For
years now, intellectually curious people who are about to head off to
China—and happen to know that I teach and write about that country for a
living—have occasionally asked me a variation of the same question: "Can
you point me toward a good book to read in advance or take along on the
trip, which will offer a perspective different from both that offered by a
standard guidebook and that given by reports in the mainstream media?"
And with the Beijing Olympics drawing near and interest in China rising for
other reasons, the frequency with which I get asked this sort of question
has picked up. Sometimes now the people doing the asking aren't even
planning to go to the PRC, but just want to know more about the place.
I've
always liked to be asked the question, since it gives me the opportunity to
steer people toward a piece of reportage, a memoir, a work of analysis, or a
novel that has the potential to counteract simplistic and misleading ideas
about China. And at the moment, I've got a special reason to welcome
the "what should I read" question. It gives me a chance to answer:
"Why China's Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times, of
course." (That's my latest book. It's also
my first that is playful and footnote free enough to have the potential to
divert a China-bound traveler who isn't an academic, and is short enough
that someone going from Chicago to Shanghai or Bombay to Beijing could not
just start but also finish it while en route.) But I don't actually
give that response, since it feels tacky to flog my own wares.
Instead, I suggest a recent book I like by someone else. Oracle Bones,
for example, an insightful and elegantly written book by Peter Hessler,
which is part memoir, part work of analysis.
Coming
up with books to suggest isn't hard these days, since many accessible and
interesting ones about China have come out recently—though some fall pray
to simplistically romanticizing or (as is especially common just now)
demonizing the PRC, which immediately disqualifies them from being worth
recommending in my eyes. What's tough at the moment (even tougher
than resisting the temptation to plug my own book) is settling on just one
book by someone else to recommend. As good as Oracle Bones is,
for instance, when I've suggested it, I've sometimes immediately
regretted that I didn't tell the person instead to read journalist and
oral historian Sang Ye's China Candid, a wonderful collection of
interviews with Chinese from widely varied walks of life. So, now
I've decided that it's silly to limit myself to just one book when
dealing with a country as big, interesting, important, multifaceted, and
misunderstood by outsiders as China. Surely, it makes sense to offer
up a few books. Or better yet, take things further, in honor of the
upcoming Olympics (for which athletes are training so intensely), and
develop a twelve-step reading program. This is what I've done,
organizing my scheme around a dozen titles that will help anyone serious
about preparing to watch the Games (up close or on television) get in shape
mentally. I've even put these readings into a month-by-month training plan
that is outlined below. (I'm aware that most people will skip a
month or two or even nearly all of the "assignments," yet I remain
convinced that, even so, just as occasional visitors to a gym still see
improvements in their health, the program will benefit these slackers.)
The
books have been chosen with an eye toward liveliness, links of some sort to
Beijing as a city or the Olympics as an event, and also stylistic and
topical variety (just as athletes find it important to cross train, shifting
gears periodically in any reading program is a good thing). A few are
by academics. For example, I start things off with Jonathan Spence's
1999 biography Mao Zedong, a life story of the founder of the PRC
that is not just more sophisticated and less sensationalistic than the
recent best-seller about the same figure by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, but
also much shorter and far more fluidly written. Some of the readings
are by journalists. May's reading, for instance, is Ian Johnson's
carefully researched Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China,
which includes a moving account of Beijing residents being forced to give up
their old homes to make way for urban development projects. And
one's a mystery set in Beijing, The Pool of Unease, by BBC
journalist-turned-novelist Catherine Sampson. This seemed natural to
throw in, both for the sake of bringing an additional genre into the mix and
because my own reading en route to China is often a whodunit.
October 2007
Spence's
Mao Zedong (Penguin, 1999) is doubly appropriate to read this month.
It is natural to begin things with a book on the past (Mao lived from 1893
to 1976), and in China the first day in October is when ceremonies are held
to commemorate the moment in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the founding of the
People's Republic. Spence manages to give us a thoroughly human as opposed
to demonic Mao (early chapters even quote from some of the love letters the
future leader wrote in his youth) who accomplished important things.
But he does not minimize the venality of Mao's actions at certain moments
(such as his ordering brutal purges of rivals). Nor does Spence gloss
over the horrific consequences of some of the campaigns Mao launched late in
life, such as the ill-conceived Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s (that
was responsible for an astronomical number of famine deaths) and the
Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
November 2007
Since
Spence provides us with an essentially top-down introduction to China's
Communist era, structured around one unique and uniquely powerful
individual, it is useful to turn next to a work that foregrounds the
experiences of ordinary people: China Candid: The People of the
People's Republic (University of California Press, 2006). The
work of a Chinese writer now based in Australia, who publishes under the pen
name of Sang Ye, this book introduces readers to a Beijing student who
relocated to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (and much to the
dismay of his friends and relatives still does not want to return to the
city), a woman who works for a bureau of consumer affairs, an executioner, a
prostitute, a fiercely nationalistic hacker, and many other colorful
characters. By turns moving, depressing, disturbing and funny, their
interviews with Sang Ye are presented with the questions edited out, so that
readers feel as though they are being talked to directly. With the Olympics
approaching, the chapter that makes don't miss reading is "Unlevel
Playing Field: Confessions of an Elite Athlete," a no holds barred
indictment, by an insider, of the Chinese sports establishment.
December 2007
The
end of the year is always a time for backward-looking assessments of the
recent past. This makes it fitting for this month's reading to be
historian 
Timothy Cheek's Living with Reform: China since 1989 (Palgrave,
2007). This short overview of China since Mao's day carries forward
up to the present the history lesson begun by Spence. (Don't be
misled by the reference to 1989 in the title, as Cheek has plenty to say
about the period between Mao's death and the protests of that year.)
In addition, since Cheek pays as much attention to social and cultural
issues, ranging from the changing role of women in Reform era China to new
belief systems, as he does to high politics, the book also helps place into
context the individual life stories at the heart of Sang Ye's book.
January 2008
Since
2008 seems likely to be remembered, at least in China, as Beijing's year,
it makes sense to start it off with a reading focusing exclusively on the
city. And, fortunately, a sweeping survey of the city's past that is
scholarly yet readable has just appeared: Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey
and Halli Kong's Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City (Palgrave,
2007). This book, which comes with a generous number of photographs
and footnotes that point readers who want to know more about particular
periods to the best specialized studies, is an ideal choice for January
reading.
February 2008
Li and company approach history via a straightforward narrative, but this
month's selection, Oracle Bones: A Journey between China's Past and
Present (Harper Collins, 2006), continually moves back and forth
from the country's rapidly changing current state to its distant past, as
Hessler recounts his growing fascination with the earliest evidence of
Chinese writing and the scholars who study these inscriptions. The
book is liberally sprinkled with extended quotations from the author's
conversations with and letters from people he has gotten to know in China.
Gracefully written and thoughtful, it seems particularly appropriate to read
this month because of its fine chapter on what it was like to be a Westerner
in Beijing in February 2001, when the capital was striving to win the right
to host the 2008 Games.
March 2008
With
the Olympics less than six months away, a book focusing on Chinese sports is
called for, and, luckily, just such a work is due out in February: Susan
Brownell's Beijing's Games (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
This promises to be a very special collection of essays by an anthropologist
who is uniquely qualified to weigh in on the topic of the Games. She has
done well over a decade of ethnographic work on sports in the PRC (beginning
with the dissertation research that led to 1995's University Chicago Press
book, Training the Body for China, her first major publication) and
has worked closely with the IOC and the Chinese representative to that body
(whose life history she translated into English). In addition, she has
the rare distinction for a foreigner of having competed successfully in a
Chinese track meet, earning fame in 1986 as "the American girl who won
glory for Beijing University." Though I haven't read her new book,
which will deal with everything from the links between sports and
nationalism to recurring patterns in Western coverage of Chinese athletics,
I've seen and been impressed by early versions of some of the pieces it
will contain. And if it is like her first book, it will not just be
based on solid research but also written clearly and with verve.
April 2008
While
Brownell's book will prepare readers for the athletic side of the
Olympics, the reading for this month, art historian Wu Hung's Remaking
Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space
(University of Chicago Press and Reaktion Books, 2005),
will prepare them
for the opening and closing ceremonies. This is because the
author—using an experimental format that shifts between scholarly analysis
and digressions into his own memories of going to and watching events held
in Tiananmen Square—has very interesting things to say about the
state-sponsored spectacles of the past, such as National Day parades, that
are sure to influence the 2008 summer ceremonies. He also, not
surprisingly, deals with Beijing's largest gathering area as the site of
protests. And this makes the book an ideal reading for April, since
some of the most important Tiananmen protests have taken place in that
month, which was both the time of year when a series of large 1976
demonstrations took place and when the 1989 upheaval that ended with the
June 4th Massacre began.
May 2008
This
month's selection also has an art history angle: Picturing Power in the
People's Republic of China: The Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Rowman
and Littlefield, 1999). It is a lavishly illustrated volume edited by
historian Harriet Evans (who contributes a chapter on representations of
women in propaganda of the Maoist era) and media studies specialist
Stephanie Donald (whose chapter looks at portrayals of children). Much
as China has changed since Mao's death, there are some aspects of the
visual culture of that time that endure, just as the posters of the 1960s
and 1970s (which as shown in this book were widely varied in style and tone)
often reworked genres and themes inherited from the pre-Communist past.
This means that the book retains a contemporary relevance, helping readers
decode the symbolism of current propaganda drives, state-sponsored
spectacles, and sometimes even Chinese advertising. Containing essays
by prominent scholars in different disciplines (including literary
specialist Chen Xiaomei, who writes here of growing up surrounded by the
images displayed and analyzed in the book) and a chapter by a longtime China
correspondent (the Guardian's John Gittings), Picturing Power
is a fitting reading for May, since many say that the Cultural Revolution
began with speeches Mao gave during that month in 1966 (though, like so many
things about the upheaval, when exactly it started and ended continues to be
a matter of debate).
June 2008
This
month will see the arrival of the nineteenth anniversary of the June 4th
Massacre, and hence is an appropriate one in which to read Wall Street
Journal reporter Ian Johnson's Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change
in Modern China (Pantheon, 2004). The book does not provide a new
account of the 1989 protests, but it does offer a superb, textured analysis
of sources of discontent and patterns of state repression (including efforts
to quash the Falun Gong sect) of the 1990s and early twenty-first century. (Readers looking for a new account of the 1989 protests should turn instead
to another excellent recent book by an American journalist, John Pomfret's
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China—a
publication that could easily have been included in this program, but which
I passed over mainly because, the short section on the Massacre aside, it
focuses largely on Nanjing rather than Beijing.)
July 2008
To
get up-to-speed on a variety of issues not yet covered during the final
run-up to the Games, it makes sense to read something that deals with a
broad range of topics. My choice is a volume edited by historians
Timothy Weston and Lionel Jensen, China's Transformations: The Stories
Beyond the Headlines (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)—though lively
alternatives for those who want to stick with reportage after reading Wild
Grass, would be Duncan Hewitt's Getting Rich First: Life in a
Changing China (Chatto and Windus, 2007) and Rob Gifford's China
Road (Random House, 2007). Most of the contributors to China's
Transformations are academics who know how to write for a broad
audience, but there are also two chapters by journalists and one on the
politics of the internet by human rights activist Xiao Qiang. The
topics covered range from pollution, to popular nationalism, to the
differences between what "Chinese food" is and means in China as opposed
to in foreign lands—a subject that might well intrigue those planning soon
to set off for a stay in the country.
For the Plane
As
noted above, my favored in-flight books tend to be mysteries, so I'm
recommending Sampson's The Pool of Unease
(Macmillan, 2007)—and
slipping it in here to also nicely bring the total number of books up to an
even dozen. Some readers may feel that, at a few points, loose ends
either get tied up a bit too quickly or are left dangling too long, but the
writing is lively throughout, the characters memorable, and Sampson has
created a storyline that allows her to deal with several important
issues—and deal with them deftly.
While never forgetting the goal of
entertaining her readers, for example, she gives them a valuable sense of
the complicated nature of police corruption in the PRC, the tensions caused
by the growing divide between those being raised swiftly and those being
left behind by China's economic boom, and the ethical dilemmas faced by
foreign reporters who are protected in ways that their sources are not in a
one-party state. And the book's main narrative device—alternating
between first-person chapters by British reporter Robyn Ballantyne, heroine
of two previous crime novels, and third-person chapters that focus on a
Chinese private eye, whom readers may hope shows up in future mysteries in
the series—works wonderfully. There are evocative descriptions of
both gritty parts of Beijing that most tourists won't see and Chinese
luxury hotels and villas, which can seem surreal located as they are in what
is in many ways still a developing country. A final plus—or
minus—is that, for those about to be jet-lagged, the book conveys all too
well the difficulty that the heroine has adjusting to the time change during
her first trip to China.
August 2008