Everything You Wanted to Know About China: A guide to its past and future

Written in a question-and-answer format, this book attempts to address all the questions you may have about China, its past, and future direction

Everything You Wanted to Know About China: But Were Afraid to Ask

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Published by Bui Jones Books

112 pages  ₹1,233

  The opaqueness of Chinese politics, coupled with strict media censorship and overweening control of society, makes efforts to understand China difficult and tedious. Scholars and students have to constantly dissect and contextualise almost everything ever written and spoken about the country, a challenge that is repeated with every new leadership. This is where the new book by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Everything You Wanted to Know about China: But Were Afraid to Ask, fits in. Short and concise, written in the form of questions and answers, the book attempts to address precisely this opacity.

 

The book is divided into three themes: History & Ideology; Politics & Power; and Culture & Control. Under this broad umbrella, it covers a wide range of topics — Confucianism, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, censorship, journalism, and much more.

 

There is, for instance, an interesting discussion on the “tank man”, referring to the famous photograph of a lone Chinese man, laden with shopping, who stood in the way of a column of tanks a day after thousands of people had been shot dead. It became a defining image of the students’ protest but is barely remembered in China today because it was suppressed by the government. “The image showed a government that had lost the mandate to rule, and they really didn’t want to have that image out in the world,” Mr Wasserstrom points out.

 

The book also offers a succinct and comprehensive account of how the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Communist Party today are constantly engaged in narrative-building with the aim of strengthening totalitarian control over Chinese society. “You have the story, a very powerful story about the Chinese past, that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of, reversing a long trend,” writes Mr Wasserstrom. As British historian Rana Mitter points out in the foreword, “In China, perhaps more than any other society, an understanding of the past is vital to reading the present”.

 

One of the most interesting sections in the book discusses similarities and dissimilarities between Mao and Xi Jinping. The author writes, “The ubiquity of Xi’s face and words in today’s China is a notable throwback to Mao’s day, but a key difference between the two leaders is that only the long-dead one revelled in chaos and class struggle... By contrast, Xi, unlike his predecessor Mao, is obsessed with maintaining order.” Despite this, they “share one goal: to see China stay under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party and to see its status in the world rise”.

 

The discussion on the similarities between Chiang Kai-shek and Xi Jinping is also thought provoking. “As much as Xi talks about carrying forward the legacy of 1949, sometimes, he gives speeches that bring up themes that Mao would not recognise as the words of Chinese Communist Party leader. If Chiang were to come back to life, on the other hand, the Nationalist Party leader might think Xi sounded like one of his successors, not a successor to his arch-rival,” Mr Wasserstrom writes. Even when it comes to women’s rights and gender equality, the author draws parallels between Xi and Chiang. He argues, that Mao did talk about women holding up half the sky. By contrast, if one has to look at Xi regime, “it has promoted the idea that women should play traditional role, which is more in step with Chiang’s Taiwan than Mao’s China.”

 

On Confucianism and Marxism, Mr Wasserstrom writes, “While Confucianism looks to an ideal past, Marxism and communism look to an ideal future”. He adds that when the Chinese Communist Party was looking for an ideal “value system to promulgate, Confucianism was the safest and most useful. It sprouted and flourished on Chinese soil; it is an ethical system and not a religion, and it fosters convenient conservative precepts like obeying authority and striving moral purity.” This clearly underscores Xi’s effort to root the idea of Chinese society within Confucianism, building a narrative of hierarchy and obedience, with the citizens expected to follow the command of the Chinese Communist Party.

 

For scholars and students, the book offers a bonus in the form of a discussion of what China may look like into the future, say, 25 years from now. The author does hope for more openness but is concerned about the weakening of the international institutions and organisations. He chooses to end on an optimistic note: ...“developments in Chinese history and in world history have surprised us before.” A list of suggested reading and the author’s anecdotal accounts enhances the value of this book as an interesting and essential read.

 

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  The reviewer is associate professor at OP Jindal Global University