China Under Deng: A Great Leap Forward?

China Wakes is removed, not just from Snow and Smedley, but also from Butterfield and Bernstein, both of whom studied China in graduate school, vexing over Vietnam, the "Taiwan problem," and the thoughts of Mao. Kristof’s Asian interests at Harvard were "limited to excursions with friends to a bar called the "Hong Kong." He and WuDunn did not set foot in China until 1987 and came to Beijing without baggage from the field of China studies or the feuds over China policy of the 1960s. China bubbled at their feet; they took it as they found it. They were not haunted by hidden meanings. Reading China Wakes, we realize China is being treated as a normal nation. The book could be titled Beyond a Pathology of China.

DENG’S WORLD

China Wakes is a deeply ambivalent book. The authors’ grim experiences of repression, especially following the Tiananmen disaster, jostle against their palpable excitement that China is taking off to prosperity, even to freedom, as Taiwan did before it. Kristof catches the illogical but hopeful spirit of the age by calling the Deng system "Market Leninism." Writing in alternating "he" and "she" chapters, the couple depict an economy jumping through the roof and a politics sunk in Stalinism. They see a system of rule by men and not by law, where the petty thieves are punished while the big crooks run the country. They observe the shriveling of Marxist faith, leaving "about as many believing communists in China as there are Zoro-astrians in the West." Filling the vacuum are religion, money-making, qi gong (the Daoist art of breathing and concentration), and a superstitious cult of Mao. "Maybe I’m not a believer," a travel agent at worship in a Catholic church tells WuDunn. "But this is Western culture, and I want to learn more about it. This is a very famous religion."

We read of eye-opening talk radio and a new literature of nihilism, which does not so much criticize the Chinese Communist Party as laugh at it, like the novel Fei Du (Wasted Capital), in which the main character sucks milk from a cow and a young woman dies from masturbating with corn cobs. We hear of the spreading cancer of corruption in which graft has turned into Mafia-style organized crime. (It is revealing of the Deng era that intellectuals do not bulk large in this book. We more often hear something interesting from a businessman or the son of a high official than from a professor.)

It would appear that Kristof (especially) and WuDunn have bought the Deng view of the reform era, as if only in 1978, when Deng edged out Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, did the globe begin to spin. They make a burlesque of the Mao era and subsume the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 into the broader category of the late Mao years. These distortions are worth noting because they carry a warning about China-watching in the future. Involved is a mental process originating with the Beijing government, blacken yesterday to brighten today, that has tarnished all who have spent years listening to the Chinese communists. Actually, China still serves up a Beijing Opera version of events, complete with heroes and villains. Campaigns no longer target ideology as in the 1960s and 1970s. But they continue to occur; witness the handling of the Asian Games in 1990 and the failed bid to secure the 2000 Olympics. In the new campaigns, the nationalistic interest of the Chinese state replaces Maoism as the campaign’s raison d’être.

Kristof and WuDunn take potshots at Edgar Snow, Felix Greene, and others for past misjudgments about China, but some of Kristof’s own observations may bring a smile to the faces of our grandchildren. "If China can hold its course," he writes, "it will produce the greatest economic miracle in recorded history." Do I hear an echo of the drumbeating that surrounded Mao’s Great Leap Forward? Kristof concludes that the Chinese "live about as well as an American might live, in America, on $2,000 a year." If China did not have 1.2 billion people, no one would turn a hair at such a statistic. But Kristof’s conclusion is grand: "Never before has such a large proportion of humanity risen from poverty so rapidly."

One trait of the current awe at China’s economic boom, happily avoided in China Wakes, is a condescension to the Chinese and a supposition that a full belly and gadgets in the kitchen are all they desire. People do like to be free. There may not be a Chinese Solzhenitsyn, as Kristof and WuDunn point out, but a Chinese farmer knows what freedom is just as much as Kristof or WuDunn or I do. We should not underestimate the materialism of a people inured to scarcity and now unleashed. Nor should we underestimate the intelligence of a people who have spent thousands of years hiding their thoughts from lofty rulers.

Is China really "waking" in climactic fashion? Chinese intellectuals and American liberal reformers have announced such a dawn many times. But Deng’s policies of the 1980s and 1990s have only dismantled Maoism; they have not set in place a new polity, public philosophy, or socioeconomic order.

BREAKDOWN OR CRACKDOWN?

China Wakes is a child of the American liberal vision of progress. "We had in-vested our souls in China," the authors confess. WuDunn says she went to Beijing searching not just for the "real China" but for her own identity. Kristof felt "betrayed" by the Tiananmen massacre, as American liberal reformers in China before him felt betrayed by decadent Mandarins, warlords, Chiang Kai-shek, and Japanese marauders. The pair avow that China has "a fighting chance to go the rest of the distance." To where?