 |
|
paperback $22.95
Anthem Press
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Paul French
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century by Kerry Brown
Over the last 18 months, I have received on average at least one newly-published book on China weekly. In the last decade, a trickle has turned into a stream and then a river and now a flood of New Orleans-like proportions. Fortunately, the majority of these books have been sent free of charge -- but if IKEA would care to send me a set of bookshelves to review, I'd be most grateful. Now admittedly 75% of these books, especially the ones by self-appointed expert consultants and put out by obscure publishers in Thailand and Singapore (what we used to call 'vanity' publishers pre-Web 2.0) could be offloaded to the recycling merchants but that still leaves a quite impressive pile worth reading.
KERRY BROWN's STRUGGLING GIANT: CHINA IN THE 21ST CENTURY goes in the impressive pile. It's a slim volume, coming in just shy of 150 pages, but that just adds to its impressiveness. It says a lot, says it well, leaves you more knowledgeable than when you started and then promptly exits stage left. The book is a nice hodgepodge of ideas about China that reflect Dr. Brown's own background -- language student, teacher in Inner Mongolia, diplomat and businessman. What Brown brings to my ever more groaning shelf of China books is a nice reminder of a few key points many of us involved in the minutiae of daily life in China as businessmen, journalists, diplomats or observers (and yes, even `expert' consultants) tend to forget as we get wrapped up in it all.
To ask the question, as Brown does, or whether or not in a decade's time we'll look back on the mid-2000s as a period of over-optimism towards China, similar to that towards Japan a decade or more earlier is a good question. Especially given that we are `celebrating' the tenth anniversary of the Asian financial crisis. Is there some nasty shock around the corner we will all (in hindsight) say that we should have seen? Most got Japan horrendously wrong, and if anyone wrote a book predicting the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, I didn't get a copy.
How much longer will China's ruling Communist Party accentuate a theatrical victimhood over World War Two while simultaneously refusing to have a serious discussion about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution? Surely these days, as Brown suggests, the ghosts of the latter should loom over China's self-awareness and social stability to a greater extent than the former.
The central question for all China watchers is not really a point of GDP here or a billion more of foreign reserves there, but whether China's future is one of stability or instability. The fact that the Party has hitched its wagon to the Harmonious Society slogan indicates that, while there is no organised opposition demanding an unharmonious society, the higher echelons of the Party believe that instability is the 330lb gorilla in the corner.
Brown's other key observation is that in the good (bad) old days of the 1960s, China committed 6.5% of GDP to assisting the revolutionary struggle overseas. Now they are committing vast sums of money, aid, investment and time in other parts of the world again -- not to promote global revolution or the glory of Maoism but to secure energy and commodities. This will change the world, and will mean that we will all have to be bothered about whether or not China is harmonious or unharmonious.
Perhaps understandably, Brown hedges his bets in the end, ranging from an ever-richer move towards a middle class-dominated civil society emerging over time to a return to the fractured chaos of the warlord period. You could take the author to task for refusing to take sides but then the biggest and most worrying conundrum about China in 2007 is that both those options are now distinct possibilities recognised not least by the Chinese leadership -- and that's a scary thought.
Paul French
13/08/2007
|
Paul French is author North Korea: Paranoid Peninsula. He writes regularly on Chinese and North Korean economics and politics for a wide variety of publications. |
| |
|
