The China Reader: The Reform Era

By Jonah Greenberg

"You have to rely on yourself, and that's just what I've been doing," says a software pirater in Beijing. "That's why I'm different from my parents: I don't owe the communist party anything, and the Party doesn't owe me. The Party makes money their way, and I make it mine."

These words, taken from Sang Ye's Chinese Time: The People on the People's Republic, read like a layman's parse of Deng Xiaoping's "to get rich is glorious", the no-nonsense mantra that brought China out of the Cultural Revolution era and sustained its sweeping reforms well into the nineties.

But when Deng Xiaoping, the de facto successor to Chairman Mao's supreme power and the man responsible for China's opening up to the West, passed away in 1997 it was as if he was right on cue to neatly bring to an end that twenty-five year period now known as The Reform Era.

This quarter of a century stretch of time is the focus of the fourth and most recent volume of the China Reader series, simply titled "The Reform Era." For this book editors Orville Schell and David Shambaugh culled a collection of articles, papers, institutional studies, speeches, and primary texts (The China Reader: The Reform Era, Vintage Books, 1999) that address Chinese politics, economy, society, and culture from 1972 to 1997.

Untouchable Status

The rich and colorful interviews in translation and the excerpts of speeches by some of China's most influential statesmen make the volume a sort of native testimonial, which, in combination with the scholarly insight in many of the handpicked essays, outweigh the dated quality of some of the more journalistic entries and make The China Reader a work of lasting value.

Schell and Shambaugh approached this ambitious task -- one that would seek to encapsule a topic of unlimited complexity into 535 softback pages -- in a simple yet brilliant way: they let the facts speak for themselves. The two editors, who have reached a sort of untouchable status among sinologists (Schell with his post as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Shambaugh being the former editor of The China Quarterly) have figured out at least one thing in their decades long immersion in China studies: there is no single right answer when dealing with China.

From the start the editors make clear that they aren't articulating any one particular argument, but rather the lack of one. The primary goal of this volume, they write in the introduction, is to "highlight a contradictory theme," to call the reader's attention to the "paradox of reform" in China. Reform by the current Chinese leadership, the editors argue, is an absolute necessity yet it may also be a slow suicide for those selfsame leaders.

"Deng Xiaoping and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) had to reform in order to stay in power following Chairman Mao's death in 1976, but a quarter of a century later the dilemma is whether continued reforms will be able to keep them in power or whether the consequences of those reforms will result in the Party's collective downfall."

The China Reader tackles controversial subjects -- like the democracy movement in China and the Taiwan issue -- and perhaps its most notable achievement is that it tries to represent both sides of those issues. An interview with the Dalai Lama in which he speaks openly and condescendingly about China is found only a few pages away from a speech made by Chinese President Jiang Zemin about "the reunification of the motherland."

Sensational Appeal

Complete translations of orations and essays by Chinese newsmakers provide fascinating and sometimes entertaining insights into Chinese politics, especially for the reading public in the U.S. and other English-bound nations.

Oriana Fallaci was able to draw some wonderful comments out of Deng Xiaoping in an interview the editors included no doubt for both its sensational appeal as well as its value as an historical document.

Talking about the highly controversial wife of Chairman Mao:

"[Deng]: ...Jiang Qing was rotten through and through. Whatever sentence is passed on the Gang of Four won't be excessive. They brought harm to millions upon millions of people.

[Fallaci]: How would you assess Jiang Qing? What score would you give her?"

[Deng]: Below zero. A thousand points below zero."

In the same interview Deng remarks that Chairman Mao's performance was seven parts good and three parts bad. The interview, which took place in 1980, could have been the first time China's leadership ever made a public criticism of Mao.

Political Dialogue

True political dialogue, something so rare in Chinese reality, is enabled after the fact in this reader. A climactic moment and one of acute political relevancy is the juxtaposition of radical and reactionary views as a speech by physicist and political activist Fang Lizhi is followed by a fire-breathing diatribe by Deng Xiaoping.

"Knowledge must be independent from power, the power of the state included," Fang tells the students of Shanghai's Tongji University in 1986. "If knowledge is subservient to power it is worthless."

Deng's retorts in no uncertain terms when speaking before the Party's Central Committee:

"I have read Fang Lizhi's speeches. He doesn't sound like a Communist Party member at all. Why do we keep people like him in the Party? He should be expelled, not just persuaded to quit."

Schell and Schambaugh, in their calculated inclusion of Deng's speech directly following Fang's, have manipulated an unlikely verbal fisticuffs between political opponents the likes of which is seldom found in commercial publications about China.

The book is a forum for many views though, and reading it one soon becomes aware that calls for reform over this quarter century were by no means a polarized strugle between two neatly defined political forces. In "Out of Work in the State Sector," an entry originally published in a longer form titled "Surviving Reform: Former 'Socialist Pioneer' City Copes with New Poverty" in 1997, Antoine Kernen focuses on those who were left behind in China's dash toward reform. Kernen offers a sobering image of the real situation for the common man in China. Kernen's interviews with disgruntled former state employees reveal a suprising and ironic sentimentality for the heady days of pure Maoist communism.

"We miss the Mao period when the city was prosperous....The only thing the reforms have brought to us is the bankruptcy of enterprises all over the city. In the past we were rich, now we are just surviving," says one frustrated worker.

Tiananmen

The China Reader particularly benefits from Schell's familiarity with China (he claims to have taken annual trips to China over the 25-year period covered) and from the fact that he has amassed a wellspring of journalistic documentation of important events within that period. In an entry called "China's Spring," Schell puts on a pair of keenly objective goggles and presents the Tiananmen Massacre, capturing its historical import while revealing its tragic underpinnings:

"Insulated for a historical instant from the immense difficulties of actually changing China, young protesters -- and even Western journalists -- were all too easily swept up in the immediacy of what was happening around them. In the intoxication of the moment it was not difficult to believe that a state of revolutionary immortality had been attained and that some important but indefinable success was just around the corner."

Schell and Shambaugh are careful not to let any significant development within the designated time period go undealt with, making sure to include Schell's own article "Shake Rattle, and Roll," about China's most famous rock star, Cui Jian. Schell puts the rebel rocker in socio-historical perspective as a representative of "Gray Culture". The term, which Schell attributes to Australian sinologist Geremie Barme, describes "a phenomenon mixing hopelessness, uncertainty, and ennui with irony, sarcasm, and a large dose of fatalism."

Blinding Clip

China, because it is changing at such a blinding clip, is fiendishly mercurial. Although The China Reader was published in 1999, certain entries -- particularly ones about technology or other rapidly evolving sectors -- are already out of date.

One entry, "The Battle for Cyberspace," lays down Chinese regulations regarding the Internet but they have already been replaced by a slew of new edicts. As key agencies in China's government formulate new policies, and as political events between the U.S. and China over Taiwan continue to take shape the China captured in this book becomes obsolete. The U.S.-China trade agreement over China's entry into the World Trade Organization is but one example of how the situation in China can change literally overnight.

Nevertheless, many important documents are included in this volume that will help any conscientious reader understand the complexity of this massive country which plays an ever more prominent role on the world's stage.

"The China Reader" is available at Amazon.com

To reach Jonah Greenberg: jgreenberg@virtualchina.net