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Duncan Hewitt's first visit to China
was way back in 1986, when he was a student in Xian. Since
then he has been BBC correspondent, translator of contemporary
Chinese literature, and Newsweek journalist.
From the Deng Xiaoping to the Ikea
takeover of urban China, Hewitt's first book sums up the profound
changes that are transforming the Middle Kingdom.
What was
your idea behind the book, and why now?
Partly because it took me several
years to get my ideas together and then actually write the thing.
The initial idea came more than four years ago, soon after I quit my
job with the BBC in Shanghai. I’d always resisted the notion
that all journalists must write a book about their years in China,
but at that time, when I looked at what was available on China in
the average bookshop in Britain, I felt there was a real lack of
anything which gave a sense of what life in contemporary China was
actually like, and which tried to explain the complex and often
contradictory nature of the society which had developed since the
early 90s.
Journalists write about all this
every day in the papers, of course – but most books at the time
seemed to be either memoirs of the Cultural Revolution or academic
studies of politics or macro-economics. I felt that people in
China had been living through a quite unique period of change – from
the ideological hysteria of the cultural revolution to a
more-or-less capitalist free-for-all in just a couple of decades –
and that it would be worth trying to make sense of what this
transformation had meant for them.
I’ve tried to bring out both the
startling pace of change, some of which I’ve seen for myself (only
15 years after the Campaign against Bourgeois Liberalization,
China’s lifestyle magazines were offering the new middle classes
tips on how to enjoy a ‘petty bourgeois’ way of life!), as well as
some of the nuances and ironies of the society which has resulted.
My aim was to use individual people and their lives and opinions to
tell the story; but it’s a huge subject, and I must admit
there were times when I found the sheer scope of what I was trying
to write about quite daunting. I tried to break it down into
different themes: the book covers the spectacular reconstruction of
China’s cities, and the destruction of heritage and communities
which has resulted, as well as the rise of the middle class with its
aspirations for a ‘modern’ lifestyle, the growth of popular and
media culture, and the enormous generation gap between today’s
well-educated, pampered urban youth and those who lived through the
politicized decades of the 60s and 70s. It also looks at
attempts to create a more open media and the emergence of a
fledgling civil society, along with the rise of the contemporary art
scene, the sexual revolution, the problems of the countryside and
migrant workers, and the way in which the economic and welfare
reforms have affected people’s faith in the political system.
And I’ve probably only scratched the surface! But I hope it
will be a useful introduction to China for people who are interested
in the country but don’t start with too much specialist knowledge.
What drew
you to China and Chinese studies, when, in the 1980s, possibilities
within China were so limited?
When I first decided to study
Chinese at university I really didn’t know much about the country at
all (some might say I still don’t of course!) – in fact I remember
reading my first book about China (Fox Butterfield’s Alive in the
Bitter Sea) on the coach on the way to start my first term at
university. But I was interested in learning a new language, and
doing something I wouldn’t otherwise have had the chance to do: the
lure of a year studying in China was part of the attraction.
At the
time it didn’t seem very easy to just go and live there of your own
accord. In the back of my mind I was probably also trying to
irritate people at my school in England, where the teachers were
putting a lot of pressure on me to study English literature; when I
told them I was planning to study Chinese I think they thought I was
pretty strange. But by the next time I met my old headmaster, a few
years later, the school had already begun taking groups of students
on trips to China. It was around this time, in the mid-late 80s,
that it suddenly became fashionable to say that China was ‘opening
up’ and that there would be lots of business opportunities for
students of Chinese. Now the same school,
Brighton College, has
recently become the first in the UK to make Mandarin a compulsory
subject for all students…
It’s another example of the
sometimes scarcely credible pace with which China and its status in
the world have changed in recent years. Personally when I
began learning Chinese I had no particular intention of making a
career out of it – but nowadays it seems that if you’ve had anything
to do with this country it can become harder and harder to get away
from it!
What
memories stand out among your initial impressions of China?
My first image of China was of a
sea of people, camped out on the huge forecourt of the old Guangzhou
station in September 1986. In retrospect, they were presumably
among the earliest waves of migrant workers who had begun descending
on south-eastern China from the mid-80s onwards, though at the time
I don’t think I quite realized what was going on. I do remember
thinking they looked pretty downtrodden, in their cheap blue and
olive green Mao jackets, their belongings wrapped up in bundles or
stuffed into outsize red, white and blue stripey bags…
I
remember feeling very isolated from the outside world in Xian, where
I and my fellow students from Edinburgh
University were living
that year. To make a phone call to another city in China
involved filling in a form at the university telephone office, then
waiting several hours until the call could be put through.
There was a lot of waiting, in fact: in shops, in the bank, at the
railway station ticket office -- things like customer service,
after-sales hotlines and VIP reward cards, so common in Chinese
cities today, seemed extremely remote.
This was a time when much of the
socialist system remained intact, on the surface at least: students
were still allocated jobs by the government when they graduated, and
had little say in what they did and where they went; even as foreign
students we sometimes had to use grain coupons to buy bread; when a
couple of our classmates accidentally set off a fire in their
dormitory room in the university we all had to take part in a
special meeting to criticize them! And when our old language
teacher took us to the local store to practice our shopping
vocabulary he insisted that we must call the saleswoman “comrade
shop assistant” if we were to have any chance of making a successful
purchase!
During the year I was studying in
China, the government
launched a political ‘rectification’ campaign known as the “Campaign
against Bourgeois Liberalisation,” in response to what was seen as
the growing negative influence of foreign ideas and values. This
didn’t exactly make us flavour of the month – in fact there was
still a great officially-enforced divide between foreigners and
Chinese people at that time, which I think is one of the biggest
differences with the situation in China today: as students then
there was no question of us living with a local family; if we ever
tried to take Chinese friends with us to eat in local tourist
hotels, the guards would often refuse them entry.
Most people were very friendly,
and often delighted and fascinated to meet foreigners, sometimes
embarrassingly so, but there was no doubt that in the middle of
China in those days you really felt that you were living in a
totally separate world. In recent years I’ve been back to Xian
a couple of times: of course it will always be geographically
remote, and with all the urban upheavals, demolitions and
construction sites it now looks worse in some ways than it did in
the 1980s – but I felt very strongly that that sense of being cut
off from the outside world had gone - not just in terms of the
easier access to communications and information, but also in terms
of the mentality and ideas of people who live there.
Both enemies
and friends of the Chinese government describe it as a ‘communist
government’. How would you describe the form of government in
China?
Well, China is obviously run by
an organization which calls itself the Communist Party, and
apparently has no intention of allowing that situation to change in
the foreseeable future. But the values of that organization have
equally clearly changed drastically in the past two decades. The
authorities officially describe China’s current system as ‘socialism
with Chinese characteristics’ – but these days the unique
characteristics seem rather more in evidence than the socialism.
It dates back really to the era
of Deng Xiaoping, who progressively steered China away from much of
its traditional ideology, in pursuit of economic reforms and
economic growth. In the mid-80s he said explicitly that China
would have to let some people, and some parts of the country, become
wealthy first – the aim was to boost the nation’s economy, and
eventually create what he called ‘common prosperity’ for all.
But it certainly gave the green light to the pursuit of personal
wealth – and since the early 1990s in particular has resulted in an
increasingly divided society, one where some people are clearly
proud to be wealthier than the majority. Shanghai, where I
live, for example, is now littered with luxury housing developments
called things like ‘Rich Gate’, ‘Block of Wealth Land’, and ‘Boss
and Winner’.
At the same time, the
government’s attempts to streamline China’s economy and reduce the
enormous burden which the traditional socialist welfare system
placed on the government and state-run enterprises, led in the
second half of the 1990s to cuts in welfare so drastic that they
would probably have made even Margaret Thatcher think twice. Tens
of millions of workers were laid-off by state enterprises, and
people suddenly found themselves having to pay much more for health
care, education – and of course housing, where prices have risen by
hundreds of per cent since the late 90s, when the supply of new
subsidised government housing basically came to an end. It
sometimes felt in those years that China was embracing the rawest
form of capitalism; in fact many Chinese people are now amazed when
they hear of the welfare provisions which exist in some western
countries – and which they see as far more socialist than what they
have: the idea that you can go to a hospital and not have to put
down a lump sum in cash to get treated is hard for many people here
to believe.
It’s obviously all highly
contradictory – on the one hand people in China have experienced the
same kind of disillusionment and collapse of traditional values as
those who lived through the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe,
while at the same time being told that they should continue to
believe in the Communist Party… For people outside China I think it
can sometimes be hard to take all this in – which is one of the
reasons I decided to call my book ‘Getting Rich First’, just to
emphasize the idea that the egalitarian officially no longer exist
in China. The authorities have recently become increasingly
conscious of some of the social problems which the reforms have
produced, and have started to talk a lot about helping the poor and
dispossessed, and returning to the search for ‘common prosperity.’
But things have moved so far that it may be hard to solve these
problems without leading to a slowdown of the economic growth which
still remains crucial to the government and its legitimacy.
At the same time, despite all the
reforms, any business person will tell you that there is not yet a
fully level playing field in the business environment in China – and
the government’s role in the economy can still be obstructive and
disruptive. So China’s political system is a hybrid – highly
capitalist but with remnants of the old central planning mentality,
a one party state with continuing authoritarian tendencies, which
nevertheless now allows a significantly greater degree of freedom in
certain areas, as long as this benefits the economy, keeps people
happy, and does not cross certain political lines.
People have
long talked, some almost hopefully, of Chinese collapse as the
forces within the country grow increasingly out of control: what is
your opinion on the future of China?
As suggested above, there are
clearly enormous problems and challenges; indeed some people think
the Party is trying to achieve the impossible, in attempting to
operate an increasingly open economy without implementing greater
reforms of the political system. Many see the divisions within
society as the biggest problem – I think outsiders often find it
hard to understand why the have-nots do not seem to be more
rebellious in China.
Personally I think this is not
just the result of coercion; it may be partly about the traditional
ability of China’s poor, in the countryside in particular, to accept
a harsh life; there’s a sense too that since the beginning of what’s
referred to in China as the era of ‘reform and opening’ in the 80s,
there’s generally been enough of a sense of forward progress to keep
many people believing in the chance of a better future – however bad
their lot may be at the moment. Maintaining this sense of
aspiration is crucial for the government – in fact I talk in the
book about the ‘aspiration nation’ – but if the economy slows badly,
or if the divide between those who have done well and the
dispossessed continues to become even more extreme, this imperfect
social pact could still collapse. We already have official
figures showing tens of thousands of protests taking place in China,
many in rural areas, every year. And rising aspirations could
be a source of problems in themselves – as the new middle classes
begin to feel increasingly empowered and within their rights to
demand better managed cities and a better social welfare system, as
well better management of the environment, and to speak out if they
don’t get these.
I’d be lying if I said I could
predict what will happen – I think China’s dynamism is not to be
underestimated, and nor are its problems; look around the street in
any Chinese city and you’ll see things which are examples of
positive social change – greater individual freedom, choice etc –
and signs of the great problems which remain, all mixed up together
in the same scene. For all the sense of positive momentum generated
by years of constant change, there are many potential flashpoints
and sources of tensions, and sometimes these can come in quite
unexpected areas: in recent months we’ve had student protests over
university fees, riots over bus prices rises for Chinese new year,
strikes by port workers demanding higher wages. Public anger at
poor treatment in hospitals, meanwhile, frequently seems to boil
over into protests; even on a visit to a bank or a supermarket, the
sense of tension and bitterness over bad service or the attitude of
staff and officials is sometimes palpable. This year there’s
already concern at the rising cost of food – to add to worries about
soaring house prices; we saw in the early 90s how inflation could
pose a threat to social stability. And with so many people
investing in the stock market, any crash could also have disastrous
consequences. So with such an incomplete social system, the
challenges facing the government are great, and it will require
enlightened and imaginative officials to tackle them – in a
political system where enlightened and imaginative ideas have not
tended to be encouraged.
You mention a
number of examples of Chinese journalists who push press freedoms a
little far and end up beaten up or in prison. Do you find it
difficult to work as a foreign journalist living in China, and how
has this changed during your time working there?
As a foreign journalist one tends
to be at least partly insulated from many of the pressures facing
Chinese journalists. Foreigners who offend the government are more
likely to not get their visa renewed, or occasionally be kicked out
of the country, than put in jail. And no-one is censoring your
stories at source – even for TV reports now, improved technology
means that foreign media can send stories direct, without using
Chinese state TVs satellite uplinks (which would occasionally
mysteriously drop out!) as they had to do until the past few years.
And there’s no doubt that some parts of the Chinese bureaucracy are
now significantly more open to the foreign media than they were in
the past; this year the government, as part of its pre-Olympic
glasnost, also abolished, at least temporarily, the old rules which
required foreign journalists to get permission from local
authorities whenever they travelled outside the city where they were
based.
Still, journalists straying into sensitive territory –
geographical or political – can still find themselves under
increased surveillance and pressure; people who witness protests for
example are often detained. And the jailing last year of Ching
Cheong, a Hong Kong journalist who wrote for Singapore’s Straits
Times and was accused of spying for Taiwan, was a reminder that just
working for a foreign media organization in itself is not ultimately
protection (as a Hong Kong citizen he was treated as a Chinese
national in this case, it seems). Chinese researchers and assistants
working for foreign media organizations in China also remain
particularly vulnerable if their organization does something the
government doesn’t like; ‘sensitive’ interviewees can also face
harassment. This one of the indirect pressures on foreign
journalists in China: facing the responsibility of making sure that
someone else doesn’t get into trouble.
How much do
you feel Chinese society is reverting to customs and habits of
pre-1949?
Not in every way – you could
still argue that much in Taiwan, or even Hong Kong, represents a
greater continuity with traditional Chinese society and culture; in
fact I was struck by the way that several young people I talked to
for the book expressed regret at the loss of aspects of traditional
culture, particularly morality and values, as a result of the
Communist Revolution and then the Cultural Revolution. But there’s
no doubt that some aspects of the ‘old society’ have re-emerged in
recent years – perhaps most strikingly with the reappearance of the
instinctive entrepreneurial ability of many Chinese people, despite
all the decades of communism; there’s also been the return of
aspects of the ‘bad old days’, such as the revival of the sex trade
and the growing class stratification of society.
The resurgence of
traditional religions, notably Buddhism, has been spectacular too:
in fact some people are actively seeking out elements of traditional
culture: sending their children for education in the ancient
Confucian classics for example. Even the government is harking back
to traditional culture with its campaign for a new social morality:
this campaign emphasizes what’s know as the ‘socialist concept of honour and shame’, but the way in which it lists eight precepts for
honourable behaviour does seem quite reminiscent of traditional
neo-Confucian teachings. (Another example of this phenomenon, which
I personally find quite amusing, is the sight of the Communist
authorities investing in, and sending senior officials to open,
‘Confucius Institutes’ in major universities around the world.
These are basically just centres for promoting the study of China
and Chinese culture – but coming from a party which in the early 70s
ran a nationwide political campaign to denounce Confucius and his
‘feudal thinking’, there’s a certain irony there…)
Should people
fear the growing power of China?
That’s up to them. Of course
people who run, or work for, many types of small businesses and
manufacturing industries in the west are likely to be anxious about
the impact of the Chinese economy on their job security – though the
Chinese themselves are actually very worried at the moment about
their own difficulties in moving from the labour-intensive industry
stage to a more sophisticated economy based on original research and
creativity; factories in some parts of the country already face a
labour shortage, in fact.
In strategic terms I don’t think
China has any great expansionist territorial ambitions in the near
future, though it undoubtedly would like to regain sovereignty over
Taiwan (which will remain a flashpoint in its relations with the US,
Japan and other countries), and will certainly continue to resist
any pressure to reduce its control over Tibet. China’s demand
for natural resources – and the pollution and environmental damage
which result – will certainly be a source of problems in the years
to come. And the sheer size of its population, coupled
with people’s growing wealth and ability to travel (and invest)
around the world means that China’s global impact – and influence –
is likely to become increasingly visible. This is really a new
phenomenon, still in its early stages: it’s only a few years ago
that it was very rare to see mainland Chinese people on the streets
of European or other countries – now they’re a common sight, and the
numbers will keep growing.
The open-mindedness of many
Chinese people cannot be underestimated these days – but they
obviously bring with them their own attitudes and values – some of
which are inevitably influenced by what China has been through in
the past few decades. In other words, China, its people, and
its problems, are becoming increasingly connected to the outside
world – and it will be up to all of us to deal with that in the best
way possible.
Next year will
be the 2008 Beijing Olympics, how will this event change foreign and
Chinese perceptions of their country?
I imagine some people will be
impressed by how modern Beijing looks, and possibly by how well-organised
the whole event is – the government is devoting enormous resources,
and has a huge number of bilingual volunteers lined up to help out.
And there’s no doubt that some of the Olympic architecture – the
main stadium and the swimming centre in particular – will be very
striking.
At the same time the authorities have made so much of how
they’re using the Olympics to make Beijing a more modern city and
society: – insisting that all taxi drivers learn English, correcting
the English on all signs and menus in the city, urging citizens
not to spit, and football fans not to shout abuse - that any
failings on this front are likely to attract attention from the
international media. The official handling of the foreign media
will certainly be a test in itself: the government has promised
‘complete openness’ to foreign journalists visiting China during the
Olympic period – whether it can really deliver on this is something
lots of people are waiting to find out. The Beijing climate and
environment, with its notorious pollution, presents another
challenge.
As for Chinese perceptions, I’m
sure lots of people will be very proud of the event and the image of
a healthy, modern China that it’s designed to portray, and see it as
a symbolic international coming-out for the country as a modern
nation, rather as the Seoul Olympics were in 1988. But others,
especially those living outside Beijing, seem to feel very detached
from the whole thing – and there’s no doubt that some will see it
as a waste of money for a country with some pressing problems,
especially if the event doesn’t generate a lot of revenue. And some
in Beijing will just be glad when it’s over and the city can get
back to ‘normal.'
Many
Chinese people wonder why no Chinese writer has yet won a Nobel
Prize (Gao Xingjian being considered by Mainland Chinese as French). You’ve met and
translated a number of influential Chinese writers in the last
twenty years. What is your take on this: is China lacking writers
of great status, are there not enough good translators of Chinese
literature, or are major Chinese Writers just not reaching a Western
audience?
You’re too polite, as they say in
China: I’ve met a few, but the only reasonably well-known authors
I’ve actually translated are Mo Yan, whose novel Red Sorghum was
filmed by Zhang Yimou -- I translated a couple of short stories for
a collection published by Renditions at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong -- and by Wang Shuo, the sarcastic social satirist of the
late 80s and early 90s – though the novella I worked on never
actually got published at the time!
As for why the chance of a Nobel
Prize looks remote at the moment (though whatever the authorities
say Gao Xingjian undoubtedly did win it as a Chinese writer, for
books written in Chinese) all of the above apply. In the 80s, there
was still a belief that one of the older writers who first emerged
in the 1930s, and therefore had the experience of writing without
the same political restrictions as those brought up in the communist
era, might still have a chance of winning the Nobel prize; but that
generation - Shen Congwen, Qian Zhongshu, Bing Xin, Ding Ling, and
most recently Ba Jin - have now all died. Of the middle-aged
writers who came to prominence in the post-cultural revolution years
– Wang Meng, Zhang Xianliang, Zhang Jie – their careers were
seriously affected by the political decades: first they lost many
years of writing because of the Cultural Revolution; while their
education in the 50s perhaps made it harder for them to get away
from a fairly predictable socialist realist style. And since the
arrival of a much more commercial media and popular culture in the
90s, many of these authors have found it harder to maintain the
popularity they had in the 80s, when people would fight to get hold
of copies of the latest editions of China’s monthly literary
magazines.
People still read books – in fact
bookshops are often packed - but many young people are reading about
business management, while others are more focused on Japanese manga
or young ‘internet writers’, who they can relate to more easily.
Some of these writers are undoubtedly interesting, but there’s a
sense that the internet age – and the new pressures on Chinese
publishers to generate income – encourages a kind of throwaway
‘instant literature’, and makes it harder for carefully crafted,
well thought-out works to be viable. Last year one leading Chinese
magazine ran a cover story asking what had happened to all the poets
– a reference to the many young poets who emerged in the late 70s
and early-mid 80s and achieved surprisingly wide popularity; its
conclusion was that they had ‘all become CEOs’! I’m not sure that’s
quite accurate – but there’s no doubt that many creative people have
now gone into the internet world, and also that many talented
writers now write TV screenplays rather than novels: there are some
quite well-constructed, gripping, sometimes even witty dramas on
television - and the top screenwriters can earn far more than they
could from a novel, particularly since book piracy is so widespread
in China.
The question of translation is
also relevant. In general, the situation ought to be getting much
better, as there are growing numbers foreigners who speak and read
Chinese, and more bilingual Chinese people too - and more and more
interest from international publishers. Some good works have been
translated. But many publishers seem to have focused on the newest
young writers – who are more marketable - and often more sensational
too. Some of these works are interesting – but I feel that some
serious, slightly older writers, have been rather neglected as a
result: many Chinese people over thirty will tell you of their
admiration for the late Wang Xiaobo, for example, but it’s only this
year, more than a decade after his death, that I’ve seen an English
translation of any of his works (Wang in Love and Bondage: Three
Novellas by Wang Xiaobo – State University of New York Press). Some
writers who emerged in the 80s, like Mo Yan or Yu Hua, for example,
are still being translated, as is Ma Jian, the ‘enfant terrible’ of
Chinese literature in the 80s (though in his case the fact that he
now lives in England may have been a factor in helping him find a
publisher abroad) But other prominent writers, like Wang Anyi, seem
to have fallen off the international radar screen: she had several
books translated in the 80s, one by Penguin, but despite writing
widely acclaimed novels in more recent years she doesn’t seem to
have had anything published in English since. Hopefully, with the
big international publishers now setting up offices in China the
situation will improve. As for that Nobel prize, perhaps Mo Yan
still has a chance, if he keep producing major works; not everyone
likes the brutality of his depictions of rural Chinese life, but
there’s no doubt that of all the novelists in China over the past
couple of decades, he in particular has managed to create a distinct
world of his own in his writing over a sustained period.
Reviews of
Getting Rich First
Taipei Times
Asian Review of Books
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