Middling Kingdom
Jasper Becker is Beijing bureau chief for a Hong Kong newspaper, the South China Morning Post, which covers China more extensively than any other English-language paper does. Reporting from China most of the time since 1985, he has been everywhere and asked every question. A few years ago he published a well-regarded book on China's great famine of the 1960s. Now he has pulled together much of his own reporting and that of his Post colleagues to offer a corrective to the outside world's generally sunny view of China today.</br></br>Becker focuses first on poverty-stricken minority peoples living in regions distant from the coast and on peasants in hilly and dry regions. Then he moves chapter by chapter to the cities, and up the ladder from factory workers to private entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and finally the top leaders. As he gets closer to the coast and to Beijing, he brings consumerism and intellectual sophistication into view. He emphasizes how recent China's consumer revolution is, and throws doubt on the argument that the Internet and faxes will pry Chinese society from the grip of the authoritarian state.</br></br>A common view in the West -- and a principle behind the China policies of both Bush pe{grv}re and Bill Clinton -- was that economic opening and growth would improve human rights in China. Becker shows that this optimism has been largely unjustified. Beneath the back- slapping, banqueting and cell-phone networking of private-enterprise China he sees the pathologies of a sick society: unemployment, nepotism, corruption and political repression. Many Chinese are worse off, even though GDP per capita has increased. The welfare system has collapsed, the state enterprises are even hollower than they're commonly understood to be, workers have lost job security, and the traditionally dismal terms of trade between the countryside and the cities have worsened. Private entrepreneurs flourish at the sufferance of the state but fall victim to predatory officials and shifts in government policy, and even on the most optimistic projections cannot create enough jobs to soak up China's surplus labor power. Police repression has tightened: The individual freedoms bruited in the West are restricted to matters of lifestyle, which do not include politics or religion. "The 600 million Chinese peasants," says Becker, "are the largest unenfranchised group in the world."</br></br>Becker's reporting is at its best where China is at its worst. Even among specialists, I do not think the collapse of China's health system has been portrayed as incisively as Becker does it here. He is convincing on the sorry state of rural education, although I think he underestimates strengths at the university level, and he is scathing and correct on the often overpraised reforms of the justice system.</br></br>Some details Becker gets wrong. It's not fair to say that "China has annexed the South China Sea" or that "China acts as if it has no international obligations other than to ethnic Chinese." It's not true that the National People's Congress has no permanent staff or offices or that Deng Xiaoping had no official post in 1989 except chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association (in fact, Deng's chairmanship of the Central Military Commission was crucial to his role in the events of that year). The prediction that Taiwan will help fund the Chinese democracy movement and hence determine China's future strikes me as misguided in two ways -- because the Taiwanese avoid involvement in mainland politics, and because change is more likely to come from within the ruling Communist Party than from the dissident movement.