China Digital Times

CHINA NEWS SECTION: CDT Bookshelf

• Enough of the Big Picture

  

  In Time, Jeffrey Wasserstrom critiques the spate of recent China books whose authors have two things in common: “a conviction that they know what will happen next (even though the P.R.C. has been defying the best guesses of pundits and academic specialists alike for decades) and an ability to provide easy-to-summarize answers to Big Questions.” He continues:

  The most successful and widely reviewed tend to have theses spelled out in provocative titles that fit into ongoing point-counterpoint debates or give rise to new ones. When China Rules the World is a case in point. Its appearance immediately triggered an expected rebuttal from Hutton, and inspired Big China Articles (yes, there are lots of those too) for and against.

  Big China Books vary greatly in quality, but even the best leave me cold due to their bird’s-eye view of the P.R.C. Adopting an Olympian perspective, their authors tend to use broad strokes to portray things that actually require a fine-grained touch. For example, most treat China’s population as an undifferentiated mass, or one that can be bisected along just one axis: be it the 90% Han and 10% non-Han ethnic divide, the clear ideological fault line between loyalists and dissidents, and so on. And they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth of “thousands of years of continuous civilization,” which suggests that China’s borders have remained fairly constant over time and that the “Confucian tradition” has been remarkably enduring. When in the company of even the most astute Big China Book authors, like Jacques, I often find myself wondering if the place they are describing can really be the same one that I regularly visit and teach and write about for a living. For the China I know is one where complex regional divides fragment the population and the views of many people don’t fit into either the dissident or loyalist category. It’s a country with multistranded traditions, not just a single Confucian one. And it’s a country whose long history has been marked by many discontinuities, from the mix of traditions to dramatic shifts over time in just how big China itself is imagined to be.

  » Read more
  • January 28, 2010 4:55 PM

• Perry Anderson: Sinomania

  

  In the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson discusses three new books about China in the context of a new fascination with the country in the west, which he terms “Sinomania.” The books discussed include: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order by Martin Jacques; Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang; Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbeltby Ching Kwan Lee:

  Too far away to be a military or religious threat to Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled according to merit, not birth. Even those sceptical of the more extravagant claims for the Middle Kingdom – Montesquieu or Adam Smith – remained puzzled and impressed by its wealth and order.

  A drastic change of opinion came in the 19th century, when Western predators became increasingly aware of the relative military weakness and economic backwardness of the Qing empire. China was certainly teeming, but it was also primitive, cruel and superstitious. Respect gave way to contempt, mingled with racist alarm – Sinomania capsizing into Sinophobia. By the early 20th century, after eight foreign forces had stormed their way to Pekin to crush the Boxer Uprising, the ‘yellow peril’ was being widely bandied about among press and politicians, as writers like Jack London or J.H. Hobson conjured up a future Chinese takeover of the world. Within another few decades, the pendulum swung back, as Pearl Buck and Madame Chiang won popular sympathy for China’s gallant struggle against Japan. After 1948, in a further rapid reversal, Red China became the focus of still greater fear and anxiety, a totalitarian nightmare more sinister even than Russia. Today, the high-speed growth of the People’s Republic is transforming Western attitudes once again, attracting excitement and enthusiasm in business and media alike, with a wave of fashion and fascination recalling the chinoiserie of rococo Europe. Sinophobia has by no means disappeared. But another round of Sinomania is in the making.

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  • January 22, 2010 11:04 AM

• Exiles From Themselves

  

  The New York Times reviews Ha Jin’s new book A Good Fall: Stories, which “explores the nature of displacement and the unease with which Chinese immigrants in the United States experience their new country”:

  With skill and spareness, he uses the dozen stories in “A Good Fall” to dramatize lives in which hope has been crushed rather than abandoned, in which the struggle to find a place to live becomes as much a daily battle within the self as it is with society. His characters seem to be in exile not only from the China of their memories and dreams but from their very sense of who they are. Their emotional universe has become as circumscribed as their physical surroundings. Once inhabitants of a sprawling and familiar culture, they are now confined to a few rooms, a few streets.

  Although Jin is more concerned with the patterns made by small lives under new pressures, there are times when the broader picture comes to the fore. “It’s foolish to think you’re done for,” the downtrodden hero of the title story is told by a friend. “Lots of people here are illegal aliens. They live a hard life but still can manage. In a couple of years there might be an amnesty that allows them to become legal immigrants.” To characters like this, immigration to a land of opportunity proves an occasion of loss as well as gain. They are ordinary people with modest expectations, modest even in what they notice and remember and imagine. This lack of color is reflected in Jin’s quiet, careful, restrained prose — prose whose absence of flourish can, at times, make it all the more eloquent.

  The review also includes an excerpt of the book.

  Read also reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Toronto Star.

  » Read more
  • January 3, 2010 10:53 PM

• Julia Lovell on Translating Lu Xun’s Complete Fiction: “His is an Angry, Searing Vision of China”

  

  Danwei interviews Julia Lovell, whose translation of the complete works of Lu Xun,The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics), has recently been published:

  Danwei: What significance do you think Lu Xun’s work has for the younger generations of Chinese people today?
  Julia Lovell: Plenty, I think. But I would distinguish between two Lu Xuns: between, on the one hand, the heroic revolutionary Lu Xun (invented by Mao), whose works generations of schoolchildren have been forced to memorise (down to the punctuation, I believe); and on the other, a spikier, tirelessly critical, more realistic Lu Xun. I think that Lu Xun’s legacy of cosmopolitanism and intellectual independence – which comes through in a good deal of his dark fiction and polemical essays – is an important and useful reminder of modern China’s traditions of dissent and extraordinary receptiveness to the outside world.

  China Beat also posted an excerpt of the new book.

  » Read more
  • November 11, 2009 1:43 PM

• Danwei Interviews Paul French, Author of Through the Looking Glass

  

  Danwei interviews Paul French, whose new book, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, explores China coverage in the 19th and 20th centuries. Read also an interview with French on TimeOut Beijing.
  

  Danwei Interview with Paul French from danwei on Vimeo.

  » Read more
  • June 22, 2009 8:02 AM

• The Secret Memoir of Fallen Chinese Leader Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳) (Updated)

  

  The memoirs of Zhao Ziyang are due to come out this month. A look at Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang –

  From Adi Ignatius, one of the book’s editors, in TIME magazine:

  When the tanks and troops blasted their way into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, crushing the student-led protest movement that had captivated the world, the biggest political casualty was Chinese Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, the man who had tried hardest to avoid the bloodshed.

  Outmaneuvered by his hard-line rivals, Zhao was stripped of power and placed under house arrest. The daring innovator who had introduced capitalist policies to post–Mao Zedong China spent his last 16 years virtually imprisoned, rarely allowed to venture away from his home on a quiet alley in Beijing. As his hair turned white, Zhao passed many lonely hours driving golf balls into a net in his courtyard.

  Yet as it turns out, Zhao never stopped thinking about Tiananmen. Through courage and subterfuge, he found a way, in the isolation of his heavily monitored home, to secretly record his account of what it was like to serve at China’s highest levels of power — and more amazingly, he sneaked his memoir out of the country. Published this month, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang provides an intimate look at one of the world’s most opaque regimes during some of modern China’s most critical moments. It marks the first time a Chinese leader of such stature — as head of the party, Zhao was nominally China’s highest-ranking official — has spoken frankly about life at the top. Most significantly, Zhao’s account could encourage future Chinese leaders to revisit the events of Tiananmen and acknowledge the government’s tragic mistakes there. Hundreds of people were killed or imprisoned by government forces, though few Chinese today know the full story.

  Perry Link reviews the book in the Washington Post. Perry Link was a co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers, published in 2001. A Chinese translation of the review is also available.

  Ironically, it was Zhao’s incarceration after 1989 that brought him closer to the street life of ordinary Chinese. His guards told him it was “inconvenient” for him to play golf; he had to guess at the content of unwritten rules, to deal with “made-up excuses” and to engage in vacuous word games with functionaries. His indignation at such treatment suggests that he was learning about these routine features of his society’s political life for the first time.

  But incarceration also provided him with time to read and reflect broadly on China’s situation in history. At the end of “Prisoner of the State,” we see Zhao arrive at positions more radical than any he had taken before — positions that the Chinese government had long been calling “dissident.” For instance, Zhao eventually concluded that China needs a free press, freedom to organize and an independent judiciary. The Communist Party will have to release its monopoly on power. Ultimately, China will need parliamentary democracy.

  What it actually has, he observed near the end of his life, is continuing rule by “a tightly-knit interest group . . . in which the political elite, the economic elite, and the intellectual elite are fused. This power elite blocks China’s further reform and steers the nation’s policies toward service of itself.” He saw that China’s “abundant and cheap” labor had produced an economic boom. The society’s rulers claim they have lifted millions from poverty, but in truth the millions have lifted themselves, through hard work and long hours, and in the process they have catapulted the elite to unprecedented levels of opulence and economic power.

  From John Pomfret, also at the Washington Post. A Chinese translation of the review is also available.

  The posthumous appearance of Zhao’s memoir, which he dictated onto audiotapes and the publisher has titled “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” marks the first time since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China 60 years ago that a senior Chinese leader has spoken out so directly against the party and its system.

  Reaching from the grave, Zhao pillories a conservative wing of the party for missteps that led to the bloody crackdown, which began after dark on June 3, 1989, and left hundreds dead. Few in China’s leadership at the time escape Zhao’s criticism. He castigates Deng Xiaoping, the man credited with opening China to the West and launching its economic reforms; Li Peng, the dour premier at the time of the Tiananmen tragedy; Deng Liqun, a hard-line party theoretician; Li Xiannian, a former vice president; and even Hu Yaobang, Zhao’s longtime ally, whose death April 15, 1989, touched off the student-led protests.

  But Zhao’s memoir also constitutes a broader challenge to the generally accepted version of history, especially in China, that places Deng at the center of the economic reforms that have turned China into a global economic power. While acknowledging that none of the reforms “would have been possible without Deng Xiaoping’s support,” Zhao depicts Deng as more of a benevolent godfather than a hands-on architect. Much of the critical design — such as dismantling agricultural communes, mapping out China’s hugely successful export-led growth model and conjuring up ideological sleights-of-hand that allowed China’s Communists to embrace capitalism — was left to Zhao. In China, Zhao’s role in the momentous economic changes and political events that led up to the Tiananmen crackdown have been airbrushed from history. “Prisoner of the State” is his attempt to place himself back in the picture.

  “Reading Zhao’s unadorned and unboastful account of his stewardship, it becomes apparent that it was he rather than Deng who was the actual architect of reform,” wrote Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, in a foreword to the book.

  Lastly, the New York Times provides excerpts from the book, as well as Zhao’s own audio recordings. The following is taken from Part 1, Chapter 4: ‘The Crackdown’ (Pp. 33-34).

  On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire. A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all.

  I prepared the above written material three years after the June Fourth tragedy. Many years have now passed since this tragedy. Of the activists involved in this incident, except for the few who escaped abroad, most were arrested, sentenced, and repeatedly interrogated. The truth must have been determined by now. Certainly the following three questions should have been answered by now.

  First, it was determined then that the student movement was “a planned conspiracy” of anti-Party, anti-socialist elements with leadership. So now we must ask, who were these leaders? What was the plan? What was the conspiracy? What evidence exists to support this? It was also said that there were “black hands” within the Party. Then who were they?

  Update: Read an op-ed about the book by Bao Pu, one of the book’s editors and the son of Bao Tong, a top aide to Zhao Ziyang. China Beat also posts several links about the book. Read more coverage from Google News.

  » Read more
  • May 14, 2009 11:25 AM

• The Final Triumph of Chiang Kai-shek

  

  Laura Tyson Li in the Washington Post reviews Jay Taylor’s new book The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China. The book, released by Harvard University Press, brings a new look into the life of Chiang Kai-shek, former President of the Republic of China and leader of the Kuomintang (KMT).

  Chiang Kai-shek ranks as one of the most despised leaders of the 20th century. Famously derided as “Peanut” and “General Cash-My-Check,” the leader of China’s Nationalist government bedeviled the Allied war effort in World War II with his lackluster defense of his country. His corrupt and brutal regime squandered billions of dollars in American aid and drove the Chinese into the arms of the communists. He died in exile a deluded despot, relegated to a footnote in modern Chinese history. Or so the conventional story goes.

  Now, however, Jay Taylor’s new biography, “The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China,” challenges the catechism on which generations of Americans have been weaned. Marshaling archival materials made newly available to researchers, including about four decades’ worth of Chiang’s daily diaries and documents from the Soviet era, it torpedoes many of that catechism’s cherished tenets. This is an important, controversial book.

  » Read more
  • April 25, 2009 9:34 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Fuschia Dunlop’s “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper”

  

  Fuschia Dunlop was the first Westerner to attend the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and has written several books about China’s food culture. Her latest book, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, is a culinary memoir of her journeys through China. From Serious Eats:

  The book is an evocative and emotionally resonant account of her visits to China, from the time she first went as a student in 1994 to the many trips she took after to research for her two cookbooks. In traveling around the country, Dunlop discovered just how much her feelings about Chinese food had evolved in tandem with how the cultural fabric of China had evolved in the post-Mao era.

  As this go-go, free enterprise period unfolded, Dunlop became profoundly aware and disturbed by all the attendant environmental problems and food safety issues that accompanied all this “progress.” She found herself questioning her love for and commitment to Chinese food culture. Dunlop’s restless quest to make peace with a rapidly evolving China is at the heart of her journey and this book. I won’t give away the ending, but sweet and sour is an apt description for the conclusion.

  Listen to Dunlop talk about her book in Beijing via City Weekend. Also, read an article by Dunlop about a restaurateur in Sichuan, from the New Yorker. See Dunlop’s recipe for Dan Dan noodles, via Chowhound.

  » Read more
  • March 13, 2009 12:36 PM

• Muddy River, China, Where the Going Is Bleak

  

  The New York Times reviews The Vagrants: A Novel, by short story writer Li Liyun:

  …This is small-town universality with a difference. That difference is Communist China. The town isn’t small; it only feels that way, as a provincial city where everyone seems to know his neighbor’s business. The city’s name is Muddy River, and with good reason. Ms. Li presents a desolate yet fully transporting vision of China in the turmoil of the late 1970s, still reeling from the death of Mao Zedong and clinging to unclear measures of political rectitude and very clear methods of political corruption. She skillfully encapsulates this larger vision into the monstrous, Sino-Dickensian details of Muddy River’s dysfunctional family life.

  Most events and characters in “The Vagrants” can be linked to the theatrically public execution of Gu Shan, a former member of the Red Guards now accused of anti-Communist apostasy. This seasoned, embittered political veteran has repudiated her past and spent a decade in prison. It hardly matters, to her or to anyone else, that she is only 28. Gu Shan is all but dead as “The Vagrants” begins. Her vocal cords have been cut to keep her from making any more trouble.

  Read also reviews from: The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Times.

  Update: Listen to an interview with Li Yiyun here. Li’s website is here. Read also an interview with Li on therumpus.net.

  
  

  » Read more
  • January 30, 2009 9:10 PM

• A ‘Postcard’ View Of China’s Global Prominence

  

  Today on Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews James Fallows, Beijing-based correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and author of the newly-released “Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (Vintage),” about the role of Chinese investment in the American economy. The interview can be heard here.

  Danwei has posted an excerpt of Fallows’ book, with an introduction that Fallows wrote:

  As the financial crisis of 2008 became the worldwide economic crisis of 2009, the mainstream Western media began noticing the ‘bargain’ China had made with developed economies, above all the United States, that led to imbalances that helped cause the crash.

  This passage of Postcards is part of an attempt to explain not simply the political calculation behind this ‘grand bargain’ but also the day by day mechanics through which it worked.

  The passage picks up with an interview in which Lawrence Summers is commenting on the pattern through which a country full of poor people, China, kept sending money to a country full of rich people, the United States

  
  

  Read also:
  - an interview with Fallows on China Beat
  - Examples of Fallows’ reporting, via CDT

  » Read more
  • January 6, 2009 1:47 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Richard Vine’s “New China, New Art”

  

  Richard Vine, the Asian art editor for Art in America and a long-time observer of China’s contemporary art scene, has written a new book called, “New China, New Art,” which chronicles the origins of the work of Zhang Huan and other artists and looks at how consumption of the art by a western audience has influenced it. From a review on NewCriterion.net:

  The art critic Richard Vine, a senior editor at Art and America and for many years one of the few incorruptible observers of China’s cultural scene, recounts this history in his new critical survey called New China New Art, published by Prestel.[1] Today’s Chinese avant-gardists do not “share either the political intent or the reckless bravery of the Tiananmen organizers,” he notes. “The cruel lesson of June 4, 1989 is that repression sometimes works.”

  [...] Look up Chinese art history and you won’t find chapters on illusionistic painting or abstraction or high modernism. Traditional Chinese art is limited to calligraphic ink on paper. So today’s hot Chinese artists, who skillfully replicate the contemporary practices of Western art, never passed through the history that created it. “Mao Zedong, having set out to establish a Communist utopia,” notes Vine, “inadvertently paved the way—at the cost of forty to seventy million peacetime lives—for a postmodern society par excellence.”

  And from Art Journal:

  Vine divides New China, New Art into sections according to medium: painting, sculpture & installation, performance, photography and video, while at the same time remaining artist-centric in approach. Some 125 Chinese artists are featured overall, including details on each of their backgrounds and careers.

  However, it would be impossible to produce a book of this kind without addressing the social history of China and the repression under which artists have traditionally produced their art. While covering the major events such as the effects of Tiananmen Square, New China, New Art intertwines fascinating and lesser known events such as the Shanghai Biennale of 2004, in which a group show of abstract works was open for only four hours before being closed by authorities.

  Chinese artists, says Vine, are unique in that they have undergone virtually overnight, a complete shift from a period of enforced people’s art to that of eclectic postmodernism. This was so, writes Vine, without ever passing through a period of high-minded modernism, as in the Western world. Thus, the effects of the ‘capitalism yes; democracy no’ stance taken by the country’s governments, can also be seen in the contemporary art market – the importance of the flow of capital in this domain should not be underestimated.

  Read also:
  - Reviews on Art Critical and Red Box Studio.
  - Art in America’s website
  - A 2007 article in the New York Times about artist Zhang Huan
  - CDT’s coverage of contemporary art

  
  

  » Read more
  • January 2, 2009 11:41 AM

• 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.

  » Read more
  • 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

  » Read more
  • 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

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