Last year, publishers rushed out so many books on China before the Beijing Olympics that a critic remarked that the mountains of unsold books would resemble the huge inventories that periodically pile up at Chinese warehouses.
In 2009, which marks many significant Chinese anniversaries – aside from commemorating the founding of the Communist republic, it is three decades since the beginning of capitalist reforms and 20 years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown – the shift has been to quality over quantity.
Postcards from Tomorrow Square, by James Fallows, is a travelogue of a different sort: he writes about everything from how two Taiwanese brought the internet to schools in the poorest parts of China to the different social behaviour of the Japanese and the Chinese. “In Japan, social controls are internalised ... whereas China seems like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they might get caught.” Fallows, empathetic and impartial, concludes that China is not as monolithic nor as powerful as it is commonly perceived to be and warns against overestimating it. When you factor in that factory employees in southern China get free or subsidised housing and food, he says, they are probably better off than workers on the minimum wage in midwestern America. There is also a wonderful profile of an eco-friendly Chinese billionaire aviator who wakes up a Nasa friend of Fallows’ at 6.30am to discuss fuel-efficient aviation.
Our most common interaction with China is through buying its products. A spate of scandals involving harmful toys and poisoned milk have already raised concerns and readers will find more to worry about in Poorly Made in China, Paul Midler’s romp through factories there. To foreign businessmen, “mainland China seemed law-abiding in ways other places did not,” he writes, but the reality is that many entrepreneurs in China agree to manufacture, say, computer peripherals at prices that scarcely make economic sense because they often intend to sell the products with a higher mark-up in Asia and Africa, where intellectual property is not as well protected as in the west. The US gets a bargain, but it suffers the consequences of what Midler calls “quality fade” as Chinese cost-cutting runs riot and safety is compromised.
Disquieting though this may be, this book has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. After reaching a deal with a husband and wife team of factory owners, the American importer Bernie tells the husband that he is so tiny that he could put him in his pocket – and leaves a mortified Midler to translate. When Midler discovers a worker has developed a serious reaction to hair gel being manufactured by their factory, he suggests diplomatically that he be taken off the line. “How can [the worker] harm the product when it was the product that caused him harm,” the wife asks.
The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li, examines the collateral damage suffered by a small town when one of its youngsters, Shan, is executed in 1979 for her loss of faith in communism. Visiting elderly neighbours to ask for help burying his daughter, Teacher Gu begins to feel faint after recalling how Shan whipped them at a public gathering in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution: “Crazy as the young revolutionaries were, it seemed that being human was a sufficient reason for humiliation,” he reflects. Shan kicked a pregnant woman who despises the child, Nini, who is born crippled after that brutality. Nini, heart-rendingly drawn, is one of the legion of walking wounded in the town. She falls in love with a sexually depraved teenager. It all ends in tears – more accurately, it begins and ends in tears. Reading this book almost makes one sympathise with China’s refusal to come to terms with the demons of its Maoist past. I am haunted by it still, but wager that I will not read a better novel this year.
Rahul Jacob is the FT’s travel editor and is appearing at the Ubud Literary Festival, Bali, October 7-10. www.ubudwritersfestival.com
