BOOK REVIEWS

Jasper Becker, The Chinese

With The Chinese, Jasper Becker gives us once again an important work on contemporary China. In 1996, the author had already published a remarkable work on the famine brought about by the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1961(1). In The Chinese, he draws a broad and uncompromising picture of China in reform. It is a book that is resolutely aimed at a general readership, but China watchers will also find political, economic and social subjects dealt with in depth. In the course of 15 chapters, Jasper Becker offers us a journey through China in reform, moving from one group to another of the main actors of Chinese society: from the marginalised, such as the peasants of the national minorities in mountainous regions, to those who are being excluded, like the public sector working urban proletariat, and on to the beneficiaries who are seeking political recognition, like the private entrepreneurs, and finishing up with the all-powerful who shelter behind the walls of Zhongnanhai.

As Peking bureau chief of the Hong Kong English language daily The South China Morning Post, Jasper Becker has accustomed us to long reports dealing with the most controversial questions of reform in China's society. The choice of presenting the evolution of China over the last twenty years by constructing an argument based on reports is salutary in a country where information and statistics are manipulated and truncated to such an extent that they lose much of their power to grasp the economic and social realities. It is true that the shift from “micro” to “macro” has always been a difficult exercise in social science, and some might criticise Jasper Becker for the journalistic reflex which leads him to draw general conclusions on Chinese reforms from isolated facts. But this would be an unfounded accusation. On the one hand The Chinese is not only a collection of journalistic reportage: every chapter has been researched in depth and is backed up with relevant statistics which complement a degree of experience in the field to which few researchers could lay claim. On the other hand, and this needs to be emphasised, this angle of attack has the merit of generating information too often neglected in the analysis of developing countries. The Asian recession of 1997 and recent dramatic developments in Argentina illustrate only too well the blinding tyranny of statistics over the macroeconomic fundamentals of Third World countries. Those who, like Jasper Becker, travel all over China and tell stories of real life, of local situations, from the triumphant China of the coast to the diminished China of the countryside, from the urban peripheries to the regions of the interior, show us a multitude of facts which do not fit into the grandiose macroeconomic picture, skilfully orchestrated with dubious statistics by Chinese government propaganda, which now fashions the smug optimism, against a background of realpolitik, of foreign governments and company managers.

Avoiding the opposite pitfall of a China in chaos, Jasper Becker in fact gives us a more contrasted, and more balanced, vision of the “Chinese economic miracle”. China is indeed an “enormous country with an equally enormous population” as our Chinese interlocutors often say fatalistically in the course of conversation. This makes it possible for the extremes to melt into this immensity, and for China to move forward as best it can. But Jasper Becker points out developments or the return of old demons which are too worrying to be languidly dismissed. The growing inequalities between the cities and the countryside; the state's neglect of its essential public service duties, especially in education and health, which leads to growing income-based discrimination among the Chinese population; the endemic corruption of Communist Party and state cadres, especially in rural areas, where revolt is growing; the accelerating insecurity of the situation of workers in the urban public and collective sectors, as a result of hasty and secretive restructuring which leads to the control of company assets by the local nomenklatura. Lastly, to mention only some of the major themes dealt with by the author, the durability of the Communist Party's all-powerful grip on society and its consequences on the absence of the rule of law, the feudalism and local patronage systems, and above all the lack of democratic counterweights without which the bureaucracy, however enlightened, cannot manage the complexity of the problems. Most of these have already been widely dealt with by China specialists and, paradoxically, more or less openly recognised by the Chinese authorities, but Jasper Becker seeks both to connect them with each other and to let us experience them through a face, a village, a neighbourhood, which leads to a detailed, more complete and living picture of China in the 1990s.

The journey on which the author invites us, through the description of different categories of individuals, provides us with the key to a reading of contemporary Chinese society where the possession of political power plays a central role. The situation of all the groups described by Jasper Becker, as well as the social rise of individuals, are still almost exclusively determined by the possession of political power, to the detriment of regulations based on the rule of law. The author shows, with many examples, that the grafting of an impressive number of legal texts promulgated over the last twenty years on to such a political system does not lead to the rule of law. All nations, even the most democratic, suffer from the difficulty of restraining political power, but the problem reaches such a point in China that Jasper Becker's book will make the uninitiated discover, and forcefully remind knowledgeable observers, that privilege, preferential treatment, corruption, exclusion, inequality, lies and human rights violations remain the rule and not the exception in the workings of contemporary Chinese society. It is difficult not to quote one of the most powerful sentences in the conclusion: “A society in which nobody is prepared to tell the truth, whether about historical facts, great or small, or on the level of commercial transactions between individuals or companies, cannot prosper” (p. 374). The author somewhat underestimates capitalism's ability to develop in a world of mendacity in commercial transactions, but he is right to emphasise the destructive effects of the cynicism and hypocrisy which preside over economic and political relations in China, and which may well pose a serious problem in the pursuit of the country's development.

However not all is dark in the author's analysis, even if the optimistic elements do not make up the added value of the book. He shows a society which is increasingly well informed and harbours demands for institutional modernisation and greater social justice. Jasper Becker may or may not be right in thinking that the spread of new or traditional instruments of information may push more and more individuals to demand more respect for their rights, as incorporated in the laws which have been passed by the legislators in the last twenty years and which have often remained unknown to the population, especially in the countryside. But it is above all the democratic evolution of the sibling rival, the nationalist party (Kuomintang) in Taiwan, which offers, according to the author, a tremendous example and perhaps a hope to Communist China, by showing that a party which emerged from the same totalitarian and cultural mould has found a way to manage a transition towards democracy, towards a more open and egalitarian society. On the basis of what has happened in Taiwan, the author closes the book with the assertion that the next decade will be decisive for the Communist regime.

All in all, there are few criticisms to be made of this excellent book. A few minor errors need to be pointed out, like the enigmatic meaning given by the author to the Chinese word gongren, which means worker, not “public people” (p. 157), or the confusion in the chronology over the date of the first democratic elections in Taiwan, the Lifayuan in 1992, not 1995 (p. 376). Above all it it a shame that the author resorted, in the introduction, to a historical-cultural argumentation which is a little too rigid to explain the organisation and nature of present-day political power as well as the inertia in contemporary Chinese society. The author emphasises the the permanence of totalitarian power, which goes back to Chinese imperial times, especially to the third century BC, the Qing Shihuang(2) era. The communist leaders, and Mao Zedong in particular, are said to have drawn considerable inspiration, in their management of power and of the organisation of the state, from the totalitarian methods of the imperial era. This view is far from inaccurate, and Jasper Becker is right to emphasise, as have many other illustrious authors, the fact that the communist leaders were much more focused on their own history than on political developments in the twentieth century. However, despite the necessities of a general target audience which impose a summary of Chinese history in a few pages, this view leads to a kind of oversimplistic immutability of Chinese political power by presenting a historical connection with Chinese antiquity which is too linear and unambiguous.

Translated from the French original by Michael Black