In October we saw the 100th anniversary of the 1911 revolution that overthrew China’s imperial dynasty. Today we’re taking a “book tour”, if you will, through the last century of Chinese history. What legacy of the 1911 revolution and its vision for a modern nation can we see in China today, or have the changes of the 20th century been so dramatic that there is none?

One of the ironies a century on from the revolution of 1911 is that in some ways China is a completely different country from what it was a century ago – everything from the skyscrapers of Shanghai to the massive development of rural areas in western China – and yet many of the problems that the revolutionaries of 1911 were trying to solve are still very relevant to China today.

The questions of what is the Chinese nation state – is it an empire, a republic? – and how does the government relate to its people are questions that are very pressing at the present day, and were in the minds of the 1911 revolutionaries as well. The sense of social crisis is very real [today]. If you go out into the countryside, the growing economy has kept people at least reasonably happy in some parts of the country, but more broadly speaking it’s clear that there is a lot of social discontent and perhaps a downturn in the economy could create another social crisis for today’s government.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, history
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In two dozen essays and 15 poems written between 1989 and 2009 and a document collection showing Mr. Liu’s path through the courts and into jail, the book offers “one of the most impressive analyses of China today,” as well as an important warning to those hoping the cash-rich country can “save” the world economy, Perry Link, one of three editors, said by telephone.

“The image of China in the West is superficial compared to Liu Xiaobo’s,” said Mr. Link, a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature at the University of California, Riverside.

“He sees the problems, the corruption, the bullying. There is the China that the Communist Party runs, that has so much money and might try to save the euro, and wants to take over the South China Sea, and then what he’s really talking about, the ordinary people and the ordinary problems from below,” he said.

Read more by and about Liu Xiaobo via CDT.

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Post tags: Liu Xiaobo, writers
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In a series of three interviews with Paul Evans, Ezra Vogel addresses the origins of his book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. He discusses its construction and provides insights into the character, career, and impact of the man who more than any other shaped contemporary China.

The interviews were recorded during Professor Vogel’s visit to UBC when he spoke about the impact of Deng’s international connections beginning with his time in France in the 1920s.

See part one of the interview, in which Vogel discusses why he decided to begin writing Deng’s biography. In part two, Vogel speaks about what shaped Deng as a leader. Also, Inside-Out China provides a thoughtful roundup of many reviews of the book. For more about the book see The Skeleton’s in Deng’s Closet from the CDT Bookshelf.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Deng Xiaoping, Ezra Vogel
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Deng led a long and remarkable life, packed with drama and global significance, one that deserves to be dissected in detail. So we must be thankful to Harvard professor Ezra Vogel for devoting a large chunk of his academic career to compiling a prodigious biography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, the most ambitious account of the man so far. In writing this volume, Vogel has done an enormous amount of work. He appears to have absorbed the documents from every single Chinese Communist Party plenum since 1921. (I can’t say I envy him the task, but hey, someone’s got to do it.)

There have been several Deng biographies before this — from the curmudgeonly Benjamin Yang, the suave ex-diplomat Richard Evans, the meticulous analyst Michael Marti — but Vogel’s can be regarded as the most comprehensive and informative of the lot. (Maurice Meisner wrote a book of marvelous verve about Deng and his era, but it doesn’t actually contain that much in the way of biography.) Vogel has left no stone unturned, and this is mostly a good thing. But sometimes — in a 928-page book with chapter titles like “Economic Readjustment and Rural Reform, 1978-1982″ — it wears. If you want to know the particulars of Deng’s career, you’ll be well-served here; if you want to know his life, you might find this book a bit frustrating. Vogel would probably object that it is the career that matters most, and of course that’s true — up to a point. But a biography, by the very nature of the beast, should also be a story — preferably one that doesn’t pull its punches. Brutal candor is a vital literary device. William Taubman set the standard with his fantastically well-researched yet bracingly sarcastic portrait of Khrushchev. Vogel, by contrast, is a bit too quick to skip over the rougher, blacker sides of his hero’s past. The massive ambiguities, the jaw-dropping plot twists, the spicy Sichuanese reek of an unlikely life never quite filter through.

Vogel has been traveling to China since the 1960s, and over the years he has cultivated close relationships with Deng’s relatives and leading members of the Chinese Communist Party, a level of access that has unquestionably enriched the book. When Vogel reveals something truly fresh about his subject, it’s usually not because of a document, but rather because insiders have shared their views. My favorite quote comes from Deng’s youngest son: “My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.”

Read a previous review of the book by John Pomfret in the Washington Post via CDT.

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Post tags: book reviews, Deng Xiaoping, PRC history
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“In the beginning I had seen the village as an escape, a place where I could hike and write in peace; but now I went there for different reasons. In China it was the closest I ever came to home.” Eventually, “after four years, Sancha felt as familiar as any place I had known during adulthood,” and “the longer I stayed in Sancha, the more I appreciated the rhythm of the countryside, the way that life moved through the cycles of the seasons. . . . Progress had arrived: each year led to some new major change, and always there was the sense of time rushing ahead. But the regularity of the seasons helped me keep my bearings.”

Hessler’s account of his years in Sancha is for me the highlight of “Country Driving,” but that in no way diminishes my admiration for the other two sections. In the first, “The Wall,” he takes a couple of car trips through places along the routes of various sections of the Great Wall — in fact it is not a single wall but a mishmash of many, built over the centuries primarily to resist Mongol invaders — that are rapidly emptying out as people rush from the country to the city. There is much here about the urbanization of China, a phenomenon far more vast and unsettling than most of us in the West understand, but there is also wonderful stuff about Chinese rental cars, speed traps, license-exam questions and the drivers themselves.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: book reviews, peter hessler
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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.

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Post tags: book reviews, views of China
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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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Post tags: book reviews, China's rise, history, views of China
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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.

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Post tags: book reviews, emigrants, ha jin
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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.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: literature, lu xun
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Danwei Interview with Paul French from danwei on Vimeo.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China coverage, foreign correspondents, foreigners in China
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