Jasper Becker: The Chinese

By PAUL CLARKE*

In the mid-1970s, just as China was "opening up" to more outside contact, Western sinologists shared a joke. In those days people went to China for three weeks and wrote a book, visited for three months and wrote an article, or stayed there for three years and wrote nothing.

Jasper Becker, Beijing-based correspondent for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, has been there for more than 10 years and has produced a thoughtful and revealing book on contemporary China. Readers wondering about China's attitudes and actions during the Hainan Island US spy plane stand-off will find this book a valuable survey of conditions in the world's largest country and aspirant great power.

Becker's previous book was a history of the devastating famine that killed as many as 30 million Chinese in the early 1960s and went largely unreported in the West. China in those days did not offer the same degree of access journalists enjoy today.

This new book examines Chinese society in the throes of two decades of economic change that has carefully avoided meaningful political reform. Becker focuses in turn on sections of society, from poverty-stricken Zhuang peasants in the far south-west to the power-holders in Beijing. The latter are a distinctly mixed bag of the venal and the conscientious.

His subjects include workers at Taiwan-owned assembly factories in Guangdong province and cellphone entrepreneurs who made Wenzhou the button-manufacturing capital of the world and wealthier than the city had ever been in the past.

Becker has an eye for the usually unseen and an ear for the unheard. Anecdotes and briefly sketched portraits enliven a comprehensive and insightful survey. The overall intelligence of his observations shines through. His analysis of the effects of the one-child policy will surprise many readers.

Particularly welcome are moments when he remarks on Chinese attitudes to their fellow citizens. Many educated Chinese are terrific snobs, made uncomfortable by peasant directness or perceived slights.

Chinese views of their place in the world are also nicely laid out. An uncomfortable mix of prickliness and admiration characterises popular attitudes to the United States. These and the military's discontent with its modernisation, examined by Becker, help to explain the Hainan stand-off. Becker's highly readable, 450-page account of today's China is one of the best there is.

John Murray

$59.95

* Paul Clark is a professor of Chinese at the University of Auckland.