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SECTION: CDT Bookshelf

• CDT Bookshelf: The City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China

  

  Taipei Times gives a review of Jasper Becker’s new book,The City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China.

  You might think that City of Heavenly Tranquility, with its subtitle “Beijing in the History of China,” was a serene survey of one of the world’s great cities, looking at its history from its foundation to its contemporary, post-Olympics face. And you’d be right. These things are there, with the story excellently told into the bargain. But there’s also another theme, for which even the full title doesn’t prepare you. At its heart, this book is an appalled lament for one of the greatest acts of historical vandalism of modern times — the destruction, within the last 10 years, of a gorgeous, resplendent, ancient city and its replacement by a hurriedly erected modern megalopolis that could, architecturally speaking, be just about anywhere on Earth.

  [...] “In some ways,” Becker writes, “the destruction of old Beijing and the eviction of its residents can be considered a collective punishment visited on a population that had dared to rebel.” He cites Bertold Brecht writing after the 1953 uprising in East Berlin — the people had failed the government, and so it was necessary for the government to relocate them and replace them with more amenable subjects

  [...] This is an exceedingly engaging book, with far more detail than it’s possible to indicate here. The past and the present leap out with equal vividness because Becker combines library research with a good deal of oral history — seeking out individuals who remember things and writing down what they tell him. He finds, for instance, the wife of the famous architectural historian Liang Sicheng (梁思成) who, at Qinghua University, was severely persecuted by Red Guards. She shows him where the guard factions fought and where Jiang Qing (江青) addressed the crowds.

  The Economist also gives a review from another angle.

  Mr Becker, a British journalist, offers something much richer than a work of reportage. “City of Heavenly Tranquility” has two particular strengths. One is his reweaving of the threads of Beijing’s past to recreate the city of street markets, temple fairs and the “little games” that so delighted Beijingers: for instance, their passion for keeping fighting crickets, fed with honey, and for inserting tiny carved flutes of bamboo into the tail-feathers of pigeons; whole flocks created aerial music over this reviewer’s courtyard house just a decade ago. In search of such richness, Mr Becker writes with sympathy and humour of meetings with the last court eunuch; with some of the remaining Manchus who only a century ago ruled China but today are all but invisible; and with those few brave people who from the beginning recognised the Communists as being a danger to Beijing’s great heritage.

  The other strength is the depiction of Beijing as a canvas for the projection of others’ fantasies. In the case of 17th-century Jesuits or 20th-century Westerners in search of the exotic, this was fairly harmless. With purges, famine and urban destruction, Mao Zedong visited immense grief on a city he treated as a blank page. But it is China’s recent dictators who have finished off Beijing, bulldozing its past with the criminal approval of the world’s leading architects throwing up “signature” structures (I.M. Pei is the honourable dissenter). When Albert Speer, son of Hitler’s architect, was called in to make the new city even more bombastic, he explained: “What I am trying to do is to transport a 2,000-year-old city into the future. Berlin in the 1930s, that was just megalomania.”

  From The Globalist, here is an excerpted chapter about the Broken Bowl Tea House in Caishikou (菜市口), in memorial of ”the Six Gentlemen (六君子).”

  For more about the deconstruction of the old Beijing, read this early article in The New York Times and also this book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, on the CDT bookshelf.

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  • October 26, 2008 3:36 AM

• CDT Bookshelf: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

  

  The Cambridge University Press offers a summary of Yasheng Huang’s new book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State.
  

  Huang, a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argues that China’s exceptional growth is more controlled by the state now than in the 1980s.

  “This book presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand, and the result was rapid as well as broad-based growth. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its productive rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. The single biggest obstacle to sustainable growth and financial stability in China today is its poor political governance. As the country marks its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.”

  The Economist also writes a longer summary of the Yasheng’s main arguments, stating:

  “Original research on China is rare, largely because statistics, though plentiful, are notoriously unreliable. Mr Huang has gone far beyond the superficial data on gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign direct investment that satisfy most researchers. Instead, he has unearthed thousands of long-forgotten pages of memoranda and policy documents issued by bank chairmen, businessmen and state officials. In the process he has discovered two Chinas: one, from not so long ago, vibrant, entrepreneurial and rural; the other, today’s China, urban and controlled by the state.”

  William Kirby, a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, writes the following review published online in the Cambridge University Press:

  “Yasheng Huang is an insightful scholar of China’s political economy. In this important book, he shows how China’s rural economy took off in the 1980s, led by ‘township and village enterprises’ that were essentially private, only to be ignored in the 1990s by state-led development that focused on urban regions such as Shanghai. The ‘Shanghai miracle,’ he argues – and as any businessman who has worked there knows – was not the simple triumph of capitalism, but of a stronger and more intrusive (and effective) state. If one wants to understand the policy origins of China’s growing divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, one need look no further than this book.”

  An 10 page excerpt from the book can be found at Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.

  

  Book Cover

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  • October 9, 2008 5:32 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

  

  From BookBrowse:

  An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.

  China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

  A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

  Danwei.org has posted an excerpt of the book. From their introduction:

  Former China Wall Street Journal correspondent Leslie T. Chang has written a book about migrant workers called Factory Girls. With a wonderfully light touch, Chang describes the social and economic factors behind the largest mass movement of people in history—the urbanization of China’s rural population.

  As the name suggests, Factory Girls focuses on female migrant workers who make up the majority of the work force in most of southern China’s factories. In particular the book tells the stories of two migrant women who became friends of the author

  See also Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s review of the book in Newsweek, as well as reviews in the Financial Times and the Christian Science Monitor. On China Beat, Leslie Chang wrote an essay called “Writing Factory Girls.”

  Available on Amazon.com

  » Read more
  • October 5, 2008 8:17 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu

  

  Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, reviews The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu in The New York Times Sunday Book Review:

  Often in China a phone call wakes me: a voice from the provinces wondering how things are in the capital. Is the weather fine? How’s work? Did the puppy smuggler pass through, toting his squirming sack? Have you heard about that lumberjack who impregnated the extraterrestrial? Or the woman whose teacher was visited by a raccoon spirit in her dreams? My neighbors look different after I hear these tales. I wonder what secrets the jolly vegetable seller harbors, and what led the disabled news vendor to resettle on my street. In China, learning such secrets requires time, empathy and the suspension of disbelief.

  The Chinese writer Liao Yiwu displays all three in his interviews with the sorts of individuals who are often ignored beyond their immediate community — the busker, the public latrine attendant, the neighborhood cadre, the migrant worker. Twenty-seven of these conversations are collected in “The Corpse Walkers: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up,” an industrious, well-crafted recording of oral histories, almost all from the southwestern province of Sichuan. The site of a devastating earthquake last May, Sichuan is an area of extremes: mountains and plains, industry and farms, the newly rich and the perpetually poor. Its continuum of orthodoxy slides between animism, Taoism, Maoist atheism and the quasi capitalism of its favorite son, Deng Xiaoping.

  The market economy, not political dictate, is now the force that changes the lives of Liao’s subjects — unlike those in Feng Jicai’s “Voices From the Whirlwind,” an oral history of the Cultural Revolution. Most of the members of that generation have since found lucrative, or at least comfortable, niches in the new China, but ­others have been sidelined by layoffs or a porous pension system. “During the Cultural Revolution,” one middle-aged former Red Guard tells Liao, “we felt we were invincible and aspired to save the whole world with Communism. I would never have imagined that I could end up like this half a century later. I can’t even save myself.”

  Excerpts from The Corpse Walker were previously published in The Paris Review, along with Liao Yiwu’s interview of a Sichuan earthquake survivor.

  All of the poeple Liao interviewed for The Corpse Walker were from Sichuan Province; he attempted to track them down, with mixed results, after the devastating earthquake in May.

  In December, 2007, Liao Yiwu and other writers were prevented from attending the awards ceremony for the Freedom to Write Award, given by the Independent Chinese PEN Center.  Read an excerpt of Liao’s award speech “My Enemies, My Teachers” here.

  Read a review of The Corpse Walker from the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Watch a BBC HardTalk interview with Liao Yiwu.

  » Read more
  • September 16, 2008 1:21 PM

• India/China Reality Check

  

  In the New Statesman, Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Smoke and Mirrors: an Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar:

  Now, with the Beijing Olympics fresh in the memory and the next Commonwealth Games due in just two years in Delhi, more Atlantic-based consultants and forecasters than ever before will be hawking the idea of Chindia.

  All the more reason to welcome the publication of Smoke and Mirrors, a deeply insightful and often very amusing mixture of travelogue, memoir and political analysis in which Pallavi Aiyar, the first Indian foreign correspondent ever to be based in China who actually speaks the language, offers a perspective on the relationship between the two countries that doesn’t read as a breathless praise-song to the transforming, medicinal power of globalisation, and that benefits vastly from the time she has spent talking to villagers, small traders and economic migrants as much as to CEOs and think-tank wonks.

  Read also a review in the International Herald Tribune. Read some of Aiyar’s reporting on China, via CDT. Her personal website is here.

  » Read more
  • September 5, 2008 9:53 PM

• Battle Lines

  

  In the Washington Post, Andrew Nathan reviews “Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China,” by Philip Pan, the former Post Beijing bureau chief:

  Part of the book’s poignancy is that Pan has joined the chain of transmission: He earned the documentary filmmaker’s trust and promised to tell his story, just as the filmmaker had earned Zhang Yuanxun’s trust and promised to preserve Lin Zhao’s legacy of pain and endurance. Out of Mao’s Shadow is a work of reporting, but it is also a work of conscience.

  From 2001 to 2007, Pan was The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Beijing. The 10 or so intersecting stories he tells here are gritty and real. This is not a big-theme book about the “true” China but a concrete, closely observed encounter with particular people, places and events. He puts the reader on a stool in the small shop of laid-off steel worker Yao Fuxin as Yao and some colleagues plot a doomed demonstration against corrupt local officials in the rust-belt city of Liaoyang. We run through cornfields with blind activist Chen Guangcheng as he escapes from government thugs in his home village, hoping to carry a petition for justice all the way to Beijing. Other protagonists include a land developer, an army doctor, a local party secretary, a crusading editor and a passel of feuding “rights protection” lawyers (as they call themselves). Pan seems to have been all over each incident, watching before, during and after it happened, getting long interviews with participants who initially did not want to talk, copying quotes from secret documents, hiding notes from a trial in his socks.

  Read also an excerpt of the book, via the Washington Post.

  Update: Read reviews of the book from the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor.

  » Read more
  • July 3, 2008 8:11 AM

• CDT Bookshelf: The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer

  

  Beijing-based writer Josh Chin contributed the following review of Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” to CDT:

  Western observers have been lamenting the demise of “Old Beijing” since at least the 1920s, when the Chinese capital started itself stumbling in the direction of modernization. Each time, the city’s ancient charms-it’s intimate lanes (hutong) and enigmatic courtyard houses (siheyuan)-are said to be not long for this world. Each time, they survive to seduce the next generation of would-be eulogizers. Now comes Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” due out from Walker and Company this month. How much is there to be gained in listening to yet another requiem for a place that never seems to die?

  The answer, in Meyer’s case, is plenty.

  An award-winning travel writer, Meyer has done what few other foreign residents in Beijing are willing to do: actually live in the hutong. It’s true, many Westerners rent courtyard houses, but theirs are the neo-imperial mini-palaces of New Beijing, cleared of riff-raff, retrofitted with radiators and equipped with sit-down toilets. Meyer’s perch in the neglected lanes south of Tian’anmen Square is not so luxurious. For heat in winter, he relies on cups of Nescafe and the bowls of dumplings foisted on him by the Widow, his busy-bodied old neighbor. The dumplings and instant coffee processed, he walks across the lane to the public latrine, where one of his students once bowed to him as he squatted, pants around ankles, over the open trough.

  The result is an account of life in the hutong rich with lived detail but blessedly absent the romanticism and sentimentality that afflict so much of the expatriate lane literature. At times, there is a postcard quality to Meyer’s descriptions: “Grandmothers push prams filled with vegetables from Heavenly Peach market. The bells of black steel Flying Pigeon Bicycles warn to make way…” But these passages read more like an anxious ledger of scenes soon to be lost than a poem to the exotic, and are few at any rate. Instead, Meyer builds the book around portraits of his neighbors: the Widow, chain-smoking matron of the courtyard; Recycler Wang, who envies the tin buyer at Trash Village; Teacher Zhu, who has put pregnancy on hold until she knows when her school will be demolished.

  One of the most memorable of the characters in “Last Days” appears early on, as Meyer describes the character 拆 (chai, demolish) painted on the wall’s of a neighbor’s home: “Mr. Yang had never seen someone paint the symbol, and neither had I. It just appeared overnight, like a gang tag, or the work of a specter. The Hand.” Dispatched at the behest of a mysterious cabal of government officials and real estate developers, The Hand terrorizes nearly everyone Meyer meets.

  Sadly, “Last Days” never manages to uncover the mechanism behind The Hand. It does, however, rely on Chinese historical sources (most of them new to Western readers) to draw up an enlightening sketch of Beijing’s transformation from a close-knit, teeming maze of lanes named for the products or services offered in their shops (Chrysanthemum Lane, West Grindstone Lane), into an inhuman grid of wider-than-wide avenues dominated by immense structures designed to be admired rather than lived in-what Zhang Yonghe, an architect Meyer interviews, calls a “City of Objects.”

  One of the contributions of “Last Days” is to place this transformation it in its proper context. Paris was also erased and redrawn, Meyer reminds us, as were major parts of Moscow, New York City and Athens. In the end, Meyer and his neighbors are preservationists, but it’s not the architecture they care most about. Instead, it’s the refuge the lanes provide, the space they provide for humanity and civility in a city that grows colder and harder by the year. Meyer makes this point with particular force when he describes the numerous kidnapping stories he and his neighbors read in the local newspaper. “None of the missing had disappeared from a hutong,” he writes. “Rather, they vanished from wide roads, high-rise complexes and bus stops. Erasing a city’s urban corners left only straight lines, hollow spaces and nowhere to hide.”

  Beijing will probably always have its hutong and courtyard houses, which are rare enough now to have considerable real estate value. But the atmosphere of Old Beijing- the life-is already fast seeping out of them. In Michael Meyer, we are fortunate to have a writer with the clarity, humor and depth to capture that life before it flows away completely.

  » Read more
  • June 13, 2008 2:38 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester

  

  The Man Who Loved China, a new biography by Simon Winchester (author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa), tells the fascinating story of British scientist Joseph Needham and his lifelong love affair — literal and intellectual — with China. The following is a review from the Seattle Times:

  Joseph Needham was one of those rare persons who are so good at so many things that they astonish and irritate the rest of us. Cambridge-educated in anatomy, physiology and chemistry, Needham became the West’s leading authority on Chinese history. In a new biography, “The Man Who Loved China — Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,” Simon Winchester says Needham “succeeded, as few others are ever privileged to do, in making a significant and positive change to mankind’s mutual understanding.”

  A simple listing of the British professor’s fascinations would fill pages and would include auto mechanics, irrigation, horticulture, public health, military and political science, and Chinese calligraphy. His stupendous work, “Science and Civilisation in China,” the product of 50 years of research and writing, fills 23 huge volumes. His collaborators are completing five more. (Needham died in 1995, at age 94).

  Read an excerpt from The Man Who Loved China here.

  Listen to an interview with Simon Winchester here. Also see this video of the author on YouTube:
  

  Read also reviews of the book from:
  -USA Today
  -Salon.com

  And this 1995 obituary of Joseph Needham from The New York Times.

  » Read more
  • May 22, 2008 2:46 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

  

  A new book by exiled writer Ma Jian chronicles the events surrounding the protests and subsequent crackdown in Beijing, 1989. The Independent interviews Ma:

  His new novel, Beijing Coma (translated by Flora Drew; Chatto & Windus, £17.99), does much more than that. Its appearance, just as the giant propaganda juggernaut built in preparation for the Olympic Games looks liable to topple over in the face of global anger over Beijing’s record of repression, is an event that should, and will, resonate around the world. It establishes Ma Jian, already the author of three free-spirited books about the post-Mao country which he finally left in 1997, as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s amnesiac surge towards superpower status. “When history is erased, people’s moral values are also erased,” he says. “It was from a sense of rage at this whitewashing of history that I felt the need to bear witness.” In dictatorships, there must be “a constant struggle between the authorities who want to control history and the writers who want to grab hold of it and reclaim it.”

  Read also reviews of the book from:
  - The Times
  - The Telegraph
  - The Observer

  » Read more
  • May 3, 2008 3:57 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China

  

  A recent book by sports anthropologist and former professional athlete Susan Brownell, Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China, provides an optimistic view of the myriad issues surrounding the upcoming Games in Beijing. From an interview with Brownell in the Wall Street Journal:

  Last summer, when she was revising the book, she went home to visit her mother and asked her to review it. While Ms. Brownell sat on an upstairs balcony reading proofs, she began to hear her mother on the patio below.

  “She’d yell upstairs her disapproval,” Ms. Brownell says. “It was the idea that China is an evil government that oppresses its people — human rights, religious freedom and so on.”

  Ms. Brownell doesn’t dispute that China has problems, but she says many Western criticisms are hypocritical or ignore the huge progress China has made in many areas. More than that, she sees the two sides’ failure to understand each other as a tragedy.

  Read also:

  - An essay by Brownell on China Beat blog, “Beijing Olympic FAQ #1: Politics and the Olympics”
  - A Q&A with Brownell from the Seattle Times.
  - An excerpt of the book, via the publisher Rowman and Littlefield

  » Read more
  • April 22, 2008 2:14 PM

• The Political Re-Education of Rupert Murdoch

  

  Slate Magazine writes about the recent book by Rupert Murdoch’s former right-hand man in China, Rupert’s Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, which has recently been published in Britain and Australia:

  Because sucking up to government bigwigs has served Murdoch very well on several continents, Dover writes, the tycoon believed that China’s hostility to Star, which he bought into in 1993, could be overcome. If he could sit down with the proper political leaders, he was certain he could reach an accommodation that benefited all.

  But the powerful Chinese potentates routinely snubbed Murdoch, dispatching him and his underlings to speak with powerless junior officials. Dover writes that the “Chinese were well aware of his proclivity to involve himself in a nation’s politics if it were to the advantage of his business interests,” and they weren’t going to budge. The prospect of a Westerner beaming uncensored TV signals directly into Chinese homes appalled the country’s leaders.

  - See a previous article on the book from The Economist, and an excerpt from the book here. An article in the New York Times last year looks at Murdoch’s relationship with China and interviews book author Bruce Dover.

  UPDATE: Read also, via Danwei, a review of the book that was reportedly spiked by the Far Eastern Economic Review, now owned by Murdoch.

  » Read more
  • February 15, 2008 2:09 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: “Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours” by Tarun Khanna

  

  Harvard Business School Professor Tarun Khanna’s new book “Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours ” is a comparative book on the different business landscapes of the two countries. Khanna states that China and India, the two most populous Asian nations, have woken up and will catch the world’s eye.

  The book was published on February 1, 2008 by Harvard Business School Press. Below is an interview with Khanna in which he explains the main concepts of the book, via HBS:

  Q: What’s different about entrepreneurship in both countries?

  A: The extent and type of government involvement and the nature of openness are 2 dimensions in which the countries are different. These dimensions pervade all aspects of societal existence, whether that means raising capital to start a new business, the nature of markets, copyrights, the media, movies, and religion, as well as the ways in which both countries themselves project their power, the way they deal with each other, and the way the village economy works.

  In China, the government is often the entrepreneur. It is in many instances a very efficient entrepreneur. Of course there are bankrupt state-owned enterprises, but there are equally dynamic companies starting out in villages, small towns, and major cities, often with a sizable amount of investment or involvement by local government authorities. It is hard to find any reasonably sized Chinese company in which government authorities do not have input.

  In India, some islands of excellence notwithstanding, the government remains inefficient for the most part, and most pockets of entrepreneurship—interesting, vibrant new ways of doing things—are in the private sector or civil society, staying far away from government intervention. So here the private sector leads many significant initiatives; in China, the lead is often provided in a top-down manner….

  Here is an excerpt from Khanna’s book, also via HBS:

  Finding reliable, useful financial information is a real problem that anyone wanting to go to work at, sell to, buy from, or invest in a Chinese or Indian company must face. I am often asked for guidance in solving this problem and have found that answers are different for the two countries.

  In China, can I believe the financial information in a company’s annual report?

  Not really, I say. The annual report does not serve the purpose it does in market economies, that is, to communicate reliable information. Several of the companies with which one might interact may not even be legal entities in their own rights: almost surely they will have a blurred responsibility to traditional business constituents and to government.

  What about analysts’ reports on Chinese companies?

  Two issues are at stake. First, most of the domestic assets of Chinese companies are not publicly listed. Those that are listed locally are not necessarily the companies’ best assets but are the results of the government’s attempt to leverage domestic savings toward salvaging bankrupt state-owned enterprises. Assets listed overseas—and on which reliable foreign analyses presumably exist—are not all the assets of the corporations in question. For example, the Bank of China’s overseas operations are listed in Hong Kong but represent only a small part of the bank’s operations on the mainland. Second, Chinese financial analysts are not independent but state owned or state controlled, as are the companies on which they issue reports.

  - In an interview with Asia Society, professor Tarun Khanna “discusses the importance of entrepreneurs in the growth of these two booming Asian economies.” Click here to listen.
  - Listen also to the interview with Khanna by HBS here.

  See also a review of the book, from The Economist:

  With his new book Mr Khanna has returned to the topic of entrepreneurship in Asia’s emerging giants. But he has dropped the idea of India outpacing China and replaced it with thoughts about the potential for co-operation between the two countries. Their social and economic systems are vastly different, as he shows in admirably detailed but chatty studies of companies and cities in both places. But they have strengths that could be complementary, he thinks, and he argues that foreign multinationals need to start thinking about the countries together rather than separately.

  And a review from Boston.com:

  Khanna contrasts the two countries in areas as diverse as technology, healthcare, movie-making, oil, banking, and agriculture, but rarely, if ever, pronouncing one to be better than the other.

  He chides such black-and-white thinking: “The pundit’s favorite issue, of ‘who wins,’ China or India, misses the point.”

  See also reviews from China Elections & Governance and India Today.

  » Read more
  • February 12, 2008 10:07 PM

• Nan, American Man - John Updike

  

  In the New Yorker, John Updike reviews Ha Jin’s new novel, A Free Life:

  His new novel, “A Free Life,” (Pantheon; $26), is a relatively lumpy and uncomfortable work, of which a first draft, he confides in a brief afterword, was completed in the year 2000. In an interview that same year, with Bookreporter.com, he declared, “I plan to write at least two books about the American immigrant experience, but not my own story.” However, his dedication to “A Free Life” reads, “To Lisha and Wen, who lived this book”; Lisha and Wen are the names of Ha Jin’s wife and son. Nan Wu, the hero of “A Free Life,” also has a wife and son, Pingping and Taotao, and shares with Lin Kong, the protagonist of “Waiting,” a cautious, bookish nature and a nagging indecision in regard to a basic emotional choice. Lin, a military doctor, vacillates between a homely wife, chosen by his parents, back in his village, and a nurse in the hospital where he is posted; Nan, a graduate student adrift in America, cannot stop longing for an adored early love, Beina, who spurned him. [Full text]

  Read also reviews of the book from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Slate. The Washington Post will host an online discussion with Ha Jin on December 6.

  » Read more
  • November 28, 2007 8:46 AM

• CDT Bookshelf: Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road

  

  Colin Thubron’s latest travel book, Shadow of the Silk Road, chronicles his journey down the full length of the fabled route. The Times reviewed it last year when the book was released in the U.K. (It comes out in paperback in the U.S. this week):

  From the very first page, where we join the author climbing at dawn through cypress woods in Huangling to the shrine of the Yellow Emperor, his blend of poetic writing, quirky encounters and social observations is captivating. By the second page, he is meeting a Chinese girl, who giggles through her fingers at the rare sight of a foreigner and tells him earnestly that the Yellow Emperor invented boots.

  The Silk Road has long been a great romantic destination for travellers. At university, I remember poring over maps with a friend, considering retracing it through evocatively named places such as Tashkent and Samarkand. What we soon discovered was that the Silk Road was never a road, but a shifting network of routes starting in China and crossing central Asia. Until I read Thubron’s book, however, I did not know that the route (which dates from Roman times) has been called the Silk Road only since the 19th century when the term was coined by a German. Nor was it used just for transporting silk. The camel trains that left Changan were often laden with iron, bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and they would come back with Indian spices, glass, golden and silver artefacts, woollens and the western marvel of chairs. Later, they would transport fruit and flowers, including the first roses to arrive in the West. The road was also a conduit for ideas, religion and scientific knowledge. Among the revolutionary inventions that it took west from China were printing, gunpowder and the compass. [Full text]

  A video of Thubron discussing his journey is on YouTube:

  » Read more
  • October 22, 2007 3:04 PM

• ‘China Road’ by Rob Gifford - Karl Taro Greenfeld

  

  Karl Taro Greenfeld, author of China Syndrome, reviews Rob Gifford’s China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power for the Los Angeles Times:

  Almost every reporter who has covered China has weighed doing the Big Journey-through-China-story, starting in the far west or extreme south and making one’s way by various squalid means of transport to Beijing or the Yalu River. What dissuades most of us is the fact that travel anywhere in China takes so long, is so tedious ” and slightly dangerous.

  Whenever foreign correspondents gather in China, they exchange stories of harrowing experiences on its highways, roads and dirt paths, many having to do with the fact that there are more than 100 million trucks but seemingly only a million working brake lights. At night, driving fast down a narrow ribbon of road to make an appointment in the next county, you notice these lumbering trucks only when you are practically beneath their rear bumpers. In China, though it is the cradle of Taoism, a trip is more often about the destination than the journey. [Full Text]

  » Read more
  • June 24, 2007 10:44 AM