BOOK REVIEWS

Robert Benewick and Stephanie Donald, State of China Atlas

One hundred and twenty pages, 14 cm x 24, here is an atlas that is supremely easy to handle; yet, that offers a huge mass of information, in the form of maps and a varied and colourful range of histograms with commentary.

In all, this atlas contains 35 individual plates (maps and histograms) throughout its six parts: “Demography” (four plates), “Economy” (ten plates), “The Party-State” (eight plates), “The State and Society” (nine plates), “The Environment” (three plates) and “China in a Period of Transition” (one plate). These are followed by “A Synoptic Table of China’s Provinces”, which contain most of the statistics conveyed in the maps, together with a table headed “China and the Rest of the World” providing a series of 18 sets of statistics for 35 countries. Lastly, there are 22 pages of commentary plus a dense bibliography. The commentaries themselves are apt and instructive, a mine of information within a relatively brief amount of space—somewhere between 40 and 60 lines per plate.

A typical plate is laid out as follows, taking the plate for energy as the example (Plate 11, Part Two). There are two maps, the first giving the annual production of coal, province by province, expressed by a range of colours, and that of crude oil represented by drops of oil (at least, that is how I interpret these little icons), their size being proportional to production: under each drop, just to make sure, is the production figure. The second map shows by a range of colours the annual production of electricity as well as the existing and planned distribution of nuclear power stations as well as the particular role played by hydro-electric power. Lastly, the maps are supplemented with three histograms. The first shows China’s place (at the end of 1995) among the world’s ten leading producers of coal and electricity: this puts it at the top but, without figures for production per capita, this histogram is not very meaningful. The second illustrates the consumption of energy from a variety of sources as a percentage of total consumption (1997), indicating the overwhelming importance of coal (73.5%). The third histogram illustrates the development of energy production (1997-2000), by giving output figures for the four main sources (coal, oil, gas and electricity) in 1997 and the targets set for the year 2000.

We must give credit to the efforts made to provide a diverse set of statistics but, as with all publications dealing with contemporary China, the book relies principally on the official China Statistical Yearbook, the New Testament of the People’s Republic. Yet—and this is not the case with all publications, far from it in fact—the writers have taken care in their introduction to underline the problem with the reliability of official Chinese statistics: they were not, of course, able to do much about it.

While the writers Robert Benewick (professor at the University of Sussex) and Stephanie Donald (lecturer at Murdoch University, Australia) clearly have an extensive knowledge of contemporary China, what is lacking is real cartographic competence; and, for an atlas, this amounts to a serious drawback. To mention only the main points of this drawback, two elementary and basic rules of cartography have not been respected, a failing that means that most of the maps are hard to read and more what you would find in a colouring book than in an atlas. To be specific, when displaying statistics on a map—showing provinces in this case—the first rule requires that values should be divided into a reasonably small number of bands (five or six)—as was done here—each one being represented by a colour the relative intensity of which within the range should convey visually the importance of the values: this is the rule that has been most frequently ignored. As a result, we end up with a Harlequin costume that is less immediately readable than a table of statistics! For an atlas, what a damning indictment!

The second rule demands that if, instead of a range of colours—or as well as a range of colours, as is the case in this atlas—one uses shapes the sizes of which are proportional to the values one seeks to represent, these shapes must as far as possible be geometrical shapes that are immediately comparable; they should not, other than in exceptional circumstances, be a haphazard collection of little drawings. Such things might certainly be appreciated by small children—but how could an atlas of contemporary China be of interest to small children, bearing in mind that it contains not the remotest glimpse of a panda? On the other hand, the opportunity for a striking design was missed on plate 22—“The State Against the Citizens”—in which the map represents, using coloured blocks, the numbers of people condemned to death, province by province, in 1997 (source: Amnesty International); also shown is the number of executions, which are represented by bursts of yellow flame (in proportional sizes) symbolising, it would seem, a gun shot… but one might equally take them to be sheaves of wheat! Here, the opportunity to use a bold death’s head design that could have been interpreted without the slightest hesitation was missed!

These failings in cartographic technique are truly vexing, even sometimes counterproductive. This is regrettable, for we have here, in an extremely manageable format, a vast store of information and a real time-saver—if we are not too insistent on the virtues of official figures.

Translated from French original by Philip Liddell