Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Sick
Man of Asia It’s
a funny business, writing. Sometimes
you give up days to crafting a piece, sweat blood over it, research
all the background stuff the way journalists are supposed to, make sure
the ideas all connect, weed out all the superfluous adjectives and
adverbs, add just the right amount of “seasoning” — a pinch of
literary allusion, a sprinkling of historical anecdote, a soupçon
of autobiographical reminiscence — read it out loud to the wife to make
sure you didn’t commit to print something like “I conceded that he had
succeeded,” finally get the thing into print, or pixels...
And watch it sink like a stone, without a trace of interest from
anyone. Other times you throw something together at the last minute in
the style of the old newspaper hacks
— dragging yourself away to the keyboard from some convivial
gathering at 1 a.m. to meet a 9 a.m. deadline, with half a load tied on
and a head full of unprintable witticisms and unrepeatable gossip from the
evening’s company, to stare at the blank screen through a Merlot fog
thinking: What the hell am
I going to say about this? Hasn’t it all been said much better already by X and Y and
Z? Can’t I let the editors
down on an assignment just this once without them minding too much?
Did Heather really say that about Andrew?
Death, where is thy sting? ...
And then, when the piece has appeared, watch with stunned amazement
as the letters and emails pour in: “Best thing you’ve ever done!”
“What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed!”
“Brilliant!” “Surpassed
yourself this time, Derb...” All
of which is by way of offering a generalized “Thank you” to the many
readers who emailed and even snail-mailed to express appreciation of the
pieces I posted on NRO from China this summer.
I have hardly ever written anything with less care and attention
than those China dispatches. I
don’t say that with any pride: I
try to be conscientious about writing, even for such a transient medium as
the Web, and always give as much time and attention to a piece as I can.
It was just that in China, I couldn’t give much of either.
I was far from home and all my usual resources, was deeply involved
in the logistics of moving children, luggage and money around a very large
country not much designed for traveling in, and whose language I speak
only imperfectly,
while simultaneously fulfilling all sorts of obligations — some of which
I only half understood — to an innumerable host of relatives, friends,
ex-students and ex-colleagues. When
I could break away for half an hour to an internet cafe (assuming I could
find one) there was no time to do anything but key in random notes I had
jotted down, supplemented with whatever impressions and thoughts were at
the front of my mind in that moment, with very little time for editing or
review. Amongst
other things, these circumstances played into the phenomenon, first noted
by either Goethe, Pascal or Cicero (depending on which authority you
consult) of writing a long piece because I had no time to write a short
one. The material that ended
up on the noble webmaster’s screen at NRO was therefore much more than
he could use, and he cut it accordingly, not always in a way I would have
done myself if I had had time, which of course I didn’t.
I’ve posted the originals, when they survived, on
my personal website. Anyway,
a lot of people liked them, and wrote me to say so, and I thank those
people for their generous words, and the trouble they took to write.
[I
read all of every email anyone sends me except those from obvious
lunatics. There are way too
many to answer, even cursorily, and I am afraid a generic thank-you like
this once in a while has to cover most cases.
If I did answer your email it was because either (a) you
said something I thought especially interesting and had decided to
plagiarize for a column, or (b) you asked a question that I felt required
an answer, or (c) you caught me in an idle moment when I was putting off
actual work. The only emails I never, ever respond to are the ones that
tell me I’m an idiot. As
Woody Allen said about gratuitous sex, violence and profanity in movies:
Who needs it? I get enough of that at home.] Several
readers suggested I write up my China trip as a book. It’s a nice thought, and God knows I have not the
slightest, most trifling objection to having my fugitive journalism bound
up between hard covers for a nice fat advance; but though publishers do
some weird things, they are rarely so far removed from the realms of
commercial common sense as to consider such a proposition seriously.
I did mention it to my literary agent, but he not only didn’t
play the idea back over the net, he let it go right by him without even
looking at it. He knows his
business very well, and I can take a hint. I
am in any case a bit diffident about claiming any authority to comment in
a large general way about China. I
have been writing about the place for eighteen years — two novels and
numberless articles. I have
family connections there (China is, as my wife says, my
“country-in-law”) and am a big fan of classic Chinese literature.
I try my best to “keep up” with the aid of scholarly
periodicals like Australian National University’s excellent China
Journal. Back in the 1970s, when Americans started to be let into
China to look around after the Kissinger-Nixon thaw, there was a
phenomenon called, by China scholars, “the three-week sinologist.”
That is, some dimwit Congressman or Hollywood airhead would spend
three weeks in China, then come home and write a book about it.
Well, I consider myself something better than a “three-week
sinologist,” but I am not a true sinologist of any other variety, nor
even a full-time China-beat working journalist like Ian Buruma or Jonathan
Mirsky (to name the two most superb practitioners of that arduous craft). I
just look, listen, read, and then write down my impressions from time to
time. You might therefore want to apply some discounting to the
following remarks. I
came back from China in August feeling, as I wrote at
the time, that: “The present dictatorship
is more firmly established than I thought before I went to China.
The urban middle classes, who are supposed to be the driving force
behind political reform, do not like the Communists very much, but they do
not mind them very much, either... I
cannot see any reason why the Communists should not go on ruling China and
her imperial possessions indefinitely.”
The thing that is striking to me now is that this view of things
is, by the standards of current China commentary, rather optimistic. I
have been reading a lot of stuff recently — stuff of all kinds, from
personal emails sent by Chinese friends both in and out of China, to books
like Ian Buruma’s Bad Elements and Gordon Chang’s The Coming
Collapse of China — that is more deeply pessimistic about that
country than anything I can remember.
I have always hated the Chinese communists, and have never been
under any illusions about them. I
have also been rather blunt, especially in my novels, in registering
certain reservations about Chinese culture and society, some features of
which I feel work for the communists and against the best interests of the
Chinese people. I have, in
short, been a China pessimist all the years I have been writing about the
place. At least, I have been
on the pessimistic side of the median line of China commentary —
that part of China commentary that seems to me worth taking
seriously. Now, for the first
time I can recall, I have the feeling that everyone else is even more
pessimistic than I am. There
are still plenty of China gulls around, of course:
always have been, always will be.*
Among serious China-watchers, though — people who know the
country well, speak the language, have watched the place for years —
there are no gulls now. For
all I can see, there are no optimists of any kind.
For the kind of thing I mean, see Gordon
Chang’s testimony to the U.S.-China Commission on August
2nd. (Full disclosure:
I reviewed Chang’s book for the Washington
Times.) Five
years ago Chang would have been way out on a limb with talk like that.
Now, to judge from the books and articles I am reading, and the
private responses to my own summer writings, he’s pretty mainstream. China
needs democracy. China
needs democracy. The
twentieth century taught us, via an ocean of blood and a mountain of
corpses, that nothing else will do. Without
democracy, a country — any country — is on a slope to disaster. Without democracy, a country cannot even modernize, except in
an incomplete and superficial way. Some
parts of China are physically impressive now:
glittering skyscrapers, air-conditioned malls, broad expressways.
It means nothing, just as the soaring Palaces of Culture erected in
Stalin’s U.S.S.R. meant nothing, though they were every bit as
physically impressive in their own time. Few phrases sound harsher or more bitter in Chinese ears than
the phrase dong ya bing fu — “the sick man of Asia,” the
phrase applied by fascist Japan to the chaotic warlord China of the 1920s,
the phrase the Japanese used to justify their imperial “mission” in
China, a “mission” to save the Chinese from themselves.
It’s not a phrase I would use lightly, knowing Chinese
sensibilities as I do. Yet it
is the phrase that will be most apt for the China of the near future,
unless a miracle happens very soon. I
have seen somewhere a list of all those nations that got through the 20th
century with their form of government intact and uninterrupted by
revolution or occupation. The
list is pitifully short: as I
recall it consists of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden,
Switzerland and the U.S.A. I
wonder what the corresponding list will look like for the 21st century?
This much, at least, I can guarantee with perfect certainty:
China will not be on it. -------------------------------------------------------------- |
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