SOME OF JOHN BYRON'S
REVIEWS AND ESSAYS



作為西方人,您怎樣看中國?
長期居住在亞洲的西方人, 漢學家拜倫, 帶您瞭解中國社會的發展.






BODY OF LIES  By David Ignatius

David Ignatius's novel, Body of Lies, tells a fascinating tale of political and personal intrigue, but it also provides a compelling vision of the problems that the United States in particular and the West in general face in the Middle East.  Indeed, Body of Lies is an excellent example of how a genre novel, in this case a spy-come-love story, can illuminate the dynamics of international politics. 

Body of Lies tells the story of a CIA officer, Roger Ferris, who is posted to Iraq and then, after being injured by a terrorist RPG attack, transferred to the safer environment of Jordan, where he becomes the official link between the CIA and the Jordanian intelligence service.  The story centres on Ferris's elaborate plan to sow dissension within Al Qaeda by running a disinformation operation inspired by reading about a subterfuge that the British used before the allied invasion of Sicily to deceive the Germans into thinking they planned to invade Greece.  Ferris's plan involves planting a dead American, equipped with mobile phone cards and documents that make him look like a CIA operative, on the Afghan border as a way of feeding provocative disinformation to Al Qaeda about the mastermind behind a series of  its bombings in Europe.  But the operation is highjacked by the Jordanian secret service, which converts the CIA plot into a ruthless and bloody game.

David Ignatius is an Op-Ed writer for the Washington Post and an authority on Middle Eastern issues, and in Body of Lies he shows how the virulent anti-Western sentiment that seethes in Islamic communities is a product of the hatred and frustration caused by decades of violent oppression, often by Israel but also by various Arab regimes.  He persuasively depicts the way random violence destroys individual lives and disrupts  communities, and how this breeds a mindset that has few outlets except anti-Western violence.

Ignatius is less authoritative when describing the CIA and its covert procedures.  He knows the first three digits, 482, of the CIA telephone exchange and the general layout of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.  He also understands the role of mobile phones and the internet in the hands of terrorists, how vulnerable the internet is to manipulation, and how mobile phones are targets for electronic surveillance by organizations like NSA.  But he displays a naïve sense of how the Agency staffs  embassies and who does what.  Ferris heads the CIA station in Jordan and liaises with the Jordanian intelligence service, but Ignatius also has him undertaking covert operations although he has already been declared as an intelligence officer to the local security service.  In reality that would never happen.  Undeclared CIA officers would do the dirty work. 

Ignatius's most amusing blunder is to make the station's operations chief, who would be undeclared to the host government, responsible for briefing CODELS, as Congressional Delegations are known in US foreign service lingo, on intelligence issues.  In fact few actions would be more likely to blow a CIA operative's cover than talking with Congressmen.  But such blemishes are far from fatal.  Ignatius knows much more about the modern Middle Eastern world than about the CIA, and this is where the strength of his novel lies.

Body of Lies is also a love story, and although this drives the novel's exciting denouement, it sometimes comes across as a trifle artificial, and raises one serious problem.  The romance involves Ferris and an American woman working for an NGO in Jordan.  As a declared CIA officer Ferris would know that his emotional intimacy with a woman could endanger her, a realization that should lead to some protective measures.  Ferris acts courageously, but only when it is too late.  I leave it for the reader to discover the consequences of Ferris's tardiness.

Many scenes in this book trigger intriguing questions about today's world.  For example, Ferris's scheme to deceive Al Qaeda involves a conservative Muslim architect meeting with a CIA-controlled former Afghan guerilla fighter in order to create the misleading impression that the two were in a conspiracy.  Such a ploy makes sense, and underscores the need to distinguish between the external appearance of a situation and the inner reality.  According to press reports at the time, before the 9/11 terrorist attacks an Al Qaeda representative met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Vienna.  Body of Lies leads the reader to wonder whether this meeting was designed by Usama bin Laden to direct American suspicions towards Iraq, the main secular state in the Arab world.  If so, bin Laden's plan worked perfectly, and he would be laughing wherever he is hiding today.

The value of Ignatius's novel is that it inspires this sort of question.

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CHINA ROAD:  A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE OF A RISING POWER By Rob Gifford, Bloomsbury, London, New York, and Berlin

CHARM OFFENSIVE: HOW CHINA'S SOFT POWER IS TRANSFORMING THE WORLD, By Joshua Kurlantzick, Melbourne University Press  

These two books contain valuable insights into today's China, the way it operates, its interaction with the outside world, and the dilemmas it faces.  Both authors are journalists by profession, but their experiences are different and that is reflected in their approach.  Joshua Kurlantzick is a Washington-based journalist with close contacts to the US think-tank world, and experience as a Thai-speaking reporter based in Thailand.  Rob Gifford worked for six years as a reporter in China, after beginning to study Chinese in Beijing in 1987.  As a consequence, while both writers see China as a rising power, they view the dynamics that determine the directions China will take from different perspectives.   

Joshua Kurlantzick's Charm Offensive provides a well-researched account of China's evolving engagement with the international community since the mid 1990s.   He provides extensive data about how China is now involved in the world community, providing aid and investment, participating in multilateral diplomacy, promoting cultural activities, engaging in international business, and generating tourist flows.

Kurlantzick argues that China's international influence is growing as a consequence of its economic rise and astute use of "soft power", by which he means China's diplomatic emphasis on multilateral forums, aid to African countries and public relations.  He is concerned about the implications of this increase in Chinese influence for the United States' global role, but acknowledges that China's growing influence is also a function of Washington's policy blunders, including the invasion of Iraq and the downgrading of US public diplomacy.  He does not overplay the Chinese challenge to the US, and concludes that American military and diplomatic influence will remain unparalleled for many years yet. 

But Kurlantzick's thesis misinterprets much of what China is doing today.  He assumes that China took a decision to launch a "charm offensive" in order to increase its international influence.  In fact much of the diplomatic behaviour Kurlantzick describes is a direct result of the economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping introduced in the 1980s. 

The increasing number of Chinese tourists going overseas is a case in point.  Until 1985 Chinese were unable to get a passport unless they had some government recognized need for one.  Today any Chinese can apply for a passport and, if he or she has sufficient funds, travel overseas as a tourist.  This is not a consequence of a Chinese plan to make the outside world dependent on Chinese tourism, but of the desire of many Chinese to see the world and be photographed below the Eiffel Tower or in front of the Sydney Opera House.  Foreign governments encourage Chinese tourism and the Australian Tourist Commission puts in a big effort to attract Chinese tourists, with no negative consequences for Australia.

China's multilateral diplomacy is another example.  Kurlantzick implies that many of the regional multilateral forums that have emerged in East and South-East Asia, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asian Summit, and APEC, were somehow the product of a Chinese drive to create platforms on which it could exercise international influence.  In fact, regional countries, including Australia, created these forums in part to provide a multilateral context within which China could be engaged, and encouraged to come out of its Maoist cocoon

One of the main shortcomings of Charm Offensive is that the author evaluates Chinese foreign policy from an external perspective.  Kurlantzick is not a China scholar, and makes up for this by drawing on Washington think tank analysts, who are experts in their own fields but who usually have a limited sense of the big picture.  Consequently Charm Offensive does not display a strong sense of the enormous changes that have swept China since the 1980s and which shape China's involvement in the outside world and openness to external influence. 

While Kurlantzick analyses China's international profile, in China Road Rob Gifford uses the format of a travel journal recording a road trip across China from Shanghai to China's frontier with Kazakhstan to portray life in China today for the middle and upper classes as well as for the struggling peasants, who form the bulk of the population. Gifford paints a lively portrait of modern Chinese, and their sense that in general life is much better and promises much more than it did during the Maoist era.  He plays up the ubiquity of mobile phones --- over 400 million --- and nationwide broadband access and rightly points out that these are major drivers of change and integration with the global community.  He also records numerous conversations with Chinese he meets on his journey.  These conversations reflect the complex character of China today---some of his traveling companions are construction workers looking for work out west, others are students on their way to high school, one is a mobile phone salesman and some are Amway representatives selling cosmetics in China's western regions. 

Gifford also highlights the problems facing China, including corruption, the greed and high-handedness of local governments and the way their land grabs and illegal taxes on the peasantry cause serious tensions.  He describes the contradictions bedeviling China, from the conflict between nationalistic impulses and the desire to be accepted as part of the global community, the high level of personal freedom contrasted with minimal movement towards democratic political processes, and the enormous economic divide between the wealthy coastal provinces and China's much poorer inland provinces.  But for all the problems he identifies, he acknowledges that on many fronts China is doing much better than India, which despite a democratic political system has a per capita income half that of China's, and a literacy rate of 60% compared with China's 93%.

Gifford offers numerous insights into China, and has an enthusiasm for books written about China by other foreigners, but his grasp of Chinese history and culture is at times shaky.  This is apparent in his generalizations about traditional Chinese art, but is most obvious in his repeated reference to the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the last emperor, as the "1912 Revolution", despite the fact that the uprising began on 10 October 1911, and destroyed the imperial regime before the end of the year.  He also confuses some other factual issues, including describing as "rice wine" the highly alcoholic Chinese spirits like Mautai, which are distilled from either sorghum or corn, not rice.  But if Gifford wrote this passage the morning after a night drinking Mautai he should be excused!

These two books work well together, but given that Gifford delivers a direct picture of China today, I would read China Road first.  Charm Offensive is easier to assess once one has a feeling for the internal dynamics driving China.  

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SPY WARS:  MOLES, MYSTERIES, AND DEADLY GAMES  By Tennent H. Bagley,  Yale University Press, New Haven & London

Spy Wars tells the intricate and disturbing story of a KGB operative, Yuri Nosenko, who defected to the US in 1964, claiming that he had had access to Lee Harvey Oswald's KGB file and assuring the Americans that the Soviet regime was not behind the Kennedy assassination.  The author, Tennent ‘Pete' Bagley, was the first CIA officer  meet Nosenko when the latter sought contact with the CIA during a short-term mission to Geneva in 1962.  Two years later in Washington Bagley became the case officer responsible for unravelling the truth and lies in Nosenko's claims about his work for the KGB, the circumstances of other defectors and agents, as well as Oswald's time in the USSR.  Bagley vividly portrays the challenging uncertainties of counter-intelligence work --- the task of penetrating foreign intelligence agencies and assessing their operations --- and provides an insider's perspective on the debates that raged within the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Bagley does not suggest that the Soviets were behind Kennedy's death, but focuses on the numerous inconsistencies in Nosenko's story and concludes that he must have been a plant intended to conceal KGB penetration of the CIA and the FBI.  Bagley does not seem to consider, however, the possibility that Nosenko might have simply been an alcoholic womanizer keen to escape to a much freer society.   Bagley and his CIA team held Nosenko a prisoner for three years, first in a safe house in suburban Maryland and then on a CIA base near Williamsburg in Virginia, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bagley is now making a sincere effort to justify his handling of Nosenko.   

While the Nosenko case has little direct relevance to events today, Bagley's analysis of the KGB and its tactics of deception and violence provides a timely account of the Russian approach to the role of clandestine operations in domestic and international politics.  The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London last November makes Bagley's treatment of the KGB's history especially relevant to understanding the Russia of Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer.

Bagley writes from a personal perspective, interspersing his recollection of Nosenko's comments and drinking habits with long passages on the history of Russian intelligence organisations.  In doing so he produces a highly readable history of the Soviet approach to intelligence, security and disinformation, and uncovers how a number of key Western agents within the Soviet system, including Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky, were caught.  But he tends to gloss over some of the key steps in the evolution of the Soviet intelligence system from the Cheka, through the NKVD, to the KGB, using frustrating phrases like "KGB (then called NKVD)" instead of exploring the politics behind each new phase.  Bagley also overlooks the enormous differences between the tightly controlled Soviet bloc, where politics permeated everything, and the liberal West, and the appeal of a Western life-style to potential Russian defectors.

But although Bagley's account of KGB methods is fascinating, he is less persuasive when tracking developments within the CIA.  His analysis of the internal history of the CIA reflects his own role as the advocate for the guilt of the most controversial KGB defector the Agency ever received, and this undermines the sense of detached analysis.  He is dismissive of William Colby, who took over the Agency in 1973 and introduced a new approach to counter-intelligence work and sacked James J. Angleton, the CIA's long-time counter-intelligence chief, who had supported Bagley's handling of the Nosenko case.

Bagley avoids discussing at length the controversies surrounding Angleton, who was known for his eccentric life-style and arcane theories about Soviet deception and manipulation of Western governments.  He perhaps calculates that any attempt to rehabilitate Angleton, whose problems included a close friendship with Kim Philby, the most famous KGB mole in British intelligence, would jeopardize his own case.

Bagley does not attempt to disguise his personal stake in the judgment history makes of the Nosenko case.  As a consequence allowances can be made for Bagley's underlying assumptions and Spy Wars can be read as a fascinating account of Soviet espionage with a rich supply of footnoted authorities and revealing  appendices.  The CIA ultimately exonerated Nosenko, but Bagley still believes that he was a plant intended to mislead the US in the secret war with Russia.  Readers must decide who is right, but Spy Wars is both an informative and challenging study of an extraordinarily obscure battlefield.

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THE TIANANMEN PAPERS  Compiled by Zhang Liang and edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link with an Afterword by Orville Schell, Public Affairs, New York

The Tiananmen Papers is a tantalizing and yet difficult book to review.  It deals with a momentous theme, namely the massive demonstrations in Beijing and across China during May 1989, which showed that the old-style Communist regime no longer constituted a viable form of government in China.  And yet despite containing many hitherto unseen documents, the book reveals little that is new about the spectacle of courage and idealism that captured the attention of a global audience.  In fact, the most interesting aspects of this volume relate to issues that readers, like reviewers, can only speculate about: the origins of the documents, and the way they reached the West; and the political objectives of the Chinese who exported them to the United States.  Indeed, the answers to these questions could well be more illuminating than the documents themselves, which, despite extensive publicity and press hype, retell in the bland language of the Chinese bureaucracy an already well-known story.

The Tiananmen Papers comprise hundreds of documents, many of them published in edited or summary form, that relate to the Chinese government's decision to declare martial law and if necessary use force to end the student protests in Beijing during May 1989.  The documents are prefaced by a statement from "Zhang Liang", the pseudonym of a Chinese who represents himself as their compiler, set in context by one of the main editors, Professor Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia University, and followed by the comments of Orville Schell, dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, on the problems of authenticating Chinese documents.  There is also a comprehensive array of annotations that explicate details likely to be unfamiliar to non-specialist readers.

The documents vary considerably in character and sensitivity: some are foreign press reports that were presented to China's senior leaders; some are Chinese intelligence reports about the student demonstrations; some are accounts of informal discussions among China's senior policy makers; and others are records of formal politburo meetings.  Taken collectively these documents give a detailed picture of the information that was available to China's senior leaders and the debates they conducted as they grappled with the almost unprecedented challenge of a mass urban protest movement.

The student protests began with the death on 15 April 1989 of Hu Yaobang, a former Chinese Communist Party general secretary.  The documents record the government's attempts to manage popular expressions of sympathy with Hu, who had been dismissed from office for allegedly having been soft in responding to student demonstrations in 1987.  The papers then track the leaders' reactions as the crisis escalated when many students began a hunger strike and attracted an upsurge of support from the public at large.  

The level of alarm among the leaders increased towards mid May, when the demonstrations disrupted arrangements for the visit of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.  During this period Deng Xiaoping and a coterie of Party veterans who no longer held formal office combined with conservative members of the politburo to decide to declare martial law.  The then Party general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, opposed this course of action and, according to the papers, offered to resign and then went on sick leave.

The documents climax with accounts of the events surrounding the crackdown on 4 June, when PLA troops shot their way through barriers on the outskirts of Beijing, cleared Tiananmen Square, and created an atmosphere of terror that had not been known in China since the mid 1970s.  The papers conclude with the Central Committee meeting on 24 June that saw the formal removal of Zhao Ziyang and his replacement by Jiang Zemin, who until then had been the Party boss in Shanghai, where the demonstrations had been handled without violence.

The story that these papers relate is already widely known.  James Lilley, who as the US ambassador in Beijing during the Tiananmen period would be conversant with how much the US government knew of the crisis, commented to the press after their release that they seem to contain little new.  Moreover, the category of documents of most interest, namely those relating the discussions among the top Party leaders, were written by officials note-takers who have produced bland, bureaucratic accounts of the conversations being recorded.  Deng Xiaoping's personal office prepared the records of the politburo meeting at which Zhao Ziyang failed to prevent the decision to impose martial law and the gathering of elders that selected Jiang Zemin as Zhao's successor.  Both documents leave much that has to be read between the lines.

Even when read together with the supplementary editorial passages, the documents only illuminate one dimension of those events.  They include few insights into the state of mind of the student leaders and the calculations that were behind their actions.  At least part of the responsibility for the ultimate tragedy lies with a small group of students.  Instead of accepting a compromise that would have opened the way to greater liberalization, some of the protest leaders became so intoxicated with their sense of power that they pushed the campaign to the point where a violent end game became a likely outcome.

A more disturbing omission is the lack of information about the contacts between some of Zhao Ziyang's advisers and the student leaders.  Zhao's closest confidant, Bao Tong, developed a covert relationship with the student leaders, providing them with guidance and participating in some of their tactical deliberations.  The "Papers" include several pro-forma Party documents setting out the charges that led to Bao Tong's arrest on 27 May, but this aspect of the story is dealt with in sketchy terms, conveying the misleading impression that the accusations against Bao Tong were the groundless product of conspiracy theorists.

These omissions raise a broader issue.  The assumption that underpins The Tiananmen Papers is that the Tiananmen crisis was a consequence of a contest between a student democracy movement and an inflexible Communist gerontocracy.  In fact, some senior Party officials were seeking to exploit the movement to undermine if not destroy Deng Xiaoping's power.  Bao Tong was part of this group.  How far Zhao was implicated in the attack on Deng is unclear, but his statement in a public address during Gorbachev's visit to the effect that the Party central committee had passed a secret resolution giving Deng the final say on sensitive policy issues raises serious questions about his motives.  In The Tiananmen Papers Zhao justifies this revelation by arguing that he wanted to explain to all Chinese that Deng's continuing authority derived from a legitimate Party decision.  But by pointing the finger at Deng, Zhao seemed to be distancing himself from Deng, and hinting that the ugly phenomena the students were demonstrating against were somehow largely Deng's responsibility.   In many respects the Tiananmen crisis reflected a struggle for power between two groups with different approaches to reform: Deng and his allies wanted a measured reform program with economic change at the forefront, while those around Zhao wanted to accelerate the process irrespective of the impact on national stability.  Unfortunately these materials do not clarify Zhao's position, but that may simply reflect the confusion about policy issues that obtained among China's ruling elite at the time.

The Tiananmen Papers tell us little about China today.  The Chinese individual who provided these documents to the editors says that the Communist Party has strengthened its grip on society since Tiananmen.  In fact since the Tiananmen incident China has evolved into a substantially more liberal and open society.   The central government remains authoritarian, but Party control is much weaker and village elections are slowly encouraging a new and more democratic culture across China.  The concept of the rule of law, which is essential to any functioning democracy, has also become more deeply entrenched since 1989, and will be further reinforced by China's admission to the World Trade Organization later this year.  The personal lives of individual Chinese have also undergone a fundamental liberation, with Chinese now able to manage their own affairs with no more government interference than is the case in many Western states.   While China's rulers do not tolerate organized political opposition, the social controls that operated with great effect up to 1989 are now useless.  Despite its tragic outcome, the Tiananmen democracy movement ushered in a new and much more open period in Chinese history.

The compiler of the "Papers" insists on their authenticity and the editors have gone to considerable lengths to establish that they are genuine.  Given that the documents accord with what is already known about the events of 1989 there is no reason to regard them at large as fakes.  But questions remain about whether they have been modified with a view to projecting a specific view of events.  The fact that the documents came in the form of computer print out means that it would have been a technically simple task for whoever transcribed them onto a computer disc to change passages or to insert new material.  Orville Schell's Afterword on the issue of authenticity, which passes favorable judgment on one of my own books, sets out the difficulties of validation in clear and honest terms.  

Important questions also arise about the motivations of the compiler and those who helped him put this collection of papers together.  The sheer volume of the material involved suggests that the process of generating the papers had official connivance, but to what purpose remains a matter of speculation.  Some press commentary has interpreted the papers as aimed at Li Peng, who strongly advocated martial law.  This seems unlikely, however, given that Li Peng has never sought to disown his role in Tiananmen and in any case will retire in early 2003.  Other commentators have theorized that the papers are aimed at President Jiang Zemin, with a view to undermining his prospects of remaining in office after the Party Congress next year by highlighting that his initial selection as general secretary in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis did not follow Party procedures.  But since then Jiang's appointment has been endorsed by two Party Congresses, and in any case his legitimacy rests largely on his leadership record over the last decade, during which China has continued a program of rapid reform, maintained a high rate of economic growth, and consolidated its place in the international community.  The suggestion that Jiang could be vulnerable because he was tapped eleven years ago by some retired Party elders reflects a somewhat naïve view of the place of constitutional procedures in Chinese politics.

A further possibility is that the documents were put into the public domain with the blessing of those at the top in order to prepare the ground for a carefully controlled reassessment of the Tiananmen episode.  The documents paint a more positive picture of Deng Xiaoping's role than is generally assumed, underscore his profound commitment to reform, and show all the senior leaders to have been sincerely concerned about the welfare of the students, keen to avoid violence, and sympathetic with many of the students demands, such as their criticism of corruption.   But while this is a plausible interpretation, it still remains speculative.  In short, The Tiananmen Papers should be read as valuable historical documents with an as yet obscure relevance to the China of the Twenty-first Century.

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RIVER TOWN by Peter Hessler.  Harper Collins, New York

Since the nineteenth century, when Westerners began to visit China and in many cases live there for years at a time, there has been steady flow of books by non-China experts that provide significant insights into different aspects of China and its way of life.  In recent years this literary sub-category has exploded, with numerous China-based foreigners writing books about their experiences there.  Peter Hessler's River Town is part of this tradition, but it stands out from many recent exercises in Sino-memoirs by virtue of the fact that it provides a first-hand, detailed account of life in a small town that few foreigners ever visit and which has little contact with the outside world.  

Peter Hessler worked as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English and American literature in Fuling from August 1996 until June 1998.  Located on the Yangtse River near the eastern border of Sichuan Province, Fuling suffers from debilitating industrial pollution --- which seriously harmed the author's health --- , has a population of only 200,000, and is a far cry from the boomtowns that flourish in China's coastal provinces.  Hessler describes in language that is in turns lyrical, reflective and dramatic a segment of Chinese society that is marginal to the history of contemporary China and yet typical of much of the country.   

Despite the marginal character of Fuling, and Hessler's lack of any formal training as a Sinologist, River Town is a fascinating, in-depth picture of the way Deng Xiaoping's policies of economic reform and opening to the outside world are transforming every corner of Chinese life.  Hessler was well prepared for his work in Fuling by having studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford, and having developed a strong dislike of the superstructure of theoretical concepts that Western university critics insist are necessary to understand literature.  He was thus deeply impressed by the direct and personal manner in which his Chinese students respond to the diverse array of foreign literature, ranging from Beowulf through Shakespearean sonnets to Robert Frost's poetry, that Hessler and another young American teacher introduced to them.

This preference for responding directly to art and to life imparts an honesty and immediacy to his writing, and as a consequence River Town provides a vivid picture of the China Hessler came to know.  Although at times this approach produces long narrative passages, and at almost 400 pages River Town is a sizeable book, the reader is richly rewarded by sharing a view of China that is pragmatic and empirical.  Hessler seeks to explain those aspects of Chinese behavior that surprise or even shock him, but unlike so much political science writing about China, he never tries to substantiate predetermined theoretical judgments.

River Town deals with many issues.  It depicts the explosion of personal freedoms that has been triggered by the reform process and the impact of this phenomenon on small towns like Fuling.  This process has many manifestations: the thriving private restaurants and noodle shops where Hessler often eats; the beauty parlors and karaoke bars where "moneyed young males" look for prostitutes; local real estate tycoons; young Chinese making their own career choices; intellectuals debating how "democratic" China is; and people in general shaping their own lives in a way that they considered impossible before Deng's reform program.  Hessler's Fuling is consequently a lively, boisterous place in which he develops friendships with his students, shop assistants, restaurant owners, the local Catholic priest, and even a peasant family in the nearby countryside.

At the same time Hessler highlights the problems that have been generated by Deng's reforms.  These include the difficult choices women now face, offered many new opportunities while still expected to abide by a traditional set of Confucian principles.   Another major problem is the continuing intrusion of obsolescent political notions into non-political activity.  Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of life in Fuling is what Hessler calls a tendency "to politicize every thing, turning every piece of literature and every scrap of history" to the Party's purposes, producing "twisted history" and "propaganda-laced textbooks."  River Town offers numerous examples of how the Communist legacy continues to obstruct and pervert China's forward momentum.

River Town also illuminates a more enduring problem, namely the difficulty that China has in dealing with the outside world.  As his Chinese language skills improve, Hessler acquires a variety of Chinese friends, but he some times has trouble dealing with Chinese when they are part of collective entities.  The core of these difficulties is the Chinese aversion to being embarrassed or exposed as inferior or wrong, and when this leads to "anti-foreign harassment" it is almost always the manifested by young males. River Town suggests a parallel between this anti-foreign behavior and the macho drinking competitions that occur among Chinese men at banquets, when they drink almost "each other into the hospital."

This dimension of Hessler's experience is disconcerting, but ultimately manifestations of xenophobia flow from anger and frustration at losing face or being forced to feel ashamed, not from intrinsic hostility to foreigners as such.  These nasty encounters are not the consequence of China's adventure with Communism, but reflect a problem with deeper historical roots, stemming from China's sense of itself as a unique civilization that can ignore international customs and standards.  Even so, these negative emotions are essentially passive: they reflect frustration, not an appetite for territorial expansion or a desire to impose a Chinese dispensation on others.

During his college vacations Hessler travels to other remote corners of China, including Xinjiang and Shaanxi and he weaves these journeys into his book.  These experiences blend naturally with his vision of Fuling, underscoring that the spectacle he sees in Fuling is typical of many other distant corners of the country.  And it is this dimension of River Town, and the way it provides such a penetrating picture of daily life in such large tracts of China, that makes it a valuable book for anyone interested in assessing where the Chinese people are headed and what stands in their way.

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CHINA AND THE AMERICAN DREAM by Richard Madsen, University of California Press

Relations between Washington and Beijing look set to remain a zone of conflict for the foreseeable future, as one irritant succeeds another.  This disturbing prospect gives special point to Richard Madsen's China and the American Dream, a provocative study of the forces that over recent decades have distorted American perceptions of China.  

Much of the tension in Sino-American relations derives, of course, from the vast differences between the two countries.  But the troubles that plague the relationship also stem from deeply-entrenched biases.  While most Westerners assume that prejudices inevitably arise in authoritarian states like China, they often reject suggestions that vested interests blur their own vision as well.  Coming to terms with this realization requires a mix of honesty and humility, which presumably is why Madsen has sub-titled his book "a moral enquiry".

Madsen's rhetorical starting point is the Tiananmen massacre.  He asks why so many Americans got it wrong.  In looking for answers he traces the evolution of American interpretations of China back to the 1960s.  His conclusion is that American institutions --- academic, political and religious --- have repeatedly misread the Chinese because of a desire to find in China proof of the "American dream" --- the liberal myth that freedom of choice was a universal remedy for the problems inherent in the human condition.  

Madsen examines how some of America's main institutions have interacted with China.  None of them come through unscathed.  Politicians offer the easiest targets.   He shows how Richard Nixon, despite his talk of the opening to China being "geopolitical", portrayed it as establishing a link with people who embraced the same universal principles as Americans.  Instead of admitting that China was ruled by a brutal dictator, Nixon fell under the spell of Mao Zedong at the very moment when Chinese were beginning to see through Mao's ruthless despotism.  

Madsen also takes a hard look at America's China experts.  He documents how influential sinologists, such as John King Fairbank, remained silent about China's dark side lest they provoked Chinese reactions that damaged the prospects for academic contact with China.

Madsen's most revealing vignette involves the Ford Foundation.  While spending millions to train Chinese in law, economics, and other subjects that propagate the "American dream", the Ford Foundation's China office marked its envelopes "open here for postal inspection" --- in effect telling those Chinese whom it was seeking to indoctrinate in the ways of the West to accept the intrusive practices of China's security apparatus.   

But Madsen's focus on the "American dream" as the root cause of misunderstanding leads him to ignore the effect on American perceptions of China's tradition of political manipulation.  China's classical text on strategy, Sunzi's Principles of War, decrees that all warfare is based on deception.  The same could be said of Chinese diplomacy --- a point that Sunzi contemplated when he said that the aim of war was to win without having to fight.

Nor does Madsen examine the flaws in the glass through which American scholars have looked at China.  One of the intellectual weaknesses in U.S. China-watching stems from the limited perspective of the Americans who dominated China studies during the 1930s and 40s.  The sinologists of those days drew on their work in China with native scholars, many of whom were steeped in Confucianism.  This cooperation popularized a notion of China as a society ruled by a high-minded literati --- in effect customizing Voltaire's vision of an oriental paradise governed by a sage-king for Harvard and Yale.

But this concept of China was only partly valid.  It played down the entrepreneur, the gangster and the gambler; more importantly, it ignored the magical underpinnings of Chinese culture.  As a consequence Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching or Book of Changes was not published in the United States until 1950, and even today is regarded as a tool for fortune tellers rather than a key to understanding how Chinese perceive the universe.

Despite these omissions, Madsen provides a fresh look at the forces that have shaped American thinking about China.  He is less persuasive, however, when he tries to explain events in China in terms of a Chinese infatuation with the "American dream".   This is not surprising.  China is a complex society with little in common with America.   Madsen frequently has to indulge in special pleading --- claiming wrongly that Chinese only became ill-mannered on public transport after American influence began to grow or that a common Chinese transliteration for AIDS reads "Love Capitalism Disease" ---in order to adapt his thesis to Chinese reality.

Madsen should have saved himself the trouble of considering the Chinese end of the equation.  He had already performed a valuable service, helping Americans gain a less distorted vision of China.

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A GREAT WALL by Patrick Tyler, Public Affairs, New York.

Patrick Tyler's A Great Wall would be a significant book at any time.  His subject is one of the most important processes of the last third of the twentieth century, namely the reestablishment of contact between China and the United States.  But the controversies that have recently enveloped US-China relations, from the furor over Chinese espionage through to the after-effects of Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui's well-rehearsed throw-away remark that Taiwan had a sort of "state-to-state" relationship with the mainland, have made it especially relevant.  By providing the historical background to today's China issues, Tyler underscores the need to recognize where Beijing and Washington were in 1969 and how their relations have developed since then.

Tyler, a former New York Times correspondent in Beijing, begins his account in the late 1960s, when armed clashes on the Sino-Soviet border made President Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger realize that China could both partner Washington in the struggle to contain Moscow's global ambitions, and help extricate the United States from the Vietnam War.

Tyler devotes one third of his book to the Nixon era.  This allocation of space reflects Tyler's assessment that Nixon cut through one of the great knots of twentieth century politics.  While Nixon's motivations were mixed, his diplomacy "ended the isolation of the People's Republic and ended America's isolation from China" and represented a profound historical turning point.

Tyler, who justifiably calls his book an "investigative history", digs deep into the evolution of Nixon's China policy.  He details Kissinger's journeys to Beijing, Nixon's concerns over Taiwan and the conservative Americans who backed Chiang Kai-shek, and the complications that flowed from the rivalry between Kissinger and Secretary of State William P. Rogers.

Rivalries within Administrations is a recurring theme.  The turf battles of the Carter period, when National Security Adviser Brzezinski duelled with Secretary of State Vance, continued under Reagan, when National Security Adviser Richard Allen and Secretary of State Al Haig fought over China policy.

Tyler tracks the evolution of Sino-US relations.  The cooling of the Ford years; the establishment of diplomatic relations by Carter and the introduction of some new apparatus, the Taiwan Relations Act.  While this legislation helped insure Taiwan's security, it did not prevent Reagan, the most conservative of all presidents, from signing the 1982 communiqué which limited the quality and quantity of US defense exports to Taiwan.  

The Reagan period was the high point of US-China relations.  The Tiananmen crisis and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the situation: strategic competition with Moscow was replaced by human rights and proliferation as the key factors shaping the relationship.  And under Clinton Taiwan has reemerged as the determining issue, with Lee Teng-hui's manipulation of American sentiment made all the more effective by the fact that the president has "little time for foreign policy".

Tyler paints fascinating portraits of the personalities who shaped US-China relations.   Dr Kissinger is the dominant player: he was central to the high level diplomacy that led to the opening, but emerges from Tyler's account as a brilliant yet flawed figure.  He saw the US-Soviet-China triangle with a hard-nosed clarity, and yet developed a fascination with China's charming premier, Zhou Enlai, that was only matched by distaste for "that nasty little man", as he called Deng Xiaoping, who had an even cooler grasp of power than did Kissinger himself.

Tyler's portrait of James Lilley captures the continuity in personalities that runs through the story, just as China was a recurring theme in the lives of many of those involved in the relationship.  Born in China, Lilley was successively an officer in the CIA's operations directorate, the Agency's first station chief in Beijing, the US unofficial representative in Taiwan, and then ambassador in Beijing, where he kept the relationship afloat after the Tiananmen massacre.  And Lilley was just one of many, including Arthur Hummel and Stapleton Roy, for whom China represented a central element of their lives.

Tyler illuminates the lives of the Americans involved in his story, but he throws little light on the Chinese side.  His subtitle --- six presidents and China --- explains a US focus, but the forces that drove the Chinese are perhaps even more important for Americans to understand.  Tyler ignores the extensive Chinese literature, and instead draws on the highly suspect memoirs of Mao's one-time physician, Li Zhisui.  

For Tyler the "great wall" is a metaphor for the cultural and political barriers that separate US politicians from their Chinese counterparts.  But less formidable barriers seem to separate Chinese reality from Western journalists who report on China, and Tyler makes some mistakes of detail about the Chinese side.  Nonetheless he sends a clear message that China is committed to a nation-wide pursuit of modernization, and that China is far too complex an entity to be handled with one-dimensional policies that fixate on human rights, trade, Taiwan, proliferation, or one-upmanship among US officials.  And this is an important message, and a book worth reading.

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SEASON OF HIGH ADVENTURE by Bernard S. Thomas, University of California Press

Edgar Snow was one of the most important Western journalists to write on China this century.  His impact on American perceptions of China during the 1930s and early 1940s was profound.  In later years he encountered insurmountable difficulties in making Chinese reality accord with his idealistic vision, and had compromised many of his liberal values by the time he died.  Bernard Thomas' Season of High Adventure tells both sides of Snow's story, portraying a man who provided brilliant insights into Chinese Communism and yet who was ultimately mesmerized by a country that he reported on, and by its charismatic leader, Mao Zedong.

Snow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1905 and spent his early life there, moving to New York to work in advertising after a brief stint at the famed Missouri School of Journalism.  A taste for adventure inspired him to begin what he expected to be a journey round the world.  But when he arrived in Shanghai he was fascinated by the vibrancy of the city and took a job on a local magazine.

China was in the throes of a chaotic transformation and Snow became engrossed by its struggle for modernization.  Daily events made him a critic of the corrupt Kuomintang regime and its despotic leader, Chiang Kai-shek.  Snow reported what he saw of China's problems as honestly as he could.  A rich travelogue style and the energetic charm that gets scoops earned him journalistic success and an international reputation.

Like other foreign journalists before him, however, Snow also sought a role on the vast stage of Chinese politics.  He formed supportive relationships with prominent dissidents; he encouraged student radicals to demonstrate in Beijing in December 1935; and sponsored the Indusco or Gungho movement, which sought to energize China's war effort by covering China with industrial cooperatives.  Snow's compulsion to shape events and act as a bridge builder between China and the United States later led him to write to President Truman to offer to serve as an emissary.

But Snow's lasting fame derived from writing Red Star Over China, a gripping report of a journey to the territory in north-western China where the Communists established their headquarters at the end of the Long March.  Snow's book was the first eye-witness portrait by any Westerner of the newly-installed Communist leader, Mao Zedong, and helped disperse the fog of propaganda surrounding the Communists that had been generated by the Kuomintang and Western colonial powers in China.

Snow's political activism never had the impact he hoped for and even his reporting on Mao and the early Communist movement had shortcomings.  He never portrayed the rather boy scout-like atmosphere of the Communist community and saw the ferocity of its later passions.  The Communists had even then displayed a penchant for bloody feuds and purges --- both in Shanghai and in areas under Mao's control.  Snow saw no value in investigating crimes committed by the progressive forces.  In later years his greatest weakness was his inability to write about Communist brutality, which mounted in intensity after Mao gained control of the entire mainland, climaxing in the hell on earth of the Cultural Revolution.

Snow left China in 1941 and when he returned as Mao's guest in 1960 he found a very different society from that he had known during the 1930s.  Only permitted by his hosts to have contact with select officials, on this and his two subsequent visits he saw little apart from those aspects on China that the regime wanted to show him.

This contrasted with his dealings with the Communists in the 1930s.  The casual conversations he had with Mao's colleagues, recorded in Random Notes on Red China, even today offer valuable information.  He was frustrated by the limitations imposed by the 1960s, , but his hopes for China and his person al feelings for Mao led him to try to force irritating pieces of information to fit into his broader vision of a China creating a new socialist man.  When he died in 1972 Snow had long ceased to produce the bold perceptions of Chinese reality that had been his hallmark in the 1930s.

Thomas focuses on the events in Snow's professional and personal life and does not explore in depth why Snow was silent about the dark side of Chinese Communism.   But Thomas's account is far from an apologia, and he identifies the inconsistencies in Snow's outlook and his difficulty in trying to adjust to the rapid flow of international events.  Indeed, Thomas's factual narrative of Snow's career will be of value to anyone seeking to comprehend the deeper problems of US/China relations and why Westerners have had difficulty understanding China and its Communist rulers.

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WRITING ABOUT CHINA DURING A CENTURY OF REFORM

An article written for the Washington Post on the anniversary of the failed 1898 reform movement in Beijing.

Literature and politics have usually been closely intertwined in China.  Indeed, so strong was the connection between literature and government that the Chinese selected bureaucrats on the basis of their mastery of classical literature.  Consequently many of China's most renowned poets and essayists were also officials, combining the career of creative writer with that of administrator or magistrate in a way rarely emulated in the West.  

But just as officials have often been men of letters, so writing has at times been politicized.  In the third century BC the man who created the first united Chinese state, Qin Shihuang, sought to burn all books because he saw literature as potentially subversive to his rule.  And this is not just a characteristic of ancient history.   Throughout the last hundred years the linkage between literature and China's process of adjusting to the pressures of modernization has been an important factor shaping Chinese experience.  Indeed, the interplay between writers and politicians that would help shape modern China was foreshadowed a century ago next Thursday, June 11,   which is the hundredth anniversary of the Hundred Days Reform Movement, the first attempt by a Chinese ruler to modernize China to counter the threat presented by the Western powers and their Asian acolyte, Japan.

Some of China's more innovative provincial governors had made piece-meal changes to the Chinese system during the previous sixty years, but the 1898 reforms represented a new root-and-branch approach to dealing with China's weaknesses.  The twenty-seven year old Guangxu Emperor took power into his own hands, ignored the courtiers who had previously managed policy, and issued edicts that sought to abolish the moribund yet sacrosanct institutions that impeded China's progress.

But the Emperor's task was Gargantuan.  As implied by the name it is now known by --- the Hundred Days Reform---his attack on tradition did not last long.  On September 21 a Manchu general --- China was still governed by a Manchurian elite that had conquered the country in 1644 --- staged a coup d'etat, detained the Emperor and installed the Emperor's aunt, who had been a concubine to an earlier emperor, as regent with the title of Empress Dowager.  The deposed Emperor continued to study international affairs and learn English, but he was never able to revive his dream of reform: the day after the Empress Dowager died in 1908 court officials announced that the Emperor had died the day before.  The cause of his death remains a mystery, but the timing was suspiciously convenient for the Manchu conservatives.

Although the Emperor's radical plans failed, his call for change was not without effect.   The events of that summer a century ago still stand out as one of the boldest attempts by a Chinese ruler to overcome the weaknesses that rendered China vulnerable to the industrialized West.  The Emperor's brief campaign was the first step on the path that lead to the modernization program that a Chinese ruler of our own times, Deng Xiaoping, launched in 1978.

The tense political drama of the Hundred Days Reform has tended to obscure the fact that it was largely inspired and shaped by some brilliant young writers and scholars.   Toward the end of the nineteenth century Chinese intellectuals began to denounce traditional beliefs as the source of China's inability to defend itself.   These men experimented with new literary forms, advanced fresh ideas, and fostered an atmosphere that made a reevaluation of China's culture thinkable.

But some of them did more than that.  Kang Youwei, a philosopher who developed an iconoclastic interpretation of the Confucian classics, and Liang Qichao, an erudite writer, became participants in the politics of the day.  Their writings paved the way for the Emperor's revolutionary program.  They were so closely associated with the Emperor that when he was arrested they had to flee for their lives.  Kang escaped to Hong Kong; Liang was smuggled out of China by Japanese diplomats.  Other young intellectuals associated with them, including Kang's younger brother, were executed.   This marked the beginning of a century during which literature and politics became intertwined, and during which writing about China's problems was a dangerous occupation.

Disillusioned by the collapse of the Hundred Days Reform movement and at odds with some of the revolutionaries who followed them, Kang and Liang gradually withdrew from radical politics: Kang eventually devoted himself to cosmology while Liang retreated into the labyrinth of Chinese historical studies.

But new writers emerged.  The next outstanding figure to rail brilliantly against China's backwardness was Lu Xun, a short story writer and essayist whose satire stripped away the facade of moral superiority that disguised China's failures.  His 1921 novella, The True Story of Ah Q, remains one of the most devastating exposes of the flaws in China's traditional mentality.  During the 1920s Lu Xun wrote brilliant fiction and won enormous prestige among China's youth.  But as the difficulty of changing China's system became more apparent he increasingly turned to politics.  By the time he died in 1936 Lu Xun had in effect allied himself with the communists who, recognizing his propaganda value, courted him assiduously.  But as he flirted with the Party he fell silent as a writer, perhaps sensing that ideological consistency prevented good writing.  Lu Xun's experience did not deter other writers, many of whom adopted left-wing positions, although by no means all were communists.

The forces that compelled so many literary figures to turn political did not just influence Chinese.  Many Western writers who lived in China were also drawn into the intense world of Chinese politics.  Some of these men and women simply reported events around them, but many supported one faction or another.  Americans were at the forefront of this trend.  Harold Isaacs backed the Trotskyites, Agnes Smedley the communists, and Edgar Snow the left-leaning liberals who opposed the conservative Kuomintang but rejected the authoritarianism of the communists.  And as their involvement with politics deepened, these writers tended to devote more energy to denouncing their Chinese opponents, and each other, than to explaining China.   Harold Isaacs, for example, sarcastically dismissed Edgar Snow in a 1933 review article as "the typical American liberal, with all the flaccidity that term implies", invective that underscores how bitter these feuds could become.

Not all foreign writers in China espoused left-wing causes and several served as aides to conservative politicians.  Two Australians worked their way into China's ruling establishment: George Ernest Morrison, known as "Morrison of Peking" because of his reporting for the London Times from the Chinese capital during the siege of the legation quarters by the Boxer rebels, served as adviser to Yuan Shikai, a warlord who helped overthrow the Manchus and then sought to install himself as emperor.  W.H. Donald, a journalist from Melbourne, had a long career as a foreign adviser to Chinese politicians and warlords, finally becoming one of Chiang Kai-shek's counsellors.  And as the communist threat to the United States-backed Chiang Kai-shek increased numerous American writers sought to advertise his virtues to the readers at home.   And after the communist victory in 1949 there was a stream of books denouncing Mao Zedong and his regime.

The Cultural Revolution spawned another outpouring of Western literature about China.  Some writers portrayed the Cultural Revolution as a period of totalitarian madness, but other Westerners fell under the spell of Chairman Mao's "thoughts" and returned from trips to China with starry-eyed stories about liberating the human spirit. Those who visited China at the time included some celebrated writers like Alberto Moravio, who produced books that revealed more about the authors and their literary tricks than about China.

The danger of being sucked into the whirlpool of debate over China still exists today.   Some Western writing about China continues to be distorted by the author's sense of participating in a struggle over China's fate, often conditioned by fashionable political perceptions.  A recent example was The Coming Conflict With China, in which the authors, Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, presented a polemical view of China's future behavior toward the United States.  Published at the height of the "China threat" hysteria, their book showed little understanding of the constraints imposed on China by its economic difficulties, its dependence on the West for technology, and its need for a stable environment.

Of course, much Western writing on China has been free from the imprint of politics.   Foreign writers have produced some wonderful and informative books about China that have not been filtered through ideological prisms.  Harold Acton's Peonies and Ponies, a comedy of manners set in 1930s Beijing, recorded the subtle artifice that pervaded relations between Westerners and Chinese at the time.  That Acton's picture was still recognizable during the 1980s, after China had experienced five decades of war and revolution, underscored how perceptively he had delineated the society around him.

This Western literature also includes some spectacular works of scholarship, such as Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China and Robert van Gulik's Sexual Life in Ancient China.  China has also inspired an enormous volume of autobiographical material written by missionaries, merchants and sundry officials and diplomats who usually lived in China's foreign settlements.  Most of these authors had no more insight into China than literary skill.  But some of these books are brilliant exceptions: Ralph Shaw's Sin City , a lubricous account of life in pre-war Shanghai, and the first part of J.G.Ballard's The Kindness of Women, which sees China through the eyes of a foreign adolescent, convey the essence of life in specific parts of China.

Taken as a whole, however, Western books about China tend to be disappointing as aids to understanding China.  In the case of those writers who were simply recording their personal experiences this is not surprising: no matter how perceptive, no individual's story is likely to explain an enormous and complex society such as China.   And too many of the talented writers who took an interest in China were seduced by the idea that they could somehow change China's fate.  They championed political creeds, which presumed stereotypes about how China behaved, rather than looking beyond the slogans of the day in order to convey how Chinese see life, and how they view dealings with the outside world.  

It is the impact of literature on relations between China and the West that most causes one to lament the politicized and consequently superficial character of much Western writing on China.  That D.H. Lawrence painted a misleadingly idealized portrait of Etruscan society was inconsequential; the Etruscans had vanished long before Lawrence wrote.  But China has not vanished.  In strategic, economic and political terms China is a society that the West cannot afford to get wrong.

Understanding China is not easy for Westerners.  In some respects it is still a self-contained civilization --- indeed, China is now the only extant classical civilization --- which is selectively integrating Western ideas with its own distinct view of the way the world functions.  But the literature that has been produced since the Hundred Days Reform suggests that Western writers too rarely realize this.  

The impact of globalization makes China --- and relations with it --- even more important to the West, but it also perpetuates the illusion that outsiders can change China.   Whether writers in the West will lay the foundations for a more balanced approach remains to be seen.  But the literature of the past century suggests that overcoming the gulf in understanding between China and the West will take some time yet.

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© John Byron - 2008