Yellow Peril journalism is on the rise once more, both abroad and much closer to home. A particularly paranoid and racist practice, Yellow Peril scaremongering is engendered by threats seemingly posed by China’s self-styled “peaceful rise”.
Take this bit of good old liberal xenophobia: “Is the baton of global leadership going to pass from Anglo-Saxon hands, which held so many values in common, to Chinese hands? If so, the implications could not be more profound. The world would have to accommodate a wholly different civilisation and values; the character of global institutions, our culture and the primacy of our English language would be challenged.” Thus writes Will Hutton in The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (Little, Brown).
Much seen in the pages of the once-rational Observer newspaper, Hutton without doubt regards himself as enlightened. And a proselytiser for the Enlightenment, whose values the West continues to assert despite centuries of colonising and enslaving the apparently not-so-enlightened in deepest darkest Africa, Asia, “the Americas” and sundry other resource-rich territories across the globe.
Jaundiced by his Enlightenment articles of faith, Hutton presses on: “If the next century is going to be Chinese, it will only be because China embraces the economic and political pluralism of the West in general, and our Enlightenment institutions in particular, modified, of course, for the Chinese experience.”
China has long spoken of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — a euphemism for the industrialisation, capitalism and consumerism that is China in the 21st century. Chinese president Hu Jintao was careful to spell that out again during his recent eight-nation African tour. But however seemingly capitalist China appears, its political fabric will not readily admit pell-mell adoption of all Western modes. Furthermore, it is improbable that the world’s oldest continuous civilisation, with governance theorists rather more profound than Hutton (among them one Master Kong — Kongfuzi, aka Confucius in the West), will heed such obviously self-interested prescriptions.
Of course, the West would like to see a China embracing Western values, and frequently the colonised do indeed adopt the so-called values of their former masters. (One has only to observe the upsurge in the popularity of golf as a business and social lubricant in South Africa to lament a certain lack of resolve on the part of the newly independent.) China has forged another way, the radical experiment of the swiftest industrial revolution in history fettered to a state apparatus intent on maintaining political and social control.
To understand China, one must eschew Hutton and those of his ilk — johnny-come-latelys to the burgeoning writing-about-China industry — and turn instead to those who have paid their dues, respected China hands such as John Gittings, for 20 years The Guardian‘s China expert. In The Changing Face of China, subtitled From Mao to Market (Oxford), Gittings explains contemporary China, and how it has arisen from — not despite — its Communist past.
In taking the reader from 1949 to the present, Gittings is comprehensive, judicious, accessible and scholarly. His book combines the virtues of vigorous and clear prose, free of academic curlicues and conceit, with voluminous reading and painstaking research. His own experiences of China inform much of what he says, and it is apt that he honours his “greatest debt” by saying, “Long Live the People of China”.
It is those people who have been and are guinea pigs in the fundamental revolution that has been China since 1949. Can “state capitalism” offer China and the developing world an alternative model, in which a relatively affluent society can be created through freedom of the market but without other freedoms?
Whether that is good or bad is, naturally, debatable: but the possibility poses a bigger threat to the West’s ideological hegemony than the Cold War.
Perhaps Hutton should start learning Mandarin.
Reading matters
South African writers dominated the Africa shortlists for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, which goes to the best fiction written in English in the Commonwealth by established and new writers. Four of the six nominees in the Africa best book shortlist and five of the six in the Africa best first book category are from South Africa.
Literary giant Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya (Wizard of the Crow, Random House United Kingdom) and acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, Harper Collins) are the only non-South Africans in the best book list. Vying with them to be regional winner, who will be announced on March 12, are Ken Barris (What Kind of Child, Kwela Books), Ronnie Govender (Song of the Atman, Jacana), Shaun Johnson (The Native Commissioner, Penguin South Africa), and Zoe Wicomb (Playing in the Light, Umuzi).
In the best first book section, Nigeria’s Segun Alofabi is the sole non-South African, for his novel A Life Elsewhere (Jonathan Cape). The South African contingent comprises All We Have Left Unsaid by Maxime Case (Kwela Books), The Beggars’ Signwriter by Louis Greenberg (Umuzi), Ice in the Lungs by Gerald Kraak (Jacana), The Shadow Follows by David Medalie (Picador Africa) and Room 207 by Kgebeti Moele (Kwela Books).
South Africa’s strong showing in the Africa shortlists reflects literary quality as well as the strength of the local publishing industry, which has the best resources, marketing and distribution on the continent.
The overall winners of the 21st annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize will be announced in Jamaica on May 27 at the Calabash International Literary Festival. The winners emerge from more than 300 entries drawn from the Commonwealth, divided for purposes of the award into four regions: Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, Europe and South Asia, South-East Asia and South Pacific. Regional winners advance to the final shortlists, with the overall winners receiving £10 000 (best book) and £5 000 (best first book).
Go to the Commonwealth Foundation website for all the regional shortlists: www.commonwealthfoundation.com/culturediversity/writersprize/2007prize/Sh
ortlist/index.cfm.
Closer to home, the presentation of the 2006 Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose will be combined with the English Academy of Southern Africa’s annual Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture. The prize will be presented to Jane Taylor for her thriller Of Wild Dogs (Double Storey Books, 2005), with co-winner Russel Brownlee (Garden of the Plagues, Human & Rousseau, 2005) receiving his prize in Cape Town at a future date.
Taylor, who is Skye chair of dramatic art at the University of the Witwatersrand, is already busy working on a new novel.
John Matshikiza will give the 2007 Baneshik lecture, entitled Measure for Measure: A Very South African Scenario.
To book for the events on February 27 at 6:30pm for 7pm in the Old Fort Conference Room at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, contact the Academy’s administrative officer, Naomi Nkealah, on 011 717 9339 or at [email protected]. — Darryl Accone