Chinese

Jasper Becker

Description

A lively first hand portrait of Chinese society by a veteran British resident correspondent. It starts at the bottom of the pyramid with a picture of the very poorest and ends with an account of the wealthy ruling elite. The books was written in 1998 but is still relevant today as the basic structure of Chinese society has not changed and the issues and challenges remain the same. It shows how China works in the context both of its long history and its more recent Communist past.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Publishing
• Date de parution: 10 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783017843
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE CHINESE
JASPER BECKER
Copyright 2000 by Jasper Becker
1 357 9 108642
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Becker, Jasper
The Chinese.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. China. I. Title
DS706. B393 2001
951-dc21 00-042167
First published in eBook format in 2015
eBook ISBN: 9781-783-01784-3
ISBN 0-684-84412-5
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Maps
Introduction: Through the Open Door
1. Eating Bitterness
2. Local Despots and Peasant Rebels
3. Getting Rich is Glorious
4. Behind the Walls
5. Inside the Zones
6. The Iron Rice Bowl
7. The Pig that Fears to Become Fat
8. The God of Wealth
9. Guttering Candles
10. Barefoot Doctors and Witch-doctors
11. The Stinking Ninth
12. Secret Empire
13. Tremble and Obey
14. The Rule of Law
15. Between Heaven and Earth
Epilogue: Examining the Oracle Bones
Appendix I: Chronology
Appendix II: Biographical Sketches
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
( between pages 208 209 )
1. Deng Xiaoping, architect of China s reforms
2. A town in the poverty-stricken province of Shaanxi
3. High-density housing, Shanghai
4. The burden of China s population
5. Rice-farming in Guangxi
6. Share speculation, Shanghai
7. Workers on a state-owned production line
8. Private enterprise in the former treaty port of Wenzhou
9. Western advertisements on a Chinese street
10. A newly built department store, Shanghai
11. A collective factory, Shanxi
12. The Yellow River
13. Soldiers of the People s Liberation Army
14. The unemployed in a Shanghai public park
15. Rural teachers in Hebei
16. A barefoot doctor in Guangxi
17. Statue of Mao, Hunan
18. Riots in Shenzhen, 1992
19. Bao Tong, political aide to Zhao Ziyang
20. The arrest of a suspect in the aftermath of Tiananmen, 1989
21. A parade of condemned prisoners
21. The National People s Congress, Beijing
23. Jiang Zemin, on the fiftieth anniversary of the People s Republic of China
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce photographs: Plates, 1, 13, 17, 18, 19 and 21, South China Morning Post Photo Library; 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 20, 22 and 23, Adrian Bradshaw. Plates 11, 15 and 16 were taken by the author.
Acknowledgements
W RITING THIS BOOK would not have been possible without the support of the South China Morning Post and the expertise of its staff. I would like especially to acknowledge my debt to the editors, Jonathan Fenby and Robert Keatley, who gave me the freedom to write; the paper s China experts, Willy Wo-lap Lam, Daniel Kwan and Vivien Pik-kwan Chan; and the librarian Gracia Wong.
In Beijing I owe much to the reporting of my colleague Mark O Neill who also read the manuscript, and to the research of Ma Jun and Madhusudan Chaubey. Mark Hopkins, Susan Whitfield and Frances Wood were also kind enough to read a draft and offer their comments.
Gail Pirkis, my editor at John Murray, deserves the most credit. This book is her concept and she played a decisive role in developing the style in which it is written. Without her knowledge of China, it might never have appeared.
Many fellow journalists in Beijing have also provided invaluable insights as have diplomats, Chinese friends and strangers, not forgetting the innumerable taxi-drivers who have spoken their minds so freely over the years. Though space does not permit me to list them all, I offer my thanks to them and also to the many academics on whose ideas and research all journalists rely so heavily.
Life in Beijing may not be glamorous but each of us enjoys the feeling of belonging to the ancient and select club of China-watchers. We all seek to add our penny s worth to a common fund of knowledge but in the end our real debt is to those Chinese who have had the courage to speak out.

INTRODUCTION
Through the Open Door
T HE C HINESE S TATE is probably the oldest functioning organization in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years. It is also possibly the most successful in history, controlling more people and more territory, and for longer periods, and exercising a tighter grip over its subjects than any other comparable government in the last two millennia.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the People s Republic of China governs the destiny of over 1.3 billion people, or 21.6 per cent of the world s population, making it the most populous country on earth. In describing the different groups who comprise this vast population, this book aims to provide a broad overview of the current state of China.
At the base of the social pyramid are the peasantry who constitute around a billion people, more than the combined populations of the United States of America and the European Union. The book starts with them, probably the largest single identifiable group ever to have existed at any point in recorded history. But they are not uniform and the first chapter describes the very poorest of them, the 100 million who struggle to farm patches of stony soil in remote uplands.
The final chapter describes the apex of the pyramid, the tiny group of self-selecting rulers who live in the pavilions scattered among the gardens and lakes of what was once the imperial palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing. In between, the book looks at other groups, some defined by geography, some by economic or political status.
Many chapters draw on my own travels around China during ten years as a resident reporter. Yet much of China remains hidden. For one thing it is too big to be knowable. I have been to Shandong province a number of times but it has a population of 90 million, bigger than any European country. And China is secretive. Few foreigners, if any, have ever attended-or at least reported on-a meeting of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cell, let alone a session of the ruling Politburo. It is equally rare to be able to interview an officer in the People s Liberation Army (PLA) although it has a membership greater than the population of dozens of UN member states.
Intense secrecy and manipulation of information have long been regarded as an essential part of successful government and diplomacy, and though, as Marxists, China s Communist rulers have embraced concepts of modern scientific government and so gather huge quantities of data, this has not made it any easier to understand the country.
The information travels up through the bureaucracy, and every layer revises it to conform to the targets set by its superiors. The central government constantly complains about the false statistics it receives but it is equally guilty of putting out false or deliberately distorted information. And not only is the present unclear but the past often changes too. The central state controls the archives and strives to ensure a monopoly over the reporting and recording of history. Although its verdicts on past events change frequently, this is never a cause of much shame or embarrassment.
Foreign scholars and outside agencies such as the United Nations or the World Bank are put under enormous pressure not to challenge Chinese statistical claims and rarely do. Many experts prefer cooperation to conflict, but anyone who spends time working in China eventually comes to doubt even basic facts.
How many people are there in China? One American ambassador, Admiral Joseph Prueher, remarked that he could not even find this out but he was told it was anywhere between 1,250 million and 1,300 million. Therefore, a population almost the size of Britain s may or may not exist. How much arable land is there to feed them? Official statistics say 95 million hectares (234 million acres), but satellite surveys suggest 140 million hectares (345 million acres). 1
Some experts, particularly economists, tend to argue that even if the reported facts, such as economic growth rates, are overstated they do at least represent a reliable trend. I doubt that. I suspect-but can rarely demonstrate-that many figures are simply made up to suit the propaganda needs of the day. It is this cloud of uncertainty surrounding so much in China that explains why so many books are written about the country.
Yet compared to most periods in its history, China may now be said to be more open and less mysterious than it has ever been. Even so, greater access has done nothing to clarify Western perceptions of China, which have ranged from wonder to disgust, from hope to fear-one book on my shelves, written by another journalist in the 1930s, is entitled China: The Pity of It. 2 In the past century and a half, since the restrictions on foreigners roaming around China were first lifted, Western visitors have been both fascinated and saddened by the romantic ruins of old Cathay, a dead but once glorious civilization like that of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Yet within the same period, the modernization of China has also led to a hysterical fear of China as a nuclear-armed global power bent on spreading Communist revolution. Even within the last twenty-five years writers have sincerely and convincingly portrayed China as either an oriental Utopia or a Communist hell. Between these extremes, visitors have dreamed of the vast profits to be won from selling to John Chinaman , a dream that still provides the dynamic for the West s relations with China.
By contrast, the Chinese state continues to feel threatened by outsiders seeking to win the loyalty of its subjects, just as it did over a century ago. Buddhism, Islam and Christianity have won many converts in China and continue to do so, but rarely with the support of the state.
China is big enough to permit many views. Precisely because the country eludes generalization, some observers have tended to grasp at straws, too willing to convert a trend into a prophecy-many people are buying cars, so eventually half a billion will own cars; some groups want democracy, soon everyone will. And, perhaps frustrated by