Even in the Darkness, a Thousand...

Americans have long stereotyped China. Traders in the 19th Century brought back images of erudite mandarins and laboring coolies along with their silks and teas. During the Republican era (1911-1949), U.S. officials and missionaries depicted China as racked by conflict and corruption, yet striving to emulate American democracy. The American “missionary complex” to rescue and remold China in its own image was born. In the midst of the Chinese Civil War Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek passionately pleaded to a joint session of Congress for millions in aid “to save the children of China,” while Missouri Sen. Kenneth Wherry exhorted his colleagues to “lift Shanghai up, up, forever up, until it is just like Kansas City!”

Mao’s revolution brought a new set of defining images: robotic “blue ants” laboring in lock-step; ranting Red Guards denouncing American imperialism and attacking “capitalist roaders;” and the rapprochement of the Nixon era. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping--who emerged on top from the post-Mao power struggle--was described as a “cuddly communist” and twice crowned “Man of the Year” by Time magazine for launching his “capitalist” economic reforms. The American missionary complex was reawakened and rushed to re-embrace the reformist China.

This was fueled in 1989 by the sight of millions of students and workers challenging the communist state, quoting Paine and Jefferson, and erecting a replica of the Statue of Liberty opposite Mao’s tomb in Tian An Men Square (the hallowed ground of Chinese communism). These inspirational images--broadcast by live satellite television--were soon replaced by the brutal massacre of June 4 and the enduring icon of the lone man facing down three tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. These perceptions have endured in the American public psyche for the last five years. Annual debates in the Congress over renewal of most-favored-nation trading status for China similarly revolved around the political repression Chinese and Tibetans have known since Deng Xiaoping’s hitmen invaded Beijing, guns blazing, on that hot summer night.

The publication of two new books about China in the 1990s--by longtime China-watcher Orville Schell and former New York Times Beijing correspondents Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn--will do much to define American perceptions of China until the next cataclysmic event crosses our television screens. Both document in gory detail the repression and intimidation Deng’s regime has unleashed on post-Tian An Men China but they also portray a diverse and complex society blossoming amid the Draconian coercion. The complexity they describe--especially Schell--will be difficult for Americans accustomed to simplistic stereotypes to digest, and will cause cognitive dissonance for many.

The brutality and abuse of human rights detailed in both books is shocking. Schell lays bare the horrors of the Chinese gulag, while Kristof and Wu-Dunn offer a chilling account of daily persecution and wrecked lives during 45 years under Communist Party rule. Both recount endless examples of individuals subjected to interrogation, harassment, ostracism, detention without charges, beatings, solitary confinement, forced abortions and sterilizations, hard labor, Draconian forms of torture and execution. Kristof and WuDunn recount the millions executed during various Maoist “campaigns,” and the estimated 30 million who perished in the largest famine in human history as a result of Mao’s utopian “Great Leap Forward.” One of the more grotesque revelations comes in secret Communist Party documents depicting widespread cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Kristof writes that the motivation for the cannibalism was not hunger or psychopathic illness, but ideological. Cadavers of “counterrevolutionaries” were dissected and eaten at public rallies orchestrated by zealous Communist Party officials, “students butchered and roasted their teachers and principals,” while “cafeterias displayed corpses . . . and served human flesh to government employees.” These books are not for light reading before bed.

Despite its title, “China Wakes” is a particularly damning indictment of the Chinese Communist Party and a nation not fully aroused from its long socialist slumber. There is also a personal bitterness that emerges as the Pulitzer Prize winning authors recount their five years of harassment while trying to cover the China beat. Kristof and WuDunn offer important insights into the trials and tribulations of being a foreign correspondent in China. They displayed considerable fortitude and ingenuity in the face of constant surveillance by State Security goons, regular denunciations by Foreign Ministry monitors and an impenetrable bureaucracy. While illuminating of their travails, the autobiographical nature of the text and frequent reflections on how they felt in given situations adds a personal touch but detracts--in this reader’s opinion--from an otherwise potent text. “China Wakes” also lacks a certain coherence. It is written in choppy segments, like a series of news dispatches.

Orville Schell’s “Mandate of Heaven” also strings together multiple vignettes of China in the ‘90s, but his is a more fluidly written volume. A seasoned observer of China, Schell has chronicled post-Mao China in several bestsellers: “Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!,” “To Get Rich Is Glorious!” and “Discos and Democracy.” Each has offered astute insights and polished narrative; “Mandate of Heaven” is no different. Schell has a particularly keen eye and ability to render visual and aural observations into expressive prose. A master of metaphor and cross-cultural comparisons, Schell brings a levity to “Mandate of Heaven” that is missing in the depressing “China Wakes.”

Both books reveal the diverse cast of characters that inhabit China today: pimps and prostitutes; triads, hoodlums and gangsters; cellular phone and beeper-toting entrepreneurs; newly rich tycoons with Swiss bank accounts; the 100 million homeless drifters and destitute vagrants (the so-called “floating population”); street urchins and beggars; child laborers in sweatshops; disgruntled industrial workers; rioting peasants; despotic cadres; corrupt officials; paranoid hard-line leaders who lounge in private Jacuzzis; swindlers, hustlers and scalpers; bodybuilders and pin-ups; rock musicians; transvestites; smugglers and gun runners; democracy activists and political outcasts; intimidated intellectuals; underground writers and publishers; masochistic prison guards; Han chauvinists and persecuted minorities; eremitic monks and Christian clerics; and other subterranean figures.

China today is the home of talk radio; horse racing and off-track betting; Formula One Grand Prix motor racing; karaoke bars and sex clubs; MTV and the Hard Rock Cafe. It is also a society were female infanticide is commonplace, late-term abortions are coerced and brides are bought and sold ( In Shanghai sex change operations can be had for a price; in fact, virtually anything can be had for a price in today’s China. Schell reports that even prisons charge fees for family visits, parole hearings and reductions in sentences, while Kristof and WuDunn claim that prisoners have secured release for cash payments or gifts. These phenomena are little known in the United States, where the Orwellian police state, prison labor exports, democracy activists and human rights abuses have received predominant press coverage since 1989. More recently, reports of the China’s booming economy and investment opportunities have hit the front pages (thus resurrecting another longstanding image--of the illusive China Market), but the pluralistic mosaic portrayed in these two books has not generally penetrated American perceptions. Will they stick? Probably not, given the historical penchant for simple stereotypes and the difficulty of reporting on many of these phenomena (especially by television correspondents).

What is one to make of the new Hobbesian China? Kristof and WuDunn wrestle with the complexities and implications. Their central thesis--persuasively argued--is that China today displays all the classic signs of a disintegrating dynasty. Ruled by what they describe as “red emperors,” who live remote and isolated lives behind high walls and are out of touch with their own society and the world beyond the Middle Kingdom, the population ignore or feign compliance with imperial edicts. The official ideology is a hollow shell to which even the supposed Party faithful no longer pay lip service. Corruption corrodes the body politic while workers and peasants are on the verge of revolt. An apparent illegitimacy pervades a moribund regime that clings to power through the only methods it has left--instruments of coercion.

Yet Kristof and WuDunn are upbeat about China’s future. They do not predict the dawning of democracy but believe that “China will flourish and evolve”. Orville Schell would concur, and his superb “Mandate of Heaven” offers ample evidence of the new dynamism in Chinese society. With an economy that has grown at 9% per annum over the last decade and was the world’s largest recipient of foreign investment in 1993, China is slated to overtake the gross national product of Japan by 2000 and the United States by 2010.

The rise of China as the superpower of the 21st Century is a distinct possibility. Accommodating China as a rising power--economically, militarily and politically--will be a principal challenge to the international community and American foreign policy in the years to come. However, given the myriad developments that the market has spawned, as described in these two books, the China juggernaut could just as easily come off the rails. It is not unfathomable that China could fragment like the former Soviet Union with various minority regions seeking their independence, or that China could convulse again in civil conflict. What is clear is that the current state of affairs is tenuous, and that the rush of foreign investment is pouring into a very volatile country. No nation of such size has undergone rapid and wrenching change of such magnitude in such a short period as has China over the past 15 years. Whether China grows strong and powerful or erupts in conflict, it will have a destabilizing effect on Asia and the United States.

Prediction of China’s future has always been hazardous, and as Kristof and WuDunn remind us “China-watching is an exercise in humiliation,” but the trajectory of change is clearly and elegantly described in these two compelling books.