Thursday, November 30, 2006

China looks in the mirror

The new London Review has a long reported article from Shanghai by the excellent writer Pankaj Mishra. The bulk of the piece reports on interviews -- or really conversations from the sound of it -- with prominent figures of various ideological persuasions. It's a nice counterpoint to Mishra's recent take on China's so-called New Left, in a long New York Times Magazine profile of the author and editor Wang Hui [TimesSelect] (pronounced Wong Hway).

This time Mishra's subjects aren't New Leftists. The principal subject is Zhu Xueqin (pronounced Ju Shweah Cheen), a prominent man in politics who calls himself only "liberal." In an apparent stretch of that term, he told Mishra "that China needed more market-oriented reforms, and blamed the growing inequality and injustices on excessive state interference in free market mechanisms -- the 'visible foot' stamping on the 'invisible hand.'"

Mishra's portrait of the society, or, more specifically, the society's view of itself, has the ring of truth (I've been to the country once, a decade ago, and follow it carefully), and it brings to mind life in the post-Communist, 1990s Eastern bloc:

Yu [Hua, author of the new novel "Brothers,"] insisted that he had only described a commonplace reality. 'Things were bad during the Cultural Revolution,' he said, 'but what we are seeing now is total moral breakdown.'

I heard this line of argument often, from all sorts of people, who attested to a daily life that is relatively free from state control, but, deprived of the support networks of community and social security, and exposed to rampant venality, increasingly unstable and anxious.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:25 PM

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