25 June 2012
Old China Hands
It occurred to me that this is the ultimate in Old China Handism—a state of mind in which a short residence in the country is thought sufficient to pose as an authority on any aspect of life there to anyone who hasn't been in the country quite as long, who is just visiting, or who sits at home ready to be impressed that a foreigner can manage life somewhere believed to be quite so alien, and who will believe anything they're told. Little do they know how much of this knowledge is entirely hearsay, concocted by people who have little contact with the culture and who know nothing of the language, but repeated in expat bar and club until it gains the force of truth. All too many conversations are one-upmanship beginning with a cautious 'How long have you been here?' and ending with a claim to victory based on sly implication that the opponent simply doesn't understand China as profoundly as the speaker.
Once such people often published books, but these days they strut about on-line providing wildly inaccurate information about shopping and the 'right' price for a taxi to the Great Wall, attempting to suppress dissent by sheer weight of numbers, and by mentioning just how long they've lived (their heavily air-conditioned, 'hardship' posting, car-and-driver, secure-compound) lives in the country. They claim expertise on the latest pizza restaurant but can say almost nothing about local restaurants save a few which are in sudden vogue due to their supposed accessibility only to those in the know, and mainly used to show off Old China Hand credentials to visitors.
These days, though, the Internet replaces propping up the bar exchanging gossip with other wiseacres. Google search can turn anyone into an Old China Hand, and since there are now more journalists with excellent Mandarin skills, supported by carefully selected intelligent and honest local assistants, and who have a long-term commitment to China journalism and original first-hand research, the quality of Old China Hand pronouncements on Chinese topics beyond prices for fake pearls ought to be improving. But there are, of course, still numbers of journalists who are parachuted in for short periods, who have to rely far too much on assistants who are in the pockets of the authorities, and whose reports only amount to the most flatulent generalisations, often quoting Chinese sources entirely uncritically. And then, of course, there are those English-language Chinese sources whose every figure must be assumed to be false until cross-referenced and triple-checked. The ersatz Old China Hand frequently fails to make these distinctions, although that won't stop him writing puffery in a book review for Amazon, seeking reflected glory, or in this case writing an entire book based on other people's work.
After I'd written the review I allowed myself to look at what else has been said about the title, and was not surprised to find that the former Observer and South China Morning Post editor had been able to wangle lavish praise in print from former colleagues and contacts, including some who really should have known better, and who in some cases have now dropped significantly in my estimation (not that I expect that to lose them any sleep).
But it's not as if any knowledge of China is necessary to see that this book is tosh. It merely throws every argument and tidbit of information that can be found at one side of an argument (only providing sources for a very few), and then similarly throws every argument and distantly related fact it can find at the other. It entirely fails to assess the quality of the figures it (mostly unattributably) quotes, fails to plump for one side or the other, or to provide any meaningful interpretation. No one needs to be a Sinophile to observe this, nor to see frequent glaring errors of logic.
Luckily I'm not entirely alone in a critical response. Paul Mooney's (heavily cut, I'm told) review in the South China Morning Post came to the same conclusions ( Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How it Got There and Where it is Heading):
One does not get the feeling that Fenby ever visited China while researching the book. While he occasionally mentions being in China, it's usually just an aside, with few details. He mentions visiting the Labrang Monastery in Gansu province, but fails to describe the rich colour of the monastery town crowded with crimson-robed lamas. Likewise with his visit to Kashgar, the centre of Uygur culture in Xinjiang. As a result, much of the book reads asif it's come out of newspapers or web pages.
A bit of a shock, then, to read Julia Lovell saying in The Guardian:
There is a risk that a book summarising such a monumental story might get bogged down in dry, statistical detail. Fenby avoids this through lively, first-person reportage and vivid vignettes.
She must have been reading a different book.
I ended up with 15 pages of notes, many grouped under the headings Non Sequiturs, Padding, Blindingly Obvious, Debatable, and Occasional Important Points. An 800-word review couldn't begin to do this justice.
I mentioned a non-sequitur about Chinese take-aways in the UK, but my favourite example was in a paragraph that was cut:
A
discussion of lack of trust in Chinese society citing examples of counterfeit
goods and the theft of brand names fails to notice that the copies of châteaux
and indeed of whole European villages it goes on to discuss are fakes in an
entirely different sense—neither developers nor buyers represent these as the
real thing.
Examples of padding included a discussion of Taiwanese pre-history hardly relevant to a discussion of contemporary mainland China, and extensive material on Chiang Kai-shek obviously too tempting to someone who had already written a biography of the man, but considerably more than needed.
A further example of the blindingly obvious also cut from the review:
It’s
no surprise that those behind attempts to hack commercial information
subsequently traced to China are “likely not to be run-of-the mill hackers who
prefer to go for bank accounts and credit cards.”
I also enjoyed: The economy and politcs, both domestic and external, are inextricably linked. When things go well, that benefits both. When there are problems both suffer (p.3), and an observation that planes fly over mountains (p.364).
It's amusing to find much in the same vein in a piece in China Daily (Heads or Tails?) Indeed it's hard not to cackle:
Making predictions is indeed so difficult that he certainly tends to avoid making any in his book.
Luckily China Daily is free, or you might resent having paid good money for this sort of observation. But it gets better:
"I had a conference call with a Latin American client recently who said my outlook for China in 2012 was bearish," he recalls.
"I gave the same analysis to someone later in the day, and he said it was the most bullish analysis he had heard in a long time."
And if you read this entire book you'll still remain just as confused. This is precisely its problem.
But you may be clear that the opinion of a man who even gets the size of China wrong; who invents an entirely new meaning for the phrase 虎头蛇尾 he purloins for his title; who appears unaware that the Yangzi was dammed decades before the Three Gorges was built (hundreds of thousands of cruise passengers could have told him that); and who appears equally unaware that Sun Yat-sen was only Provisional President of China and never President (it was Yuan Shikai who first held that post) would not be worth having anyway.
But why go on about this? Over the centuries of Western contact with China the majority of books on the place have been ill-informed and generally dreadful. But the struggle is to get reporting on China from people who commit themselves to the place, become intimate with the language (which is a necessary condition for having a clue what it going on), read and interview original sources, and who believe nothing they haven't seen for themselves. There's been some progress on this front—progress which a book like this, already itself being quoted as a source despite being largely sourceless, dramatically sets back.
