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.
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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