At a little under 800 pages Becoming China:The Story Behind the State is a huge work on a humongous country, its resilient people and their vast history, from way back in time to almost today. The book targets a western audience but could as well have been written with India in mind. Reading it should vastly enhance our appreciation of a country we know so little about and only continue to view as an enemy with the oft repeated warning “Remember 1962!” ringing in our ears.
Jeanne-Marie Gescher, who taught Chinese law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, is a leading expert on China where she has lived and worked since 1989. Her book is based on the valid premise that there is so much more to understanding China than just its economics. Melding myriad myths, philosophy, archaeological finds and straight history, she has produced a remarkably well- rounded thoughtful and credible account of a grand and troubled country.
Gescher covers a lot of ground in considerable depth in her book — from China’s early beginnings to today. She walks us through the several dynasties that ruled the country from the Shang in 1600 BCE through to the Qing in 1911, after which it went republican and then Communist.
Through her book we are introduced, to China’s governing classes as well as the events and attitudes which have shaped the country down the ages. The book is peppered with interesting accounts of individuals who, through history, have stood up to the state, or warned it obliquely of impending calamities, most often with disastrous consequences to themselves.
A rare one who got away, was the famous traveller Xuanzang, better known in India as Hiuen Tsang. Officially barred from leaving China, he stole away to India only to be welcomed back by the Emperor, as a hero, sixteen years later in 645AD for ‘pushing knowledge of the western world of India to unimagined heights.’
‘Becoming China’ also brings out how assiduously Chinese communists continue to flog the gross depredations of European, and Japanese imperialism to mask some their own egregious wrongs, many of which have no parallel in human history.
History repeats The point Gescher plugs away at, in her book, is that history is repeating itself in China and what is happening there today, has precedents in its deep past. China, Gescher contends, has always been all about establishing and sustaining an orderly, obedient society.
To that end, it was probably the first country to systematically count its people through decennial census’ and introduce an internal passport system, Hukou, to regulate internal migration. The Chinese also established a merit based bureaucracy long before anyone else did, albeit on an imagined Confucianism and created vast surveillance systems to manage large numbers over vast spaces.
China’s ham-handed and insensitive handling of its minorities, is well covered in Gescher’s book as also its constant anxiety to secure its borders, understandable, considering that the country has, so often in the past been felled by smaller and more aggressive entities on its periphery.
China’s predilection for grand projects going back over two millennia is well-brought out by Gescher. The construction of the Grand Canal the longest of its kind in the world, happened under the Su Dynasty (581-618 AD). The Great Wall running over thousands of kilometres was built and rebuilt through much of China’s recorded history. While neither led to major environmental disasters, its more recent ones do.
The breaching of the ambitious Banqiao Dam in 1975, killed eighty-five thousand but the news was blanked out of the country’s media. China went ahead with the Three Gorges Dam Project despite valid protests against building it.
A hydrological engineer who had warned against its construction was consigned to a labour camp for ‘re-education.’ A journalist, Dai Qing, who questioned the wisdom of building the dam in a popular book ‘Yangzi, Yangzi,’ was forced to flee her country.
Unsure future In her book, Gescher refers to the Chinese penchant to embed coded messages of dissent and protest in something as innocuous as a painting of a placid scenery. In ‘Becoming China’ Gescher has planted several coded messages of her own, similar to but far subtler than the ones in a letter Voltaire wrote from the gilded cage of King Fredrick the Great of Prussia’s court: “The King is the life of the company. But. I have operas and comedies, reviews and concerts, my studies and books. But, but. Berlin is fine, the princess charming, the maids of honour handsome. But.’
For all its spectacular achievements, China is unsure where it is headed and, as so often in the past, it has once again reposed its faith in a ‘Big Man’ to show the way. With Xi Jinping’s rise to absolute authority, there is the very real possibility that huge mistakes would be made. Lest one forgets it was under another absolute ruler, Mao, that over forty million humans perished in the greatest man- made famine in human history.
The big take away from Jeanne Maire’s book is that China is not as hot as the world thinks it is. Beneath its astonishing rise, the seeds of its own downfall have already been sown.
In graphic detail, Gescher brings out the massive environmental damage China has inflicted on itself with its growth — at any -cost —policy and comes close to suggesting, that for all its wealth, China has an unresolvable problem on its hands, one that will bring it down.
Given the gargantuan scale of corruption in China, Gescher for one doesn’t believe that Xi’s all-out war to stamp it out will succeed, especially when members of his own family have been beneficiaries of a spoils system that has always favoured the privileged.
Through its history, Gescher tells us, China’s top-down approach to everything has precluded serious discussion and debate, with dissenters either imprisoned, exiled, or killed.
A regimented society is vainly straining at the leash in China, existing as it does, in a country that doubles up as a hi-tech prison.
Reading Gescher’s book leaves one wondering, ‘Can the Chinese ever hope to break out of such a formidable Panopticon?’
MEET THE AUTHOR
Jeanne-Marie Gescher is a British barrister who has worked in China for over 25 years, establishing one of the earliest advisory firms, and the first to include a think tank. She is a Senior Fellow of the SOAS China Institute.
The reviwer is a visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc-Bangalore