China-watching has never been so popular — or lucrative. Publishers can’t get enough of scholarship, punditry and fiction about China, and nor it seems can readers. But given the vast heterogeneity of China — race, ethnicity, language, culture and place being areas of ceaseless contestation — it is extremely difficult to define, let alone understand.
To begin with, ‘China” bears no resemblance to the name that ‘Chinese” have always used for their country: Zhongguo (Middle or Central Kingdom). ‘China” most likely derives from the state of Qin, from which came the self-proclaimed First Emperor, Qin Shi huangdi (Qin first emperor). Thanks to his tomb and surrounding army of terracotta warriors, Qin Shi huangdi is arguably the best known Chinese ruler apart from Mao Zedong.
Qin Shi huangdi is the subject of a pithy but pertinent book by respected China scholar Frances Wood, head of the Chinese department at the British Library. The First Emperor of China (Profile) goes back to first principles and shows that its subject deserves more than being simplistically damned by conventional wisdom as a bloodthirsty tyrant.
It was the First Emperor who established a state administration reaching from the imperial court to the system’s basic unit, grassroots household groups of five to 10 persons. He ordered the standardisation of the written language and the system of weights and measures, and massive road and canal projects.
Among his neglected traits, Wood tellingly unearths a report that he was unable to sleep ‘until he had read a daily quota of 30 kilos of official documents”. So, to his 2 200-year-old reputation as an autocrat must be added technocratic fervour. More than a macro-visionary, Qin Shi huangdi was also a micro-manager.
It was when Mao Zedong sought to destroy posthumously the reputation of Lin Biao that the First Emperor emerged from official disrepute to be held up as a positive example. Lin — once the designated successor to Mao — was painted as an unrepentant Confucian, in contrast to the progressive and reformist Qin Shi huangdi, champion of Legalism. Then, the First Emperor’s tomb itself was discovered, and with that he moved from ambiguity to become, writes Woods, ‘an archaeological hero”.
How distanced the People’s Republic of China is from the days of the Great Helmsman, Mao, is set out in Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip Pan (Picador). Arising from Pan’s seven years as foreign correspondent and bureau chief in Beijing for the Washington Post, this is a conscientious and perceptive work of reportage.
Pan provides a fascinating cross-section of influential and ordinary Chinese striving for the extraordinary in China: a democratic state. Necessarily, his case studies and choice of subjects are sympathetic to his thesis, though this is no case of simple-minded advocacy journalism. Partly that’s because Pan’s fluency in putonghua does make a difference; the reader never feels the anaesthetising tongue of the interpreter or translator intervening.
More than that, Pan is a realist, despite his hope that ‘the people will eventually prevail and the one-party state will fail”. First, he acknowledges the anguish and untidiness associated with political change. Second, vitally, he has a long view of history. It’s said that Chinese leaders think not in five-year plans but in 500-year prospective chunks. To understand China today is to appreciate much or all of that. Pan’s book does not begin with the First Emperor or before that, in year one of China’s more than 5 000-year history, but he is aware of the weight of that past — and the obligations of contemporary international political discourse.
Significantly, he notes that ‘the Chinese Communist Party could make a strong case for the advantages of authoritarian rule. It could point to the nation’s stunning economic achievements and argue explicitly that none of it would have been possible in a messy, multiparty system. But instead of proudly defending its record and political system, it denies its autocratic nature and tries to argue that it, too, leads a democracy.”
Qin Shi huangdi would have had no doubts about asserting autocracy over democracy. But in a global media peddling perverse notions of democracy (such as Georgia’s so-called Orange Revolution, actually an election bought by US intervention and dollars), such a position would get short shrift. Nonetheless, Hu Jintao will not be the last emperor of China; many Chinese Communist Party leaders will follow, their dark Western-style suits disguising the sentiments of imperial yellow robes beneath.
There is no such dissembling on the part of Chinese citizens, according to Jiang Rong in Wolf Totem (Hamish Hamilton). The main and excruciatingly repeated thesis of this overlong book is that Chinese are sheep in sheep’s clothing, but would do better trying to become wolves.
Rong — real name Lu Jiamin — was a volunteer in the wild country between Inner and Outer Mongolia from 1967 to 1978, perceptively fleeing the Cultural Revolution before his status as a bourgeois intellectual might have had him rusticated rather more brutally. Wolf Totem is a novelised account of the author’s experience living as a shepherd in traditional Mongolian society, topped off by philosophical reflections on the existential differences between Mongolian and Chinese culture.
The book won the inaugural Man Asia Literary Prize and has sold more than two million legal copies in China and an estimated 20 million pirated copies. Its thesis is, arguably, daring: that the millennia-old Chinese agrarian civilisation breeds only compliance and unthinking whereas the Mongolian encourages initiative and a controlled ferality that preserves rather than despoils nature.
Mongolians hold the wolf as their totem, admiring the way it helps prevent the land from becoming over-grazed by periodic hunting sprees in which hundreds of gazelles are killed by wolves operating in strategic and coordinated fashion. The packs make off with many of the carcasses, storing them in natural deep freezes, leaving others for their human co-wardens of the grasslands.
It is the Mongolian totem and their reverence for nature that Lu grew to admire and then espouse in the book, which he says he spent 30 years thinking about and six years writing.
Ultimately, reading it is the closest thing to being with Lu/Rong for all those years. Worse, this protracted experience is rendered in unremarkable prose by a translator given to gobbets of Americanese.