Book Review: "Will China Dominate the 21st Century?" by Jonathan Fenby
What's in store for China's future? Everyone in the field of political writing has an opinion, and the range and variance of those opinions is never more obvious than when you walk into a book shop in Manila and see Martin Jacques' When China Rules the World right next to Gordon Zhang's The Coming Collapse of China. And of course, just as no two political scientists can agree on what is in store for China, no two in either camp (let's call them the "China Bulls" and the "China Bears") can agree on whether the imminent (pick one: ascendence / collapse) of China is a good thing or a bad thing for the world at large.
Everyone's Got an Opinion, but Who Has an Informed Opinion?
Enter, Jonathan Fenby, a Hong Kong citizen and former writer for the Hong-Kong-based South China Morning Post. Writing from the extensive inside knowledge of China's inner workings both as an insider and an outsider which can only come from a lifelong Hong Konger (having lived there both before and after it was handed off to China and thus having seen China both as a foreign power and then a peculiar blend of motherland and occupier), Fenby's 131 brief pages eschew the dominance/collapse paradigm in favor of a less sensationalist view.
"Rather than ruling the world or collapsing, the PRC will be caught in the limitations of its one-party system and the power apparatus on which the regime is founded." (Pg. 5)
"As a result, the outcome is likely to be summed up in a phrase not usually associated with the PRC: 'muddling through.' This conclusion will disappoint those who seek a sharp, headline-grabbing vision of the future." (Pg. 6)
Though this may seem to be a bit of a let-down to both the China Bears and the China Bulls, the author's no-nonsense approach, as well as his willingness to say what no one else has been willing to say, prove that he is a voice to be taken seriously. From his casual willingness to admit that most of China's international support is not truly support, but merely a desire to find someone, ANYone, who can be a counterweight to America (pg. 7), to his admission that China's gender imbalance makes military aggression more likely (p. 101), though he stops short of pointing out WHY (namely, that the idea of "can't get a woman at home? Then go out on a campaign and steal one from a slain enemy" is one of the oldest matchmaking services known to Humanity), to his frank reminder that China's economy and indeed its very security depends on both the international system that they resent and the continued pre-eminence of their rival, the United States (p. 122) to the lantern he hangs upon the fact that even the Communist Party's upper echelons are aware that the people aren't happy with them and Xi is not hesitant to remind them of the dangers that entails (p. 129), the back-cover synopsis could almost bear the subtitle "oh, yeah: I went there."
Like Quenching Thirst With a Firehose
This book's Achilles' Heel is, ironically enough, that it is too good at what it sets out to be. The short, straight-to-the-point pamphlet (a style dictated by the format of the series of which it is part, namely Polity Publishing's "Global Futures" Series, wherein hard political questions of the next decade are answered in brief and convincing fashion) is so information-dense that there is scarcely time to chew on one important fact before the next is delivered with as little fanfare as the one before it. Furthermore, with so much information packed into such a short book, the final product finds itself a bit lacking in the citations department, largely because if it had a citation every time it needed one than the "notes" section would be longer than the book (kind of the way the "Works Cited" section of my articles is frequently longer than the article). Simply put, it's as if the author isn't so much giving facts to the reader as loading facts into a machine gun and shooting them at the reader, with little time to verify (or even absorb) them.
Were it not for the fact that many of the statements made herein were things I had read elsewhere (with citations), I might have found myself frequently questioning the book's validity. Even as it is, it's not one to read without a pencil (or a multi-colored set of color-coded highlighting markers) close at hand to make some notes. My copy, having now been read through once and used as a reference source several times over, is now so covered with scrawled references to the page numbers in other books in my library where a given issue is discussed, that at a glance one would think it had fallen victim to my toddler son and his crayons.
So Who Should Read It?
Well, China-watchers, obviously. For those whose interest in Chinese politics is new but who are more interested in he global ramifications of Chinese matters, rather than the everyday nitty-gritty of the Chinese business world shown in Paul Midler's What's Wrong With China, this book makes a tasty appetizer before diving into the meat-and-potatoes of Stephen Mosher's Bully of Asia or Ben Chu's Chinese Whispers or, God-forbid, slogging through Xi Jinping' The Governance of China (which I really wouldn't recommend wasting your time with anyway).
Alternatively, for veteran China Watchers, this book makes a crisp and refreshing (to perhaps abuse the food and beverage analogy) reminder of what is already known but may have been forgotten. In virtually every paragraph is another finger-snapping "I'd forgotten about that bit" moment that will leave such Sinologists rummaging through their bookshelves for bits of information they barely remember from other books, making notes in margins that may have previously been overlooked. For these "old China hands," Fenby's book is a relaxing and useful way to wile away an afternoon or two, and will make an excellent addition to any such reader's library, even without taking up much space on the shelf.
