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What I Read on My Summer Vacation (Part I)

September 6, 2010 in Books, The Five-List Plan by mcunningham

By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

As the end of summer vacation quickly draws near, we at The China Beat have been talking about what we read during our break from the academic grind. The summer provides an opportunity to catch up on books we missed, check out some more eclectic choices, and even read ahead when publishers are nice enough to share advance copies of forthcoming titles. Rather than just keep these conversations in-house, we decided to write up short “book reports” on some of the China-related works, both new and old, we’ve been enjoying during these summer months.

Here are quick introductions to five of the books that I’ve read this summer; stay tuned for similar posts from other China Beatniks in the coming weeks.

• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

While Demick’s book isn’t exactly about China, I’m including it on this list — and placing it at the top — because it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. China is actually a major actor in Nothing to Envy, as several of the North Korean refugees Demick interviewed for the book were inspired to escape when they realized the standard of living was far higher in market-socialist China than in communist North Korea.

What I found most appealing about Demick’s book was the “ordinary lives” aspect of her work; I was fascinated by her descriptions of activities like shopping, dressing, and using public transportation, none of which is anything close to easy in the grim gray world of North Korea. She structures her narrative around the oral histories of six North Korean defectors (interviewed while Demick was stationed in Seoul with the Los Angeles Times), and each of their stories contributes to constructing a broader portrait of daily life in a police state. Nothing to Envy is a sometimes wrenching read, particularly in chapters dealing with the North Korean famine of the 1990s, but it’s also a well-written and accessible introduction to what may be the world’s least-understood country. Far from depicting North Koreans as faceless masses marching in lockstep, Demick’s work sheds light on the lived experiences of individuals who suffer heartbreak, disillusionment, and self-doubt as they struggle with the decision to defect.

For another look inside North Korea, check out A State of Mind, a 2004 British documentary that follows two girls as they train as gymnasts for the Mass Games.

• 800,000,000: The Real China by Ross Terrill

I found this out-of-print title in a thrift shop and happily took it home with me for a trip back in time. In 1971, Ross Terrill traveled to China as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, spending six weeks on a tour that extended 7000 miles. The book is an expanded version of Terrill’s Atlantic articles about the trip, and details not only his meetings with high-level officials such as Zhou Enlai, but also chronicles his observations of daily life across the country. Published on the eve of Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to China, 800,000,000 is a brief but evocative look at “what China is like” for an audience that was largely unlikely to travel there.

Excerpt:

In my imagination, the train was history’s conveyor belt, rolling, not ninety miles to Canton, but from one universe to another. In fact, the train was its usual workaday self. It was loaded with housewives, workmen heading for the New Territories, vendors with beer and cigarettes, youths going out to Shatin for a swim. For these people the train was a “local,” boring as a subway ride in Manhattan. For a few others — politicians from the Komeito (Clean Government party) of Japan, an Indian diplomat, myself — it was an international train, bound for a land which even today exudes mystery. These bored and worldly carriages also contained a certain excitement. . . .

There really are “two Chinas.” Not “Taiwan” and the “Mainland,” but rather the image we have of China in the United States, and the reality of China. Our press talks of China as power struggles and bombs and numbers. But here is China as rice and heat, glue and vaccinations, babies crying, old men playing chess. Last week, China was for me a matter of embassies and letters and magazines arriving by post. This morning, it has become a matter of trains and tea, Chinese beds, telephone numbers, weariness. There is a purging, utterly simple wonder about actually chugging mile by mile into China. The cardboard figures of a frozen scenario start to breathe and sweat and make a noise. From San Francisco to Singapore and beyond, you find pockets of Chinese society. But only in China do you see this civilization in its present power and in its ancient and beautiful cradle, and begin to sense how much the Chinese people and nation may mean in the pattern of future decades (1-2).

• The Wild Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China by Barbara Pollack

Barbara Pollack’s book examines the Chinese contemporary art scene, which she has covered for a variety of publications since the late 1990s. The book is part memoir and part exposé, propelled by Pollack’s accounts of scheming artists, corrupt dealers, and questionable museum practices. I emerged from The Wild Wild East feeling as if the art market in China is a prime example of the emperor’s new clothes, as collectors drive prices higher and higher simply for the caché of being able to afford exorbitantly priced art.

To understand more about how that works, perhaps I should pick up one of the books Amazon suggests will pair well with Pollack’s: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson.

• Beverly Gray mysteries by Clair Blank

The most famous of the 1930s “girl detectives” is still undoubtedly Nancy Drew, but Nancy never made it to China on her travels. However, her far less renowned counterpart, Beverly Gray, did, and I secured two books in the series to see what images of China young readers in the mid-1930s might have absorbed. Well, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Shanghai was but another surprise on top of all they had had so far. Heretofore, when they had spoken of China, while at home in America, it had been with various flights of fancy. Certainly they had not expected such an Americanized scene.

They gazed in surprise at the tall, foreign buildings, mostly offices and hotels; at the well-policed streets; and, in the business sections, at red and green traffic lights! (Beverly Gray in the Orient, 190).

• Haibao and Sanmao Idle Talk About Shanghai «海宝&三毛话上海» by Le Cheng Yan 乐澄彦

I’ll conclude with one of the strangest books I’ve read — ever. The 1930s cartoon character Sanmao has been one of my main research obsessions for the past couple of years, and Jeff Wasserstrom brought this book back from the Expo for me because Sanmao is one of its two leading characters. The premise of the book is that Expo mascot Haibao and longtime Shanghai resident Sanmao join together to introduce Shanghai to Expo visitors. Sanmao (being 74 years old) is in charge of topics dealing with old Shanghai, while young Haibao discusses new Shanghai, mainly Pudong. The content of the book is somewhat . . . eclectic (I learned a lot about wetlands and river dredging), but what I found most interesting is actually the presence of Sanmao himself. In old cartoons Sanmao isn’t exactly fond of the foreigners living in Shanghai, but now he happily welcomes visitors to the Expo. And Haibao, his hyper younger brother, can’t wait to greet them all.

Reading Round-Up: China Now the World’s Second-Largest Economy

August 18, 2010 in The Five-List Plan by The China Beat

This week came the not-unexpected news that China has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Here, we’ve rounded up reactions to and analyses of the story:

• At his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos asks “Why the Long Face?”, explaining that “While the story has rated front-page treatment in the U.S., it has sent China into a frenzy of self-flagellation, in the hope of reminding people that it is still home to a lot of very poor people.”

• Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is taking the news of its third-place status with a shrug:

“It can’t be helped,” said Koichi Matsubara, 36, who works in real estate. “Business has been drifting overseas, our population is shrinking. We’re a small island, and given the size of our country, we were perhaps at the top longer than expected. I think we will continue to lose ground.”

• A few observers, however, are asking if China can maintain its sustained economic growth for much longer. Citing China’s heavy reliance on export-oriented development, as well as the country’s relatively low level of domestic consumption, some economists are instead looking to India to become Asia’s next hot economy, as James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times explains. Why?

First of all, unlike China, India isn’t rapidly getting older. In fact, its ratio of working-age people to dependents (children and the elderly) is actually improving.

Second — India’s government reforms, and its growing infrastructure spending, have helped create jobs, and dynamic labour market, and a vibrant private sector.

Finally, globalisation has helped India tap into both the goods export market, but more importantly, the global services exports market — which India now has a 2.6 per cent share of.

• Tom Lasseter, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchey Newspapers, contemplates that problem of low domestic consumption at his “China Rises” blog. Writing about the story at a microeconomic level — as it relates to his choices when buying a new bicycle — Lasseter concludes that “For a country that wants to drive up domestic consumption, widespread worries about product quality and scant legal recourse to assuage those concerns is a serious issue.”

• At Forbes, Gady Epstein advises readers to take a step back and consider whether or not this story deserves the breathless headlines it’s been generating:

But do we really need a quarterly statistic to tell us anything we don’t already know about these two economies? There is not much value in debating the matter other than for the fun of the headlines and the hype.

We already know that China is the world’s second economic center of gravity now after the U.S., and in important ways is the dominant center of gravity: It has long been the economy that draws every big company in the world seeking growth, and which sets global markets in most commodities . . . When China, growing as quickly as it does, becomes a net importer of something, that is the vital turning point for prices going forward, and it didn’t take until the second quarter of 2010 for this to become true. This has been true for most of the last decade.

• And Joshua E. Keating at Foreign Policy asks “How Do We Know That China’s Economy Is Really Bigger Than Japan’s?” For those of us who need a quick review of college macroeconomics, Keating is a helpful guide as he talks through the various ways a country can estimate its GDP.

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Reading Round-Up, 8/2/2010

August 2, 2010 in The Five-List Plan by The China Beat

Before we fully embrace the arrival of August, a bit of housekeeping from July . . . some stories that we noticed during the past month and wanted to share with our readers:

• Xujun Eberlein has been busy lately, and two of her recent pieces of writing have overlaps with topics we’ve discussed here at China Beat in the past few weeks. On the matter of Wang Hui and plagiarism, see her post at Inside-Out China; for her review of the “social science fiction” novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013, head over to Foreign Policy.

• If you’re in Beijing and looking for something to do with the kids, we don’t recommend the place that’s been dubbed “the world’s worst theme park,” otherwise known as Green Dream Park. Gady Epstein discusses it at the Forbes China Tracker blog; for a more extensive (and damning) review, with pictures, check out this post by Marc Beck at The Beijinger.

• While we know we’ve talked a lot about Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, we recommend reading this review of the book — offering a Chinese perspective on Hessler’s work — posted at Jottings from the Granite Studio by Zhang Yajun.

Also at Granite Studio, Jeremiah Jenne takes a look at coverage of Aftershock, the new blockbuster movie about the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake.

• David Moser of CET Academic Programs alerted us to a series of interviews he did for the Chinalogue talk show about music in China. The segments include Moser speaking with Abigail Washburn about being an American music in China (Part 1, Part 2), with guzheng player Wu Fei about traditional Chinese music (Part 1, Part 2), and with Andrew Field about underground music in China (Part 1, Part 2).

• In the mood for more Expo? Check out pictures at Michele Travierso’s image gallery, read an extensive Expo report with photos by Jeanne Lawrence at New York Social Diary, and, for a darker look at some of the effects the Expo has had on Shanghai, see Sue Ann Tay’s photo essay on “Another Side of Shanghai” at Foreign Policy (h/t Paul French at China Rhyming).

Reading Round-Up: China and India

July 20, 2010 in The Five-List Plan by The China Beat | 2 comments

• At the Wall Street Journal, Shefali Anand explains why India’s stock market is currently outperforming China’s:

As India’s stock markets hit two-year highs this week, Chinese stocks are losing money — and how. This year Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex is up almost 3% through the end of Wednesday, while China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index is down 25%, putting India ahead by a whopping 28 percentage points.

So, why this stark differentiation between the stock markets of the world’s two largest emerging countries?

Even as the developed world fears another recession, both the Indian and Chinese economies have been growing very rapidly in recent months. Local companies have been reporting double-digit profit growth. China’s gross domestic product was up 11.9% in the first quarter of this year while the Indian economy grew by 8.6%. However, Chinese growth has slowed in the second quarter of the year to 10.3%.

Investors fear that there could be a further slowdown over the rest of this year. Meanwhile, India has not thrown any major surprises so far in 2010 — making it a haven for investments.

• At the Financial Times website, Anjli Raval and James Lamont report that Indian policymakers have recently announced that if India is to match China’s double-digit economic growth rate, it must improve the output of the country’s agricultural sector, rather than imitate China’s export-led growth model.

• A hat tip to Shanghaiist for pointing us toward this McKinsey Quarterly report on urbanization differences between China and India (free registration required):

In 1950, India was a more urban nation than China (17 percent of the population lived in cities, compared with China’s 13 percent). But from 1950 to 2005, China urbanized far more rapidly than India, to an urbanization rate of 41 percent, compared with 29 percent in India. New research from the McKinsey Global Institute expects this pattern to continue, with China forecast to add 400 million to its urban population, which will account for 64 percent of the total population by 2025, and India to add 215 million to its cities, whose populations will account for 38 percent of the total in 2025.

• Every weekend, Reshma Patil posts a piece about China and India at the “Middle Order” blog of the Hindustan Times. Read her recent essays on observing a village election in China, Chinese influence on Indian culture, and the similarity of sitting for university exams in China and India.

• For a more in-depth look at China-India comparisons, grab a copy of Pallavi Aiyar’s Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China (HarperCollins, 2008). And see our interview with her, plus read an excerpt from the book, here.

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Reading Round-Up, 7/10/10

July 10, 2010 in The Five-List Plan by The China Beat

• Apple is opening its first Shanghai location this weekend, the kickoff to what one analyst describes as a planned “major invasion” of China (Apple projects that it will open twenty-five stores on the mainland in the next eighteen months). Read a New York Times article on the new store here; see here for pictures of the store up at Shanghaiist. The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report blog has an account of the store’s launch party here.

• Sarah Wesseler writes about the failed theme suburb Thames Town for Assembly Journal (h/t Shanghaiist):

Luodian, an ancient village slowly being absorbed into Shanghai’s sprawl, was chosen as the site of a Scandinavia-themed town. Other developments are modeled on Spain, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and North America, with architects from those countries leading the designs. (Foreign designers were also awarded the commissions for the only two towns based on traditional Chinese architecture.)

Despite the plan’s Disneyesque quality, its underlying goal—steering Shanghai safely through a massive long-term growth spurt—is extremely serious. With its population ballooning to around twenty million in recent years due to a massive influx of migrants from rural areas, Shanghai is now one of the largest and most densely packed cities in the world. The city must add new housing for around 400,000 people each year to keep up with demand. As a result, the city has been gobbling up surrounding farmland over the past two decades, encrusting its core with layer upon layer of anonymous high-rise apartment complexes.

In 2000, mayor Ju Huang, inspired by the celebrated Western-style neighborhoods built in Shanghai’s city center throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by French, British and American colonizers, decided to export this international model to the suburbs. By providing unique architectural identities for some of the new satellite communities, the government hoped to lure wealthier residents to expensive, exotic new homes, and, for the less well-off, to provide recreational centers that would serve as community anchors and tourist attractions.

• At the Financial Times, Matthew Garrahan and Annie Saperstein report that Disney will be expanding the number of English-language schools it operates in China. The schools are aimed at children between one and eleven years of age; students study a curriculum that incorporates Disney characters like the Little Mermaid in its lessons. Two hours of class time per week will set parents back $2,200 a year in tuition.

• Xujun Eberlein of Inside-Out China has been following a Chinese matchmaking show, If You Are Not Sincere, Don’t Bother Me (非诚勿扰), also translated as If You Are the One. Her first post on the show, explaining its recent surge in popularity among Chinese television viewers, is here; two follow-up posts (here and here) have explored the “matchmaking censorship” sparked by the show. Explaining new rules imposed by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, which prohibit guests on the show from discussing their incomes, Eberlein writes:

Rumor has it that Ma Nuo, one of the earlier female guests in “If You Are Not Sincere,” triggered the shot. Ma Nuo’s most infamous quote circling on the internet is “I’d rather cry in a BMW” – her reply to a male guest, a cyclist, who asked if she’d like to ride a bike with him. (But Baidu has a post that says what she actually said was “a BMW is rather cool.” In Chinese, “cry” (哭)  and “cool” (酷) sound pretty much the same.) Because of this, Ma Nuo’s name has become a synonym of “mammonism,” and been attacked by numerous netizens. And this, apparently, became the motive to restrict “the second generation of the rich” to participate in matchmaking shows.

See here for a Washington Post story on how new rules for If You Are Not Sincere relate to a widespread government push against vice and immorality that’s been intensified since the beginning of the year.

• First the Olympics, now the Expo . . . will the World Cup be the next global event to be held in China? Not anytime soon, certainly (World Cup locations have already been set through 2022), but there are reports that China might make a bid to be host of the 2026 event. See here for a China Daily article about the possibility; see here for a short opinion piece that argues strongly against the prospect:

The $50 billion or so required to host the World Cup can instead be used to solve more pressing livelihood problems of the people. Aren’t the lessons of the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo eloquent enough to persuade us to move away from playing host to such galas?

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