Book review: Out of Mao's Shadow by Philip P Pan

Published on Sunday 17 August 2008 21:13

Picador, 368pp, £14.99

MANY in the West have assumed that capitalism will inevitably lead to democracy, that free markets will spawn genuine freedom, but as China celebrates its own emergence as a world power, its government has continued to crack down on dissent.

More than four dozen online dissidents have been jailed and last year more than 2,500 websites were blocked. Human-rights lawyers who volunteered to defend Tibetans arrested after anti-China protests have been effectively disbarred, and a peaceful gathering of parents protesting at shoddy school construction and the deaths of their children in the recent earthquake was broken up.

In his compelling new book, Philip Pan points out that in China independent labour unions and churches are still illegal, and the party still exercises firm control over the courts. The economic boom has left many behind, and the nation's problems are "obvious to anyone willing to see: the stifling limits on political and religious freedoms, the abuse of power by privileged officials, the sweatshop conditions in the factories, the persistent poverty in the countryside, the degradation of the environment, the moral drift of a cynical society."

Prosperity has raised people's expectations and access to information, even as it's helped the government forestall democratisation: Many citizens who might once have become dissidents have grown increasingly focused on their private lives and the opportunity to make money quickly, while party officials wield tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen who might otherwise support political change.

This "authoritarian capitalism" is "as exploitative as anything Marx – or Mao – ever envisioned," says Pan, who shows the fallout of these changes on the lives of individual citizens, just as he shows the potent effect that a few brave individuals – speaking up on behalf of civil liberties, freedom of the press and government accountability – can have on the party's conduct of day-to-day business.

Fluent in Chinese, Pan criss-crossed the country. He interviewed artists, workers, peasants, journalists and entrepreneurs, and his portraits of these people possess both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel.

Some of these individuals offer room for hope for China's future. Jiang Yanyong, a semi-retired surgeon who became convinced that the government was under-reporting Sars cases in the spring of 2003, sent e-mails to friends, hoping one of them would get the message to someone in the leadership or the foreign media. It wasn't long before he was contacted by US media and soon the story got out to the world. The party struggled for several days to maintain its cover-up, but suddenly caved: one day it was saying there were only 27 cases of Sars in Beijing; the next, it admitted that the count stood at 339 confirmed cases and 402 suspected ones.

As for Cheng Yizhong, the editor-in-chief of the Southern Metropolis Daily, he pioneered a new form of journalism in an environment where newspapers were routinely regarded by the Communist Party as propaganda channels: his paper not only started running consumer news and reviews of foreign films, but also articles that challenged the government. After breaking the news blackout on Sars, Cheng went on to run an expos of the "shourong" or "custody and repatriation" system.

It is the efforts of people like Cheng and Jiang, Pan concludes, that represent the best hope for genuine reform in China.