As I mentioned in the previous post, something I’m going to be trying to do on my blog is to publish more book reviews. I wanted to start by thinking about a book that I have just finished reading, China Road, by Rob Gifford.
I was talking to a Chinese friend of a friend a few weeks back. She is from a Xian, perhaps best known as the home of the Terracotta Army. We got talking about the...
more As I mentioned in the previous post, something I’m going to be trying to do on my blog is to publish more book reviews. I wanted to start by thinking about a book that I have just finished reading, China Road, by Rob Gifford.
I was talking to a Chinese friend of a friend a few weeks back. She is from a Xian, perhaps best known as the home of the Terracotta Army. We got talking about the future of China and what kind of country it might become. I mentioned to her a story I had recently heard about a conversation between Harry Truman and Winston Churchill on the day that the latter delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech. So the story goes, on the train, Churchill was talking about how privileged he had been to have be born British at a time when that meant something and the opportunities it gave him to shape the world. He then went on to admit to Truman that, if he were a young man today, he would wish to be born an American. Would a modern version of this conversation, I wondered, feature Churchill wishing he were Chinese?
Actually, he probably wouldn’t, as we aren’t comparing like with like. Churchill’s admission that he would like to be American wasn’t a huge leap for him, as he was half American anyway; it just so happened his father was English and his mother American. And, even with these personal circumstances accepted, and although there were undoubtedly some huge geopolitical changes as power moved across the Atlantic during the middle years of the twentieth century, the move from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana was also marked by the continuity it created, grounded in a number of strong similarities between the two nations - language and political system being the most obvious. The same cannot be said of the potential rise of China - it is a very different country to any of the economic superpowers that proceeded it.
Yet the jury is still out on exactly what China’s future role in geopolitics will be. Certainly, in recent times, it has become quite common for revisionist texts (perhaps a slightly over the top word to use - realist might be better - but there is no doubt they reject the current zeitgeist on the issue), such as Susan Shirk’s Fragile Superpower for example, to question whether China will be able to the ascend to the top of the international pile as easily and as quickly as some have predicted.
Debates such as this lie at the heart of China Road. Gifford is a British journalist who has worked for American Public Radio in China for a number of years. When he was offered a new assignment in London, he decided to take one last trip through the PRC. And it was an ambitious one - he planned to follow the length of Route 312, a road he likens to the Chinese version of Route 66. His journey took him from the sky scrapers of Shanghai to the border with Kazakhstan. As well as this book detailing his journey, Gifford also recorded for a radio programme for American radio (which is excellent and still available online here). The question at the heart of the China Road is this: Is Chinese power sustainable, despite the massive contradictions and problems that riddle the country? And if it is, what kind of superpower will China be? The answer to these questions are hugely significant. The sub-title of the book claims that Route 312 represents a journey into the future of a rising power. However, if Chinese power continues to grow, it might also represent a journey into all our futures.
Along the route, through a combination of the people he meets and drawing on his own experience, Gifford is able to draw out some conclusions about modern China.
Firstly, China has a very strange relationship with its past, simultaneously rejecting much of it, but also using that rejection as a catalyst for future prosperity. This idea is particularly well illustrated in a scene Gifford describes in Shanghai. Western holiday makers are all looking at old buildings, either pre-dating or from the colonial period. In contrast, Chinese tourists spend their time looking at sky scrapers and the wonders of modern China. The Chinese future is therefore constructed around a notion of “never again†- never again will the country be regarded as a second-rate power or be taken advantage of by neighbours and rivals.
Secondly, the idea of “China†is historically very powerful, perhaps because it is seen as the best way to offset the insecurities created by Chinese history. On a number of occasions, the whole country has looked like falling to pieces and being reduced to its disparate elements, but this sense of unity has held it together, acting as a centrifugal force, always encouraging the next generation of governors to reassert their authority over the whole region. A number of methods have been used to do this over the years - offering some degree of autonomy to far-flung regions, brutal military repression and ethnic integration. A modern variation of the latter approach is to be found in scholarships offered to Muslims from eastern China, so as they have the opportunity to be educated in the west of the country (and, of course, at the same time, not be educated in the ways of their traditional lifestyle).
However, it is questionable whether the idea of offsetting Chinese history and ensuring Chinese unity can survive the social pressures created by the breakneck speed of the country’s development. Pressure could conceivably come from both the “haves†and the “have nots†this process has created.
Both liberal and Marxist readings Western history would suggest that a growing middle class will inevitably become very assertive and, ultimately, demand political power. However, Gifford convincingly argues that much of the current Chinese middle class - sired during the Cultural Revolution and the years immediately afterwards - have rejected the notion of politics, and instead focus their energies on achieving prosperity. The freedoms that have been granted to the middle classes - to consume and to own - are part of Faustian pact wherein they do not demand the one thing the Chinese government is fearful of them asking for: political power.
The danger from the middle classes, at least in the short term then, might be over stated. But there are other threats to the Chinese government, from further down the socio-economic ladder. As Gifford travels Route 312 west-to-east, he moves beyond the hyper-industrial belt on the western side of the country, and travels into rural China, where life is much harder. They know little of the development of the Chinese economy or the fledging superpower they are a part of. One story Gifford tells underlines just how stark these differences are. In 2003, China successfully launched its own astronaut (or Taikonaut) into space using a the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft. When reporters interviewed students in Beijing, they got long and detailed answers about what a great day this was for China and how proud they were. When they went fifty miles outside Beijing, the normal answer they received was what’s Shenzhou 5? When they went one hundred miles from Beijing a more common answer was what’s outer space?
There are certainly signs rural China is not stable; in 2005, there were no fewer than 80,000 incidents of rural unrest in the country. Additionally, people are voting with their feet and vacating the countryside. In traversing the road in the direction he chooses, Gifford is moving against the grain, against a remarkable, almost inconceivably large swell of humanity. In recent years, between 150 and 200 million Chinese citizens have gone in the opposite direction. To put that figure in some perspective, I remember reading as an undergraduate about the Great Migration of 1914 to 1950, when African-Americans left the south of the country, in order to escape racist state laws, and moved to northern cities, such as Chicago and Detroit. The particular book I was reading described the Great Migration as the biggest migration to have occurred within a country in human history - yet it only comprised of one million people. Set in this context, it becomes clear that the migration patterns in modern China dwarf anything any country has ever experienced before.
Yet whilst migration might be the human manifestation of the poverty and social hardship endemic in rural China, it also signifies something else, which might bode well for China’s future and continued growth. People are moving not just out of desperation, but also out of hope, searching for what government propaganda campaigns have called “moderate prosperityâ€. Maybe we are starting to see the emergence of something akin to a “Chinese dreamâ€. And if the history of the world’s current great power tells us anything, it is that such ideas - even if they are unevenly distributed, palpably false or derided - are powerful agents of (depending on perspective) social cohesion or control, and can also act as stupendous catalysts for growth.
[Originally published: http://www.nickanstead.com/blog/?p=425]
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