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BOOK
REVIEW
Middle Kingdom deciphered
Smoke and Mirrors by Pallavi Aiyar
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
With the ascent of China replacing the menace of al-Qaeda as
the hot international issue, a flurry of books on the Middle
Kingdom has hit printing presses. Not all of them do justice
to the complex realities of a country in a state of
permanent change over three decades. Western authors
typically focus on China's economic marvel, the challenge
that it poses to the United States, or the prospects of it
becoming democratic. Their approaches tend to be either
intensely critical (Peter Navarro's The Coming China Wars)
or unabashedly admiring (Jim Rogers' A Bull in China).
One expects more nuanced analysis from the first and only
Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent who resided in
China. Pallavi Aiyar's Smoke and Mirrors deciphers
China through unique Indian spectacles in a witty and
illuminative account that has flashes of a classic. Aiyar
soaks into Chinese culture, society, economics and politics
and reaps rich rewards by capturing what every author dreams
of - the essence of the subject matter. (Disclosure: Aiyar
is a regular contributor to Asia Times Online.)
When Aiyar went from India to China in 2002 to keep a tryst
and teach English journalism, she was stricken by "fear of
the truly unknown" that lay north of the Himalayas. The haze
cleared during the next five years of extensive travel and
reporting, uncovering a landscape of "powerful
contradictions" in which a sprinting economic engine existed
alongside stationary authoritarian politics. Smoke and
Mirrors is the story of a country undergoing dizzying
change, recounted through an intelligent Indian prism.
One sign of transformation that Aiyar noticed straightaway
was the febrile construction boom in China, with roads,
buildings and malls sprouting up profusely. Half of the
world's concrete and one-third of its steel output were
being consumed by this bottomless drive for modernity that
humbled Aiyar as an Indian. What grated on her senses was
the harsh enforcement of restrictions on rural migrants in
China's metropolitan centers that gave them an
extra-sanitized appearance which is absent in Indian cities.
Aiyar's young students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute
had to undergo compulsory Maoism courses but "fantasized of
little but money" (p 16). They reviled American foreign
policy even while patronizing McDonalds and chasing
admissions to US universities. Coming from a class of
society that benefited from the economic boom, they were
optimistic and ambitious but also apolitical and ignorant of
knowledge deemed "unsuitable". They willfully ignored human
rights problems and held a "bright, nationalistic worldview
in which China was getting stronger and everything was
getting better". (p 17)
Parroting official propaganda with sincerity, none of
Aiyar's students knew that Tibetan spiritual leader in exile
the Dalai Lama was a Nobel laureate. The "zero
anti-establishment feeling" and enforced homogeneity of
thinking among the brightest minds of the country dampened
Aiyar's liberal Indian mind, but also reminded that control
of information was the key to government legitimacy in
China. Muzzling of the media by the state seemed perfectly
normal to the author's students, who held that "concepts
like freedom of the press were fundamentally unsuitable to
the 'volatile' nature of the Chinese people" (p 22). It was
only after the full extent of the SARS epidemic coverup
became evident in 2003 that Aiyar's pupils reacted with
shock and resentment towards their government.
One arena in which China's youth were defying authority was
by breaking sexual taboos. Aiyar notes the irony of the
runaway popularity of cosmetic surgery and titillation toys
in a country that had hitherto condemned women's make-up as
a bourgeois practice.
Notwithstanding the Olympics-inspired English-learning fad,
Aiyar remarks that the lack of English skills "remained a
stumbling block in China's projection of itself as a major
global player" (p 49). Continued inability to overcome
corrupted "Chinglish" in public signs was puzzling for a
dynamic country where the word "impossible" seemed
anachronistic.
On the structural underpinnings of power, Aiyar describes
China as "a pressure cooker, calm on the top but boiling
inside" (p 60). Unlike India, ordinary people in China have
few opportunities for the release of myriad frustrations
relating to their livelihood struggles. There is "no
recourse for the marginalized when the government itself
turned tyrannical" (p 209). The author is not fooled by the
exterior calm and orderliness projected by the Chinese
government and speaks of "isolated bubbles of tension" that
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blocks from "merging into
larger, more powerful forces" (p 70). She slams "the cruel
fangs of China's autocratic regime" (p 122) that coercively
relocated half a million households to beautify Beijing for
the Olympics.
Aiyar's stay in China coincided with a bout of thickening
economic relations between Beijing and New Delhi. While
expressing healthy skepticism about ideas of a merger of the
two economies into a "Chindia", she unveils curious cases of
Chinese software professionals being trained by Indian
companies and Indian medical students and yoga gurus pouring
into China for opportunities.
According to the author, a basic belief in the dignity of
labor, which is a legacy of Chinese communism, posed "the
broadest gulf between India and China" (p 105). Although
China was turning into one of the most unequal societies in
the world in class terms, it lacked the ritual social
discriminations that bogged India down. China also fared
better than India in equality of the sexes, particularly in
female labor force participation. Aiyar argues that there is
"a greater measure of the medieval in India and a dash more
of the modern in China". (p 135)
Aiyar visited the manufacturing miracle towns of the
southern and eastern coast that rendered "Made in China"
into a global household phrase. The entrepreneurial genius
of Zhejiang province was in full bloom in the contemporary
regime of "red capitalism". From socks and shoes to lighters
and garments, the province advertised tales of tiny
start-ups morphing into giant world market-dominating
industries. Aiyar tributes enterprising local bureaucrats
who pursued capitalist profits in the name of socialism and
enabled businesses to expand into international players.
Frenetic development of world-class highways and railways
also gave a competitive edge to Chinese producers.
On the question of spirituality, the author observed a major
comeback of officially-proscribed religion. The masses were
turning to faith to counterbalance the country's pervasive
Mammon-worship and corruption. The CCP itself was actively
encouraging a revival of Buddhism and Confucianism to
undergird President Hu Jintao's goal of a "harmonious
society". The party set strict parameters within which
religion freedom could breathe. Catholics and Uyghur Muslims
were subjected to tight controls while informal
Protestantism and the Falungong were harshly prosecuted.
Aiyar quips that "people were free to believe, but just not
too much". (p 184)
At the Zen Buddhist Shaolin temple in Henan province, the
author met the "party pet" abbot who was an exemplar of the
phenomenon of "religion playing second fiddle to politics"
(p 188). In the Muslim Ningxia Hui region, the author
noticed that all imams had to be licensed and all mosques
registered with the government. In Yunnan's Tibetan
monasteries, she found lamas who concealed their India
connections for fear of landing in "trouble". Aiyar doubts
whether the CCP's shepherding of religion into quietist
channels is sustainable, given the inequalities of access
and opportunities afflicting the country.
Aboard the maiden Qinghai-Lhasa train in 2006, Aiyar
reconfirmed the "less than polite" Han attitudes towards
China's fifty-odd ethnic minorities. In the Han imagination,
minorities were reduced to "tourist attractions with quaint
folk customs" (p 224), caricatured as unfit for modern
society or economic development. Tibetans, in general, were
"treated by Beijing as suspect and excluded from the
policymaking that would shape their own future". (p 231)
On the "roof of the world", Aiyar met Tibetans seething
under Chinese colonialism and spotted instances of silent
resistance. Modernization, which got a rousing response in
Han areas, had proven inadequate for buying loyalty in
China's restive western frontiers. Aiyar contrasts this with
India, which had superior "mechanisms for negotiating
large-scale diversity". (p 242)
In the concluding chapter, Aiyar draws attention to the
impact of new technologies on the ruler-ruled equation in
China. The rise of the legal consciousness movement (wei
quan) to defend property rights and the environment was
predicated on the spread of the Internet and mobile
telephony. Yet, the CCP had enough policing prowess in the
communications sphere "to keep the flame low enough to avert
an explosion for a while to come" (p 256). To the author,
Deng Xiaoping-bequeathed pragmatism and openness to "pilot
project" innovations guarantee regime survival in China.
Smoke and Mirrors emerges as the best comparative
narrative on China by an Asian in recent times. After the
mountains of statistics-laden works by economists matching
China and India, and the cornucopia of strategic prognoses
by policy wonks on China's threat to the West, Aiyar's debut
book comes as a fresh breeze with a special human touch that
retains objectivity.
Smoke and Mirrors. An Experience of China by Pallavi
Aiyar. Harper Collins, New Delhi, 2008. ISBN:
978-81-7223-746-2. Price: US$ 9.50, 273 pages.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
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