BOOK
REVIEW China's unique rat
race Chinese Lessons by
John Pomfret
Reviewed by Jeremy
Hurewitz
SHANGHAI - If you're a journalist
looking to cover the biggest stories of our time
there are essentially two options: Islamic
fundamentalism and the rise of China. Both are
multi-generational in their scope, and they will
both have a huge impact on the world's future. To
use journalistic parlance, they are "stories with
legs".
So it's no
surprise that journalists are flocking to the
Middle East
and China.
And so it should also come as no surprise that
many
of
those same journalists are turning out books about
these subjects faster than most people can keep
up.
There is no shortage of things to
write about when it comes to China. The world's
oldest civilization is undergoing the greatest
migration in human history - from its countryside
to its urban centers; its economy is reforming
from the backwardness of central planning to a
no-holds-barred, "man-eat-man" form of capitalism;
and all of this is going on in the context of a
society nearly destroyed by the madness of the
Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
So there is a lot to report and,
conversely, a lot to read if you want to keep up.
But among the many books and articles being
churned out about modern China, those looking for
real insight into what China has experienced since
the start of its economic reforms in the late
1970s would do well to pick up John Pomfret's new
book Chinese Lessons.
Pomfret was
among the first American students to be admitted
to a Chinese university after Deng Xiaoping opened
up China. He attended Nanjing University, or Nanda
as its known (a shortening of the Chinese name
Nanjing Daxue). He spent most of the next two
decades in the country reporting for the
Associated Press, and later the Washington Post,
serving at its Beijing bureau chief.
The
first impression derived from Pomfret's book is of
the guts he had in taking on China at that time.
Not only did young Pomfret take on the huge
challenge of China in 1981, but he went a step
further and gave up his place in the dormitory for
foreign students to board with the other Chinese
students.
He recounts waking up in the
morning in a tiny room with seven other men, who
would hock up their morning phlegm and loudly
expectorate on the floor, dodging the lines of
"scabrous" underwear hanging in the room to get a
place at the bathroom sink for a morning wash.
This reviewer finds living in modern-day Shanghai
enough of a challenge, never mind student life in
Nanjing, circa 1981.
A lot of what Pomfret
writes about China makes one shudder - from its
pestilential toilets to its mind-numbing capacity
for destroying the lives of its citizens. One
marvels at both his intrepidness and his
passionate desire to understand China. The
narrative centers around the lives of several of
his fellow students, describing them as Pomfret
knew them in Nanjing in the early 1980s and taking
the reader through their lives as they navigate
China's chaotic reforms.
They are a
colorful bunch. We get to know Old Wu, the oldest
of Pomfret's roommates and a study in
contradictions and compromise as the resident
Communist Party member despite the murder of his
two parents by Red Guards; he keeps an eye on the
lao wai for the party and artfully extracts
gifts out of him from the Friendship Store. Book
Idiot Zhou's desire to leave the rice fields was
so strong that his face was eternally buried in a
book; he develops an early entrepreneurial flair
in collecting "night soil" in his village despite
the "capitalist road" implications, and later
moves into a lucrative business venture extracting
enzymes from urine.
We get to know
Daybreak (Liming) Song a hopeless romantic who
attracts the affection of an Italian beauty at
Nanda and all the complications that an affair
with a foreigner at that time attracted as well.
Little Guan is one of Pomfret's best-drawn
characters, a headstrong young woman who makes it
to university seemingly on a sheer will and turns
down a lucrative post-graduation job in Beijing to
follow her heart.
But Pomfret is at his
best with Big Bluffer Ye. Chinese Lessons
is a memoir and not straight reportage so there is
plenty of room for Pomfret to give his personality
and opinions free rein. But he wisely draws back
into reporter mode with Big Bluffer Ye and
tactfully handles a character that embodies so
much of what is good in today's China as well as
what ails it.
Ye Hao got his nickname
because of his poker face. "You're so easy to
cheat. You're such suckers," he sneered at his
friends while playing gin rummy back at Nanjing
University in 1981. Big Bluffer goes on to use
that poker face and a bullying, selfish instinct
that would characterize many of the officials who
made a fortune in the 1980s and 1990s to both
change the face of society around him while also
enriching himself.
Pomfret describes Big
Bluffer Ye's tactics to transform Hunan Road from
what he saw as a fetid, Third-World bazaar to a
First-World avenue of entertainment and shopping,
where "people come up to me and say this road is
like heaven. No beggars and no itinerants."
His tactics are ruthless. Deftly using the
discretionary jailing powers at his disposal
(three years, based on his word, no trial), and
the funds at his disposal, he is able to silence
and destroy those who oppose his development plans
and move things forward at typically Chinese
breakneck speed. "There were no regulations
allowing us to do what we did, but we did it
anyway," he tells Pomfret of the merchants on
Hunan Road that wouldn't heed his edicts. "They
were in the way of progress."
Pomfret's
journalistic flair is masterful in these chapters.
He closes one by walking with Big Bluffer Ye down
Hunan Road to a gaudy glass dragon he had built.
Big Bluffer Ye looks up at the dragon and sighs:
"You know, I wanted him to breath fire, but he
only blows smoke."
Later, he picks up
Pomfret in front of their old university for a
conversation after keeping him waiting for several
days. His Audi swerves at high speed into the
bicycle lane, horn blaring, and Big Bluffer Ye
flings the door open knocking over an old man on a
bicycle. "Don't worry about him," he says. "Get
in."
Pomfret tells us that Big Bluffer Ye
says he subscribes to "the Great Man theory of
history, despite its anti-Marxist slant", He is
undoubtedly a villain, but of the complicated,
compelling and very Chinese variety. Big Bluffer
Ye is not a rare species in modern China, where
men of power often care little for those around
them and hurt many. Yet a lot of what they are
doing is generating wealth, changing the country
for the better and propelling it forward.
One of the major experiences for Pomfret,
like any journalist working in China at the time,
was the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He was
a cub reporter for the Associated Press at that
time and recalls: "I was by no means the best
journalist among the group of foreign
correspondents in Beijing, but I spoke some of the
best Chinese and, just a few years earlier, had
gone to school with men and women much like the
ones now marching."
Those traits allowed
him to cover the story in a more intimate way, and
Pomfret almost loses himself in the story so
caught up is he in the historic whirlwinds of the
moment. He vividly recounts the horrors of June 4,
and even those who have read many accounts of the
crackdown will find Pomfret's reporting incisive.
His dogged pursuit of the story results indirectly
in the jailing of a dissident composer named Liu
Gang.
On May 19, Liu Gang reads him a
secret speech given earlier in the day by Li
Ximing, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party
Committee, which was essentially the announcement
that the military was planning to enter the city
to put an end to the uprising. Exhausted from
working non-stop, "handed the biggest scoop of my
career, the declaration of martial law in China's
capital, I dozed off, and didn't write a thing".
But the authorities had been following the
two and wound up incarcerating Liu Gang, which
would haunt Pomfret for years afterwards. He also
wound up being one of the two journalists expelled
as a result of their reporting on the events on
Tiananmen (the other was Voice of America's Alan
Pessin). Much has been written about the Tiananmen
Square massacre, and Pomfret doesn't dwell too
long on this much-trodden territory.
But
what he really offers is a unique insight into the
growing mood that created Tiananmen. He writes
about race riots that erupted on Nanda in December
of 1988 after some African students objected to
adhering to rules promulgated by the university to
restrict them from having Chinese girls in the
room. An altercation ensued and the next day wild
rumors fueled what appeared to be at first a race
riot, but then seemed to morph into a political
protest. "Kill the black devils" mixed with "Give
us human rights". The events at Nanda "were a
precursor to the nationwide demonstrations that
would rock the government months later".
The seething mixture of "racism,
nationalism and democracy" that fueled the unrest
at Nanda and the uprising on Tiananmen Square are
still evident in the evolution of China today,
where they have been perhaps co-opted by
incredible economic growth but still not reckoned
with.
Pomfret writes from a unique
position as a foreigner who nevertheless knows
China as well as anyone of his generation. He
never lost his moral compass watching the
spectacle of China's unique rat race, and his book
is filled with trenchant criticism of China,
ranging from the country's social norms to its
foreign policy.
But through it all the
reader has no doubt that Pomfret is a journalist
who didn't view the country he was covering as a
simple career choice; there is a clear love for
China in Pomfret's memoir that is aptly and
romantically captured toward the end of the book
when he describes meeting his Chinese wife while
trekking with his editor through Tibet.
In
just over 300 crisply written pages, Chinese
Lessons expertly threads the story lines of
its characters and their country together to
provide a tremendously readable account of
developments out of China, relevant for both
China-watchers and those with only a casual
interest. In a marketplace crowded with news and
accounts of China, Chinese Lessons deserves
a wide readership.
Chinese Lessons
by John Pomfret. Henry Holt and Co. (August 8,
2006). ISBN: 0805076158. Price US$26, 336 pages.
Jeremy Hurewitz edits the Asian
Century Series for Project Syndicate. He is based
in Shanghai.
(Copyright 2006 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
of
those same journalists are turning out books about
these subjects faster than most people can keep
up. 
