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CHINA NEWS SECTION: CDT Bookshelf

• 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

• 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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

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