Book Review: "Chinese Whispers," by Ben Chu
I discovered this book in the Western paperbacks section of Shanghai Foreign Languages Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. My first thought, based on the cover and the disappointingly uninspired title (never mind the tired cliche about judging books based on those criteria), was that it would be another baudy soap-opera-esque tale of intrigue among China's analog of the West's desperate housewives. The subtitle (why everything you've heard about China is wrong) got my attention, so I picked it up, still not entirely sure what to expect from it. I was a bit surprised to find that it was a non-fiction work, as it was probably the only non-fiction among the paperbacks there.
On one hand, it was a book about China in a Chinese bookstore, which is almost always a sure sign that it will be smack full of CCP propaganda. Indeed, the sale of anything about China that dares to speak of the country in anything less than cloying praise tends to guarantee a "friendly visit" from the local PSB. That's how it is in Beijing, anyway. Experience with Shanghai gave me the impression though that the city might be a bit more cosmopolitan and open-minded. It has a reputation for that, though the Xi regime is cracking down on such insidious Western vices as individual thought or a free press.
In any case, the book's location (on the opposite side of the store from where I found the stack of CCP propaganda already in my cart), its back cover (a series of points the book sets out to make, which included an unusual mix of praise and criticism of Chinese society in general; or perhaps more accurately, of Western perceptions thereof), and a quick flip through its early pages (I flipped to page 25 and audibly gasped as I beheld, for the first time, someone other than myself who had the balls to not only dismiss China's "5,000 year history" myth but put it in print), convinced me that adding this book to my research shelf was more than worth the 24 RMB price tag, and while I certainly would not mind the chance to debate the author over a great many of his conclusions (or to ask why in all the Hells he picked a title that he must have known had already been used more than a dozen times), I'm certainly glad I chose it.
What Chu Talkin' About, Willis?
If I had to give my opinion of the book in a single sentence (notwithstanding that I've already overshot that mark by three paragraphs), I'd say the author is a genius when it comes to uncovering facts and a fool when it comes to drawing conclusions from them. If permitted a second sentence I would add that he shows far greater prowess as an investigaor than as a historian. In this book Chu expertly unearths facts, ranging from data to personal interviews, lays them out in plain and accessible terms (except in matters of economics, where the author, who is a senior economics editor for The Independent, seems to have a different definition of "laymen's terms" than I do), and then, bafflingly, derives conclusions that are frequently debunked by the facts he himself presents.
The most glaring example presents itself early in the book, in Chapter Two (or rather, in "Whisper Two"), subtitled "The Chinese are Irredeemably Racist." Throughout this chapter, Chu rather unceremoniously exposes blinding bursts of overtly ethnocentric thinking in both the political arena and daily life of China, citing everything from news coverage of the 1988 Anti-African riots (p. 54) to the discriminatory neglect experienced by the Malaysian wife of British Author Martin Jacques in a Hong Kong hopital, ultimately leading to her death in 2010 (p.55), and from the Chinese internet's reactions to Condoleeza Rice's visit to China (p.54) to his own personal experience (p. 67-68). His examples range from quasi-educated blue-collar laborers in Guangzhou (p. 67) to expats who began to see the jingoistic writing on the wall and jumped ship with the rise of Xi in 2012 (p. 55) to a Chinese talk show host (p. 55) to a pop singer (p. 52), and he manages to cite examples by Mao and Zhou along the way. It is an impressive catalog of Zhonghua Jingoism.
However, he ends the chapter by stating "in some ways, China has less of a mountain to climb than our own societies did when it comes to eradicating racial prejudice and stamping out its attendant evils (p. 74)," never mind that China itself openly admits to having an entire culture built upon little other than ethnocentrism (they have a direct etymological analog of the word "ethnocentrism" as their name). He follows this up with a string of rhetoric that is so obtuse and oblivious to obvious facts that it is worthy of salon.com or addictinginfo.com.
"China never generated the systemized political racism of twentieth century Europe or America. It has no crime in its history to compare with the transatlantic slave trade, the destruction of the way of life of American Indians, the segregation of the southern states of America, or the Holocaust."
(P. 74).
For the record, slavery was legal in China well into the twentieth century and even after it was outlawed the purchasing of daughters (not a bride-price, the open and unmasked purchase of daughters as concubines, using the Chinese characters 奴役妾; look it up) was openly practiced until the 1970's. Furthermore, China leads the world in black market human trafficking to this day, which refutes Chu's allegations that nothing in China compares to the Tran-Atlan. Also, I would recommend he read up on Qin Shihuang. As to the claims that China has nothing comparable to the Indian Wars or segregation, Tibet would like a chat with him regarding the former claim, as would Xinjiang with regard to the latter. And of course, the Holocaust, with its 6 million dead, absolutely pales in comparison to the death toll of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. It is a bit jarring to read more than 30 pages of blistering examples of Han Chauvanism, from which the author derives the conclusion that the Chinese are not as racist as we think. It's a bit like a coroner looking at a burned and charred corpse and saying "my conclusion is that he drowned while in a state of mild hypothermia."
A second, less shocking and more laughable example of the author's diligent efforts to refute his own points comes on page 84. The best way to explain this is to simply make two quotations, and remind the reader that Chu puts these two statements on the very same page.
"The first Ming emperor, Hongwu, killed a hundred thousand people in various purges, including not only disloyal officials but their families too."
(P. 84)
And then, in the very next paragraph no less...
"The society-shredding terror of the Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged to beat their teachers, and former landlords were vindictively tortured, must also be understood as something new in Chinese history."
(P. 84)
The author goes on to say that no Chinese emperor prior to the Communist Party ever encouraged the rank and file to seek out and destroy everything associated with the previous dynasty. This seems to indicate a glaring lack of knowledge of the reign of Qin Shihuang, who issued an edict mandating execution for anyone found in possession of a book by any pre-Qin scholar. This apparent lack of information is made doubly ironic by the fact that the author refers to Qin Shihuang earlier on the same page.
While this tendency to undercut his own thesis is a thread that unfortunately runs throughout the book, the information from which he derives his bizarre conclusions, which Chu has done a remarkable job of sifting through layers of Communist Party propaganda and nonsense to find, makes the book an enlightening read. Essentially, for a "dragonslayer" like myself, reading this book is like being a prosecutor and watching the defense make my case for me.
Chu on This
Despite the fact that Chu seems to have missed his own most salient points, it's difficult for anyone reading his book to do the same. It is doubtful that the entire CIA could produce a more damning dossier against the harshness of everyday life for rural Chinese than what he (with family living in the guangdong countryside, whom he has frequently visited throughout his life) assembles in these 268 pages. Whenever China's Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, takes the podium to spout fountains of fantasy about China's "anti-poverty efforts," Chu's no-nonsense look at the vast, abject poverty and massive wealth inequality that characterize Chinese life (p. 89), and the foolish allocation of resources to eye-candy projects while the meat-and-potatoes of infrastructure (such as roads connecting most villages to the nearest town) go unbuilt (p. 175), is there in print to say "not so fast," if anyone cares to open the book and see.
Perhaps the book's peak is between pages 175 and 185, where the author examines China through the lens he know best: economics. His examination of everything from China's lack of roads to its pork-barrel spending (an order of magnitude beyond anything in the West) to the death toll from its air and water pollution paints a stark picture any expat will recognize, a picture we can point to and say "see, this is what none of you guys back home understand. This is how messed up it really is over here in this 'rising superpower.' " While the rest of the book has a tendency to flounder wishy-washily every few pages and meander around finding its way to its main ideas, these pages are a series of one-after-another power-strikes against the perception of China as an invincible economic giant, and at the risk of abusing the metaphor, the author pulls zero punches and is not afraid to hit below the belt.
"It all points to a colossal misallocation of resources. Local government officials prefer to commission eye-catching building projects -a new airport, a new expressway, a skyscraper, a public square, a sports stadium - rather than the kind of mundane construction work that will actually improve people's lives. And because the promotion prospects of regional officials are determined by their area's annual output figures, there is no incentive for them to give much thought to the long-term profitability of the projects they approve. They will (they hope) have moved on by the time any losses show up. Far from being the 'long-term thinkers' of our imagination, China's capitalist politicians are dangerously preoccupied with the here and now."
(p. 176)
This in-your-face attitude toward China's smug facade of not only invincibility but self-proclaimed divine perfection runs throughout most of the book. Chu takes aim and fires both barrels at China's education system, ripping the veil off of their rampant plagiarism within their university sector (p.116), the seeming inability of their students to write an essay that consists of anything other then previously-memorized chunks of text arranged in various orders (p. 120), the fact that for all China's boasts about the volume of 'research' they allegedly produce, none of it is considered worthy of citation by anyone else outside of China (p. 114), and the fact that for all our talk of the Chinese work ethic, China has not come anywhere close to any Western country in per capita productivity (p. 162), and every example is documented, nor does the author permit the delusion that any of his citations are isolated anomalies. He tends to cite examples in groups of five or more, saturating the reader with proof. Indeed, this example is indicative of the tempo of nearly every page, notwithstanding Chapter 2 and the rather unfortunate conclusion.
Ending with a Whisper
After a rough beginning, the book mostly consists of rather cutting insight into the soft underbelly of China's darker open secrets, and it continues in that vein for most of its length. It is a bit of an unfortunate irony that the book's only remaining weak point, once you roll your eyes at the author's unwillingness to face his own facts in Chapter 2 (to be fair, he is British and it is considered highly improper in the UK to imply that anyone other than Caucasians could possibly be capable of racism), is its ending. Much like chapter 2, the conclusion spends a great deal of time presenting evidence against the points it is about to make. An example is page 232, where Chu gives an account of the McCartney expedition (I have already described this incident in an earlier entry), and then goes to great lengths to state McCartney was in the wrong for refusing to grant the Qianlong emperor's outrageous request for a declaration of servitude, and lays the blame for the confrontation squarely at the feet of the British.
"All this talk of arrogance comes across like psychological projection in the sense described by Sigmund Freud - attributing one's own unacceptable impulses to another. For in a contest between China and Britain one might argue that Britannia had the more exalted sense of its own superiority."
(P. 232)
...I'm sorry, but at the time of this encounter, which of the two nations referred to itself as the "Celestial Empire (having decided that the term 'Central Nation' used by a string of previous dynasties simply wasn't pompous enough)?" Which of the two nations refused to trade with any nation that did not declare themselves a barbarian vassal? And while it may not be popular in this age to say it, but at the time of the encounter, China exercised imperial dominion over more subject nations than the British Empire did.
In short, this page comes across as an example of the national self-debasement that seems to have become an expected norm for political writers in the UK, but the author preemptively sets up enough evidence against his own point that it becomes difficult to take it seriously when that point is made, and the reader can go back to appreciating the book's real value: a look underneath the mythology favored by both Western and Chinese media outlets about the "unstoppable rise of the great China," and a sound and stabilizing perspective on just how weak and unstable the Party-State truly is.
