DECEMBER 22, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 50 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK

Explaining the 1.3 Billion
The latest survey in a long, distinguished line
By TODD CROWELL

There's a distinguished journalistic franchise that dates back at least to the late 1970s. Call it simply, The Chinese. The purpose is to explain China, its people, now 1.3 billion strong, culture and empire. Invariably, the franchisees have been Western correspondents stationed in Beijing. The genre's pioneer was John Fraser, Beijing bureau chief from 1977 to 1979 for the Toronto Globe and Mail. His book The Chinese: Portrait of a People (1980) was the first of the surveys produced after China began to open to the rest of the world.

David Bonavia, then correspondent for The Times of London, quickly followed in the same year with The Chinese: A Portrait. Both books described a China that was just emerging from the depths of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong. Deng Xiaoping was on the ascent, and the country was showing nascent glimmers of consumerism and the first stirrings of a democracy movement.

Now comes The Chinese (John Murray, London, 464 pages, 25) by Jasper Becker, the Beijing bureau chief of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. Anyone who read Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine, his well-researched history of the famine caused by Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, will look forward to this new work. It is an outstanding snapshot of China today and a fitting successor to the earlier works.

Reading Becker, it is remarkable to discover how little has changed in some areas of Chinese administration since Fraser and Bonavia published their works. Take education. Bonavia found a system struggling from the depredations of the Cultural Revolution and sheer lack of funds. "To visit any university, even in the later period of the decade, was a deeply depressing experience," he wrote in 1980.

Twenty years on, Becker reveals an education system still starved for funds. In a country that purports to be communist, poor people continue to pay stiff fees to go to school. "Education remains China's biggest challenge and an area in which the Communist Party has singularly failed its people," he writes.

One of Becker's more illuminating chapters concerns the rule of law, or more accurately, the lack of it. In 1980, Bonavia found it "astonishing that China came through three decades since 1949 without a civil code." At the time, only a few thousand people had any legal training at all. China has since made some progress. A law adopted in 1997 expands the role of lawyers. Other rules give citizens the theoretical right to bring complaints against state organizations.

Nevertheless, much that is iniquitous has remained. Becker is good at documenting the difficulties that ordinary folk face in using the law to redress grievances. This is still a country where individuals simply disappear, where trials are held in secret, where verdicts are still heavily influenced by the Communist Party, where people are executed within days of being arrested. Progress is slow and probably not really possible so long as the political philosophy of the state remains unchanged.

The major transformations have been economic. Becker's book is peppered with acronyms — SEZs, or special economic zones, for example — absent in Fraser's and Bonavia's books because they barely existed then. When every unit was a state-owned enterprise, special designations for SOEs were superfluous. It is almost quaint to read in Bonavia how, "to secure a factory job is the highest goal most Chinese city dwellers aspire to." Few Chinese would have such aspirations today.

For Fraser the big political crisis of his tour was the Democracy Wall movement of 1978. By the time Becker arrived 12 years later, this awakening of political consciousness was ancient history. Memories of the 1989 Tiananmen dissidents are also fading. To be sure, China's leaders possess plenty of tools for repression, and Becker is not shy to describe them. But the overall feeling is of political quiescence.

Even the rise of the Falungong last year gets relatively little attention in Becker's book. For a more detailed analysis turn to Falun Gong's Challenge to China by Danny Schechter, an American journalist and television producer (Akashic Books, New York, 254 pages). He appears to have obtained most of his information from reading news clippings and by interviewing devotees living abroad. Schechter met briefly with the sect's mysterious leader, Li Hongzhi, in New York (the short interview is printed in full), but remarks that, "I didn't have time to ask him personal questions." Still, this is a fairly competent survey of the sudden appearance of the quasi-religious sect that the authorities branded as an "evil cult" and the fierce crackdown that followed. Little, indeed, has changed, in the party's response to civil dissent.

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