Inside Out

Books that seek to define China or Asia tend to have a short life span. Rummaging through the used bookstores of the world, you can collect, as I do, the tomes of earlier eras, each one offering confident predictions that have quickly turned out to be hilariously inaccurate.

In 1959, following a brief tour of the Middle Kingdom, a hapless Australian politician named Leslie Haylen published “China Journeys,” which may have set the gold standard for wrongheadedness. Mao Tse-tung had just embarked upon his Great Leap Forward. Haylen knew it would revitalize the nation. “Only the blind and the biased could ignore the significance of the tremendous rise in production this will give permanently to the Chinese economy,” he enthused. Having met with Chinese leaders, Haylen also informed his readers that Moscow and Beijing were bosom pals. “I do not believe the frequently expressed opinion that China will have a different sort of Communism to the Russian variety. That, of course, is wishful thinking.”

In very short order, the Great Leap Forward was revealed to be a calamity for the Chinese economy; the Sino-Soviet feud broke out into the open and copies of Haylen’s book began gathering dust.

Books about modern-day China are subject to many of the same vicissitudes. Over the last three decades, various authors have portrayed the Chinese as a nation of avid Maoists in the early 1970s, as Westernizing reformers in the 1980s and as apolitical money-grubbing entrepreneurs in the 1990s. Indeed, the best writers in this breezy genre (such as, for example, America’s Orville Schell) glide almost effortlessly from one entertaining image of China to another, leaving readers to wonder what ever happened to all those seemingly committed radical egalitarians (or democrats or entrepreneurs) described a few years earlier. Does all of China really change so rapidly, or merely the avant-garde of Beijing and Shanghai, or does China remain relatively constant while Western perceptions change?

It is a tribute to Jasper Becker’s new book, “The Chinese,” that he seems to have transcended the obstacles and come up with an enduring portrait of modern China. Becker doesn’t try to establish some new stereotype, of the sort that may soon be outdated, about what 1.3 billion people all want and think. Instead, he describes the deeper problems with which its government has failed to cope, such as migration from the countryside to cities or the lack of a social safety net. The result is a book that is the best available introduction to China for tourists, business executives and anyone else curious about the country.

Becker is a journalist who has been writing from inside China since the mid-1980s for The Guardian, the Economist and the South China Morning Post; he is the author of one previous book, “Hungry Ghosts,” the definitive account of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap.

“The Chinese” benefits in two important ways from his extensive reporting experience. The first is that Becker has traveled throughout China and not just in its leading cities. He gives the reader portraits of China’s “almost forgotten villages” far from paved roads, of tyrannical local despots and the peasants who occasionally try to rebel. (Visiting Zizhou, about 200 miles north of Mao’s old revolutionary headquarters at Yenan, Becker discovers that “now the peasants were afraid not of landlords but of the [Communist] Party officials who prey on them just as the landlords once did.”)

Second, Becker succeeds because he has had firsthand experience in China both before and after the great divide of 1989, when the crackdown on nationwide demonstrations that began in Tiananmen Square dramatically altered the country’s politics and leadership. Becker recognizes that the current stereotype many outsiders accept--that Chinese don’t really care about politics--is just a passing phase and a pragmatic response to repression. And yet, having lived through the last decade, he also understands the profound economic changes that have transformed China since the upheaval of 1989.

Becker’s portrayal of China is not a flattering one, certainly not to the Communist Party leadership. China’s rulers, he says, “live as a separate caste, in a style as secluded as anything created by the Qing or earlier imperial dynasties.” Whenever the nation’s leaders go on inspection tours, local and provincial cadres conspire to make sure they don’t see anything that will disturb them. In 1998, when Premier Zhu Rongji inspected flood-relief efforts in Anhui province, there seemed to be a plentiful supply of grain. Later, after getting a tip that he had been duped, he learned that the state granaries had been empty and that local officials had borrowed the grain from elsewhere to impress Zhu and show him they had everything under control.

What gives Becker’s book particular value is that it evaluates China on its own terms. The book doesn’t start with outsiders’ preconceptions or abstractions, like capitalism and communism. Rather, it begins in the countryside, exploring such issues as poverty, tax collection and, especially, agriculture; the book then moves on to cities and state-owned enterprises and from there, finally, to the roles of the army and the Communist Party. Often, Becker backtracks to explain how government policy evolved from Mao’s era through the early reforms of Deng Xiaoping to the present day. And he takes care to show how solving one problem often led to another. For example, in the interests of efficiency, Deng decentralized economic decision-making, taking power away from Beijing. However, notes Becker, “[t]he fewer specific orders the central government issued, the more autonomy local officials had.” And that gave greater scope for local abuses, such as the officials he describes in Shaanxi province who responded to a drought by hiking up the taxes on peasants.

While describing China’s dilemmas, Becker never lapses into the voice of bemused tolerance that has sometimes characterized those who have written about China in the past, like John K. Fairbank. Becker writes from the viewpoint of the Chinese people, not the government, and he regularly offers his own critical or angry judgments on what he observes. “Many urban as well as rural families bankrupt themselves trying to pay for the [medical] treatment of family members, and the fact that most public money is spent on only a fraction of the population breeds resentment,” he explains at the end of one chapter. “It is an odd complaint to make of a Communist state, but health and education are the two areas where most Chinese experience a lack of state intervention and a need for public services.”

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The West’s interest in China’s economy serves as the subtext for “The Chinese.” Becker argues that China’s economic problems are greater than outsiders realize, because of the continuing overhang of its inefficient state-owned industries, the debts they have amassed and the social upheaval that may result as China’s leadership tries to phase them out. Still, he recognizes that these days, Americans and Europeans are fascinated by China as much for its economic potential as for its culture.

So, too, growing economic power across the Pacific provides the underlying rationale for “Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia” by Nicholas B. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They look at the growing importance to the West not just of China but of Japan, India, Southeast Asia and the entire continent. Despite some recent economic problems, they argue, Asia has the people and dynamism to become ever more important to the world over the coming decades.

Kristof and WuDunn, the authors of a previous book about China called “China Wakes,” were New York Times foreign correspondents, a husband-and-wife team based in Tokyo in the late 1990s. From all appearances, they set out to write a book about Japan. “Thunder” contains a series of anecdotes about a small Japanese town called Omiya, which the authors repeatedly visited in an attempt to divine the essence of grass-roots Japan in the midst of change--but there is no comparable effort for any other Asian country.

In 1997, Kristof and WuDunn covered the Asian financial crisis that swept from Thailand throughout much of the rest of East Asia. They also seem to have thought about writing a book on that subject; “Thunder” includes two well-written chapters on the financial crisis and its aftermath.

Unfortunately, the authors tried instead to write about a subject so broad and vague that it eludes them: a portrait of all of Asia, which they somewhat arbitrarily define as the area from Afghanistan to Japan, from the Russian far east to Indonesia. The problem is that there’s not much useful that one can say about such a huge area. The authors freely acknowledge the problem at the outset: “Even if one accepts that Asia exists in some sense, it is a bit like the weather: so diverse that it is difficult to generalize about,” says Kristof. (The authors write separate, alternating chapters, except for a concluding chapter on which they collaborate.)

The result isn’t really a portrait of Asia. It includes too much of Japan, where the authors lived, and precious little about India; the book contains an odd, incongruous passage about the Pacific Islands, yet gives short shrift to more important places like North Korea, Pakistan, Singapore and Taiwan. Instead, the book is an awkward pastiche: The authors’ attempt to move from some anecdotes gathered in their reporting to sweeping conclusions about the entire continent.

This effort is strained. Kristof describes a Cambodian mother selling her child into prostitution, then suddenly jumps to the broader lesson if not a stereotype: “The cold, cruel discipline that Sriv’s parents displayed is one of the lubricants of Asia’s great economic machine: Asia arose from pain.” Paradoxically, the book becomes difficult to read, even though its sentences and paragraphs are well-written, because there is no unifying narrative or theme that can sustain interest.

Kristof and WuDunn conclude that by the year 2040, Asia “will be a more important place, and . . . will gradually displace the United States as the ‘center of the world.’ ” Perhaps. Of course, the center of the world is even more subjective and harder to define than Asia. (In fact, maybe the United States isn’t the center of the world right now.)

In the end, this seems like yet another strained effort at prediction. Kristof and WuDunn are too savvy to say anything that will be proven wrong within a few years, as Haylen did. Yet in trying to divine the vague future of a whole continent, they too fall victim to the hazards of soothsaying.