BOOK REVIEW Middle Kingdom deciphered Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyar
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
With the ascent of China replacing the menace of al-Qaeda as the hot
international issue, a flurry of books on the Middle Kingdom has hit printing
presses. Not all of them do justice to the complex realities of a country in a
state of permanent change over three decades. Western authors typically focus
on China's economic marvel, the challenge that it poses to the United States,
or the prospects of it becoming democratic. Their approaches tend to be either
intensely critical (Peter Navarro's The Coming China Wars) or
unabashedly admiring (Jim Rogers' A Bull in China).
One expects more nuanced analysis from the first and only
Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent who resided in China. Pallavi
Aiyar's Smoke and Mirrors deciphers China through unique Indian
spectacles in a witty and illuminative account that has flashes of a classic.
Aiyar soaks into Chinese culture, society, economics and politics and reaps
rich rewards by capturing what every author dreams of - the essence of the
subject matter. (Disclosure: Aiyar is a regular contributor to Asia Times
Online.)
When Aiyar went from India to China in 2002 to keep a tryst and teach English
journalism, she was stricken by "fear of the truly unknown" that lay north of
the Himalayas. The haze cleared during the next five years of extensive travel
and reporting, uncovering a landscape of "powerful contradictions" in which a
sprinting economic engine existed alongside stationary authoritarian politics. Smoke
and Mirrors is the story of a country undergoing dizzying change,
recounted through an intelligent Indian prism.
One sign of transformation that Aiyar noticed straightaway was the febrile
construction boom in China, with roads, buildings and malls sprouting up
profusely. Half of the world's concrete and one-third of its steel output were
being consumed by this bottomless drive for modernity that humbled Aiyar as an
Indian. What grated on her senses was the harsh enforcement of restrictions on
rural migrants in China's metropolitan centers that gave them an
extra-sanitized appearance which is absent in Indian cities.
Aiyar's young students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute had to undergo
compulsory Maoism courses but "fantasized of little but money" (p 16). They
reviled American foreign policy even while patronizing McDonalds and chasing
admissions to US universities. Coming from a class of society that benefited
from the economic boom, they were optimistic and ambitious but also apolitical
and ignorant of knowledge deemed "unsuitable". They willfully ignored human
rights problems and held a "bright, nationalistic worldview in which China was
getting stronger and everything was getting better". (p 17)
Parroting official propaganda with sincerity, none of Aiyar's students knew
that Tibetan spiritual leader in exile the Dalai Lama was a Nobel laureate. The
"zero anti-establishment feeling" and enforced homogeneity of thinking among
the brightest minds of the country dampened Aiyar's liberal Indian mind, but
also reminded that control of information was the key to government legitimacy
in China. Muzzling of the media by the state seemed perfectly normal to the
author's students, who held that "concepts like freedom of the press were
fundamentally unsuitable to the 'volatile' nature of the Chinese people" (p
22). It was only after the full extent of the SARS epidemic coverup became
evident in 2003 that Aiyar's pupils reacted with shock and resentment towards
their government.
One arena in which China's youth were defying authority was by breaking sexual
taboos. Aiyar notes the irony of the runaway popularity of cosmetic surgery and
titillation toys in a country that had hitherto condemned women's make-up as a
bourgeois practice.
Notwithstanding the Olympics-inspired English-learning fad, Aiyar remarks that
the lack of English skills "remained a stumbling block in China's projection of
itself as a major global player" (p 49). Continued inability to overcome
corrupted "Chinglish" in public signs was puzzling for a dynamic country where
the word "impossible" seemed anachronistic.
On the structural underpinnings of power, Aiyar describes China as "a pressure
cooker, calm on the top but boiling inside" (p 60). Unlike India, ordinary
people in China have few opportunities for the release of myriad frustrations
relating to their livelihood struggles. There is "no recourse for the
marginalized when the government itself turned tyrannical" (p 209). The author
is not fooled by the exterior calm and orderliness projected by the Chinese
government and speaks of "isolated bubbles of tension" that the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) blocks from "merging into larger, more powerful forces"
(p 70). She slams "the cruel fangs of China's autocratic regime" (p 122) that
coercively relocated half a million households to beautify Beijing for the
Olympics.
Aiyar's stay in China coincided with a bout of thickening economic relations
between Beijing and New Delhi. While expressing healthy skepticism about ideas
of a merger of the two economies into a "Chindia", she unveils curious cases of
Chinese software professionals being trained by Indian companies and Indian
medical students and yoga gurus pouring into China for opportunities.
According to the author, a basic belief in the dignity of labor, which is a
legacy of Chinese communism, posed "the broadest gulf between India and China"
(p 105). Although China was turning into one of the most unequal societies in
the world in class terms, it lacked the ritual social discriminations that
bogged India down. China also fared better than India in equality of the sexes,
particularly in female labor force participation. Aiyar argues that there is "a
greater measure of the medieval in India and a dash more of the modern in
China". (p 135)
Aiyar visited the manufacturing miracle towns of the southern and eastern coast
that rendered "Made in China" into a global household phrase. The
entrepreneurial genius of Zhejiang province was in full bloom in the
contemporary regime of "red capitalism". From socks and shoes to lighters and
garments, the province advertised tales of tiny start-ups morphing into giant
world market-dominating industries. Aiyar tributes enterprising local
bureaucrats who pursued capitalist profits in the name of socialism and enabled
businesses to expand into international players. Frenetic development of
world-class highways and railways also gave a competitive edge to Chinese
producers.
On the question of spirituality, the author observed a major comeback of
officially-proscribed religion. The masses were turning to faith to
counterbalance the country's pervasive Mammon-worship and corruption. The CCP
itself was actively encouraging a revival of Buddhism and Confucianism to
undergird President Hu Jintao's goal of a "harmonious society". The party set
strict parameters within which religion freedom could breathe. Catholics and
Uyghur Muslims were subjected to tight controls while informal Protestantism
and the Falungong were harshly prosecuted. Aiyar quips that "people were free
to believe, but just not too much". (p 184)
At the Zen Buddhist Shaolin temple in Henan province, the author met the "party
pet" abbot who was an exemplar of the phenomenon of "religion playing second
fiddle to politics" (p 188). In the Muslim Ningxia Hui region, the author
noticed that all imams had to be licensed and all mosques registered with the
government. In Yunnan's Tibetan monasteries, she found lamas who concealed
their India connections for fear of landing in "trouble". Aiyar doubts whether
the CCP's shepherding of religion into quietist channels is sustainable, given
the inequalities of access and opportunities afflicting the country.
Aboard the maiden Qinghai-Lhasa train in 2006, Aiyar reconfirmed the "less than
polite" Han attitudes towards China's fifty-odd ethnic minorities. In the Han
imagination, minorities were reduced to "tourist attractions with quaint folk
customs" (p 224), caricatured as unfit for modern society or economic
development. Tibetans, in general, were "treated by Beijing as suspect and
excluded from the policymaking that would shape their own future". (p 231)
On the "roof of the world", Aiyar met Tibetans seething under Chinese
colonialism and spotted instances of silent resistance. Modernization, which
got a rousing response in Han areas, had proven inadequate for buying loyalty
in China's restive western frontiers. Aiyar contrasts this with India, which
had superior "mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity". (p 242)
In the concluding chapter, Aiyar draws attention to the impact of new
technologies on the ruler-ruled equation in China. The rise of the legal
consciousness movement (wei quan) to defend property rights and the
environment was predicated on the spread of the Internet and mobile telephony.
Yet, the CCP had enough policing prowess in the communications sphere "to keep
the flame low enough to avert an explosion for a while to come" (p 256). To the
author, Deng Xiaoping-bequeathed pragmatism and openness to "pilot project"
innovations guarantee regime survival in China.
Smoke and Mirrors emerges as the best comparative narrative on China by
an Asian in recent times. After the mountains of statistics-laden works by
economists matching China and India, and the cornucopia of strategic prognoses
by policy wonks on China's threat to the West, Aiyar's debut book comes as a
fresh breeze with a special human touch that retains objectivity.
Smoke and Mirrors. An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar. Harper
Collins, New Delhi, 2008. ISBN: 978-81-7223-746-2. Price: US$ 9.50, 273 pages.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
When Aiyar went from India to China in 2002 to keep a tryst and teach English
journalism, she was stricken by "fear of the truly unknown" that lay north of
the Himalayas. The haze cleared during the next five years of extensive travel
and reporting, uncovering a landscape of "powerful contradictions" in which a
sprinting economic engine existed alongside stationary authoritarian politics. Smoke
and Mirrors is the story of a country undergoing dizzying change,
recounted through an intelligent Indian prism.
