How does China think? It’s a question that has bedevilled historians and policy-makers for a long time. It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to apply Churchill’s words about Russia in 1939 to the actions of the contemporary Middle Kingdom: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.
Many contemporary Chinese writers have offered us a window into the country’s lived reality. Among them is novelist Yu Hua whose work, from early avantgarde to grotesque realism, critiques China’s development from the Cultural Revolution to its modern-day variety of hyper-capitalism. Pankaj Mishra once described it as a “vision of China lurching between political authoritarianism, extreme poverty, consumerist excess and moral depravity”.
The writer’s essay collection, China in Ten Words, published almost ten years ago, offers an insider’s take from that time. Hua selects words that have both a personal resonance as well as a larger public role, and uses them as “ten pairs of eyes with which to scan the contemporary Chinese scene from different vantage points.” The frankness of his observations led to the book being banned in China when it first appeared.
The words, in an English translation by Allan H. Barr, are: people, leader, reading, writing, the writer Lu Xun, revolution, disparity, grassroots, copycat, and bamboozle. An interesting matrix to analyse any society, not just China.
To be clear, Hua’s scrutiny is not data-based or research-oriented. Instead, he offers observation, analysis, and personal anecdotes that range over the years to bring out complexities and contrasts. “When in this book I write of China’s pain,” he reveals, “I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.”
Somewhat sardonically, he writes that in China today, it’s only officials who frequently use the words “the people”. The people themselves seldom use it, “perhaps they hardly recall its existence.” He cuts deeper: after Tiananmen, “the people” have become “nothing more than a shell company, utilized by different eras to position different products in the marketplace.”
He goes on to recall the many legends surrounding Mao and the ubiquitous Little Red Book. Nowadays, though, “I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have a leader—all we have is a leadership.” It’s not that he’s a fan of the Cultural Revolution: it was “a life made up of equal parts stifled instincts, dreary freedom, and hollow verbiage.” Ironically enough, changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth, he says, have only now created real classes and real class conflict.
It’s clear from many of the parallels between past and present that Hua views history as a series of connected dots. He sees signs of 1958’s notorious Great Leap Forward in the contemporary frenzy to construct airports, harbours, highways, and other large-scale public works. In another section, he finds “the revolutionary violence that recalls the Cultural Revolution” within China’s success story. The economic leaps “in which we so revel” rely on the absolute authority of local governments.
What makes the picture more complex is that the fruits of such development have been decidedly uneven. The disparities remind Hua of “walking down a street where on this side are gaudy pleasure palaces and, on that side, desolate ruins.” Of course, China isn’t the only country to which that can be applied.
Hua goes on to recollect a TV interviewer asking Chinese teenagers what gift they would most like to receive. A boy in Beijing wanted a Boeing jet of his own, while a girl in the northwest said bashfully, “I want a pair of sneakers.”
Perhaps the most interesting section is the one in which he dwells on the meaning and associations of the word “copycat”. It’s not just counterfeiting and infringement, but also deviations from the standard, mischief, and caricature. It has, Hua feels, an anarchist spirit that has penetrated deep into the country’s culture. Thus, there aren’t merely copycat mobile phones and other product knock-offs but also “copycat stars, TV programs, advertisements, pop songs, Spring Festival galas, Shenzhou 7 space capsules, and Bird’s Nest national stadiums.”
This is a consequence of lopsided development, revealing both progress and regression.On the positive side, it’s also “a challenge of the grassroots to the elite, of the popular to the official, of the weak to the strong.”
He paints a similar picture for the word “bamboozle”, with shades of satire, hype, and deception. “Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too…it goes to show that we live in a frivolous society, one that doesn’t set much store by matters of principle.”
The country that Hua portrays is one where political reform has ground to a halt even as the economy accelerates. This explains the contradictions: “conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on the other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there.”
His focus throughout is on China’s relationship with itself and not with the world. As such, foreign policy and steps to prevail over the region – if not the world at large -- aren’t touched upon. Nevertheless, the internal and the external are closely linked, and it’s in this light that Hua’s depiction of a divided society coming to grips with a new reality is a worrying one.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.
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