims or invigorating imaginative insights, but it does manage to deal with a lot. It's consequently a pity it doesn't have an index - journalists and others will find it useful, I suspect, primarily as a work of reference. But at least it deals with China today, and isn't yet another book on the ills of the Cultural Revolution.
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