|
|
|||
| Several readers of my web columns on
National
Review Online have asked me to recommend some books on China. The
literature about China is so vast, and I’ve read so little of it, that I
can only offer a very idiosyncratic selection. Here goes. Books with no
link are out of print, but can generally be found on second-hand book sites
like Abebooks.
Note that I get a lot of China books to review, and the reviews can be found
on my "Print Journalism" web pages. Since I have little time for
reading books other than those I am paid to read, this pretty much brings
you up to date with my China reading! History. Before reading anything else, read Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China. This is a masterly survey of the last 400 years of Chinese history, written in prose so good it pretty much reads itself, and setting 20th-century events in sound historical perspective (e.g. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung as competing warlords, which is what they were). For pre-Imperial China — before 200 B.C. — Maspero’s China in Antiquity, though 60 years old and superseded on some points of fact, and of course out of print, is still well worth the effort of tracking down a copy. For the intervening 1800 years, there are many good one-volume surveys of Chinese history, though no outstanding ones that I know of. If you’re starting from scratch, I’d recommend Ebrey & Liu. For something a bit meatier, try Roberts. Hansen is very popular in colleges now, which of course raises one’s suspicions right away. I haven’t read her book; but to judge by the reviews, Ms. Hansen does seem to have an agenda, which apparently is to show that China was not the hermetically sealed, introverted entity she is popularly imagined to have been. If this is indeed her argument, I am tempted to say of it what Martin Gardner said about Freud’s theory of the unconscious: To the degree that it is true, it is not original, and to the degree that it is original, it is not true. However, it is grossly unfair to pass an opinion on a book one has not read, so I suggest you try it for yourself. (An inside source — a National Review reader — at the college where Ms. Hansen teaches tells me that she is in fact, as Jeeves would have said, "sound". It's high time I read her book myself.) [Added early-2004: I have just read F.W. Mote's Imperial China 900-1800. It's a big book – over 1,000 pages – and rather dry. It took me a while to warm to it. However, I set it down at last very impressed with the range and depth of Prof. Mote's knowledge. This book is well worth the time & effort. I would also recommend the Teaching Company course From Yao to Mao. I have some nits to pick with this course – I think Prof. Hammond is much too kind to the Maoists, for instance – but if you just want an all-purpose introduction to the entire sweep of Chinese history, all the basic facts are here. Prof. Hammond is especially good on the intellectual history of the Song Dynasty. And a reader recommends to me the lecture notes published on the internet by Edward Kaplan of West Washington University. They are here. I haven't read them myself, but my reader has, and declares them very good.] China today.
Jasper Becker’s The
Chinese is a
good up-to-date survey. Becker
is also the author of Hungry
Ghosts, the definitive book so far (in fact the only one!)
on the terrible Mao famine of 1959-61 — the greatest human catastrophe
of the 20th century, with the possible exception of WW2. My old classmate Graham Hutchings, who was China correspondent for
the London Daily Telegraph for ten years, has just brought out a book
titled Modern
China: A Century of Change,
which is a sort of one-volume encyclopedia of recent Chinese history —
excellent for reference or browsing.
Graham is a sensible fellow and a reliable guide who knows China
very well. He is also the
only person I ever knew that carried a list of the Ming emperors around in
his wallet. Literature I
— General. One
hardly knows where to begin. The
Chinese have been writing books since the Bronze Age, and show no sign of
stopping. I think I had
better tell you to read some guides to the field before taking up actual
texts. For the ancient
period, Burton Watson’s Early
Chinese Literature is
invaluable. For the half-dozen great classic novels, written from the
14th to the 18th centuries, C.T. Hsia’s The
Classic Chinese Novel is the first book to have. Hsia also wrote a
History of Modern Chinese Fiction, which is very
good for the period from 1917-57, and which has some penetrating
observations on Chinese literature in general. For Chinese poetry...
Well,
again, it’s hard to know where to start. A personal favorite of mine, but long out of print, is John Wu’s
The Four Seasons of T’ang Poetry. You
could do worse than begin with that, if you want to explore Chinese
poetry. Literature II
— Classic. All
right, you want to read some actual literature. Ancient Chinese prose presents some deep problems for a
modern western reader, which you will find out about for yourself if you
decide to explore it. Read
Watson first, then decide if you really want to take the plunge. (If you do, I think the recent translation of The
Analects of Confucius by
“Simon Leys” brings the thing as close to readability as it can be
brought, and Watson’s own piecemeal translation of the Historical
Records is, like everything else he has written, first-rate.) The great classic Chinese novel is Cao Xueqin’s Dream
of the Red Chamber (titled The Story of the Stone in the
5-volume Penguin edition), an 18th-century family saga of which there are
many translations, none of which has held my attention for long enough for
me to actually finish the darn thing! I much prefer Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, of
which there is a not very good English translation by Brewitt-Taylor that
I have read, and a recent one by Moss
Roberts that I haven’t, but which is probably better.
The Buddhist classic
Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en, is best
known in Arthur Waley’s abridged translation titled Monkey,
a lovely book. For the other
classic novels, take C.T. Hsia as your starting point. Poetry: Arthur Waley again. His
translation of The
Book of Songs is still in print after 65 years, for
excellent reasons. And the aforementioned John C. Wu wrote a best-selling
translation of the Tao
Teh Ching with an
interesting Catholic flavor to it — he served as Taiwan’s Minister
Plenipotentiary to the Holy See. Literature III — Modern. The first lecture I ever attended on modern Chinese literature was given by Brian Hook, at that time on the staff at Leeds University. He opened the talk by saying: “The main question we have to ask about modern Chinese literature is: Why is none of it much good?” I am not sufficiently well-read to say whether or not this is a fair judgment; but it sure is a very common one among the experts. Chinese people spent most of the 20th century just staying alive, and don’t seem to have had much energy left over for literature. When I ask my most well-educated, thoughtful and literary Chinese friends to name the great 20th-century Chinese novel, they usually say Qian Zhongshu’s The Besieged City (1947). C.T. Hsia also gives this very high marks, but places Jiang Gui’s The Whirlwind (1957) higher. Both are hard to find in translation, and I confess I have not read either. (If you want to trawl the second-hand sites, the author’s names may be transcribed old-style as “Ch’ien Chung-shu” and “Chiang Kuei,” respectively.) I
have read the works of Lu
Xun (spelt "Lu Hsün" in the old style), a sort of Chinese George Orwell, at least in the
essays and commentary line, and find him very simpatico, though you need a
good understanding of the social, historical and literary background he
was writing from. (For which,
absolutely the best guide is another wonderful Jonathan Spence book, The
Gate of Heavenly Peace.) Of recent productions available in English translation, I concur
with the general opinion that Ha Jin’s Waiting
is as good as it gets, though it is, like most Chinese fiction since the
15th century (certainly including Dream of the Red Chamber), much more a
woman’s book than a man’s. Should I read Soul Mountain? Only if you like structureless, unoriginal, 1920-style stream-of-consciousness ramblings, badly translated. Keeping
Up. I rely heavily on The
China Journal, a twice-yearly (January/July) summary
(250-300 pages) of current scholarship on all aspects of China, with a
dozen or so really good articles, all by scholars, plus 50 or 60 brief
reviews of new books. TCJ is
published by ANUC, the Australian National University at Canberra. (If there is also an Australian National
University at Sydney,
I’d prefer not to know about it.) There
is a British equivalent, The
China Quarterly, which I used to read in England and
thought very good, but which I confess I haven’t looked at for years.
One can only do so much keeping up. Best Book on the Opium Wars, For my money, still Maurice Collis’s Foreign Mud. Deeply out of print, but brilliant... and funny. |
||||