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More reviews by Mark Clifford
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Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip Pan
After the first few pages of PHILIP PAN's book, I worried it had been a mistake to agree to read it. Pan begins with the death and funeral of Zhao Ziyang, the premier who was ousted in the coup d'etat that took place as the Tiananmen protests swirled through the capital during the spring of 1989 and who spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Elegantly written though it was, the chapter seemed all too predictable. Did we need yet another well-crafted book by a western journalist about the democratic heroes of China?
My skepticism quickly disappeared. Pan has written one of the best of what is a very good recent crop of China books by building on his reporting for the Washington Post as a Beijing-based correspondent for the past seven years. A series of beautifully-drawn portraits brings to life people whom the Communist Party is determined to silence. Even those who are known to the Western world, thanks largely to the reporting of Pan and his colleagues, take on a new depth.
Take together, these individual drawings become a larger picture, of a society trying to make up for three decades of Maoism despite the Party's unwillingness to examine the legacy of a man who presided over one of the most brutal regimes in history.
The initial section, "Remembering", looks at the role of memory in an authoritarian state that tries to control the telling of past, present and future. Zhao Ziyang's funeral is an exercise in ordinary people trying to remember, in their own way, one of the most important events of modern Chinese history -- despite the Party's insistence that only its version of the events can be allowed. This is the state obsession with controlling the narrative that has been all too evident in the 2008 Olympics, where any deviation from the official script is seen as a serious threat to the state.
What is best about the book are those bits of the past that Pan unearths. The remarkable chapters on 1950s Party activist Lin Zhao, and the contemporary filmmaker trying to tell the story of this brilliant cadre who was executed as a counterrevolutionary, dispelled any lingering doubts I had about this book being a well-written version of old stories. Lin was a leading student revolutionary at Peking University in the early days of Communist rule. Caught up in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign, Lin refused to bend to imprisonment, torture and, concludes Pan, even at least one visit from Mao himself. Incredibly, Lin's lengthy manuscripts, eventually found by filmmaker Hu Jie, were written using her own blood as ink to write hundreds of thousands of characters. Executed during the Cultural Revolution, Lin emerges as an extraordinary and largely unknown figure in Chinese history.
The effort to recover and persevere Lin's memory by Hu Jie makes the story more compelling. It also gives the lie to those who maintain that the Chinese have historical amnesia, that they have their eyes only on the present and the future. So, too, does a chapter on another largely unknown bit of Chinese history, a memorial cemetery for victims of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing that, remarkably, has survived. Fittingly, the cemetery was saved by walling it off. "A wall can be built around history, but without destroying it," says the city official who preserved the site.
The middle section of the book, "No Better Than Thieves", is solidly reported and written but more predictable to anyone familiar with China. It certainly will confirm the prejudices of those who think that China is, as a friend in New York once put it to me, "just one big human rights violation." The chapters' titles tell the story. First is an excellent chapter on a miner's strike in Liaoyang that Pan covered extensively when it occurred in 2002 ("Arise, Slaves, Arise"); a decidedly unsympathetic sketch of one of Beijing's leading real estate tycoons ("The Rich Lady") follows; the section concludes with a revealing look at a local official ("The Party Boss").
The book's final part, "Struggle Sessions", provides another set of vividly drawn characters. Again, most of these people will be familiar to anyone who follows China. There is Jiang Yanyong, the courageous doctor who in 2003 single-handedly caused the Chinese government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic to collapse. (Despite Pan's meticulous attention to detail, here he errs in saying that Beijing's 175 SARS deaths led the world; that unfortunate distinction belongs to Hong Kong, where 299 people perished.) Later, when Jiang wrote a letter to officials stating what he had seen as a doctor on the night of the Tiananmen killings, he and his wife were abducted, imprisoned and forced into quiet submission.
Other chapters are on the brave staff at Southern Metropolis Daily, whose courageous decision to publish reports on the brutal death of a graphics artist in a detention center led to the abolition of the brutal and corrupt gulag of shourong detention centers around the nation. For their trouble, three of the newspaper's top employees were imprisoned. Pan also befriends blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, whose actions trying to protect villagers from the brutal excesses of China's one-child policy earned him, too, a jail sentence.
Pan has painted an unusually intimate mural of China beyond the slogans, a China that takes in more than the well-off elite in big cities. Pan is hopeful that the people he profiles, and the many others like them, will someday create a China that is ruled by law rather than the dictates of a Party that, for all its success in economic growth, has shown a callous disregard for laying down the rules that would make for a more civilized society. For now though, this is a country run by a Party that is remarkably successful in settling grievances with a combination of pressure, bribery and violence.
Mark Clifford
14/09/2008
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Mark Clifford is Executive Director of the Asia Business Council and has authored or co-authored four books on Asia, including Building Energy Efficiency: Why Green Buildings Are Key to Asia's Future, 'Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea' and, with Supachai Panithcpakdi, 'China and the WTO: Changing China, Changing World Trade'. |
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