Simplifying the Chinese miracle

Book review of 'Becoming China: The Story Behind the State'

Becoming China

The Story Behind the State

Jeanne-Marie Gescher

Bloombury

784 pages; Rs 799

As China’s global profile appears to expand relentlessly and impacts on the destinies of nations, far and near, big and small, a new genre of guidebooks to figuring out China and its policies — what one may call “China Made Easy’ books — has begun to emerge in increasing profusion. Jeanne-Marie Gescher’s  Becoming China at over 700 pages, is several guidebooks packed into one but by the time one has patiently ploughed through to the end, there are few insights which could frame a new perspective on what remains a rather opaque and poorly understood country.

Ms Gescher makes the valid observation that in understanding present-day China one must be familiar with its rich 5,000-year of unbroken if tumultuous history. There are deeply ingrained cultural and psychological attributes that provide a template for understanding Chinese behaviour. Ms Gescher has provided a broad sweep of this history and how it has shaped China’s world view. But this is hardly original.

Her historical narrative intends to tell “The Story Behind the State.” Some of her observations echo those of other scholars. For example, the Chinese concept of order based on a tacit acceptance of hierarchy as an organising principle. There is the perennial dialectic between the state’s demand for conformity and the constant attempt by people to break out of the constraints imposed on them. Because of a long and complex history and a language that lends itself easily to multiple layers of meaning, the Chinese view of the world is framed through a contextualising process in which political, philosophical, ethical and even scientific principles are intertwined in what Ms Gescher calls “the fabric of life.” According to her most Western analysis of developments in China lose the plot because they look at different components of the Chinese reality, never the whole picture and lose the sense of the “fabric.”

But I must confess that after reading the book, I did not feel better equipped to understand Chinese state behaviour though I became much better informed of the many strands that constitute the Chinese reality today. Some of the parallels drawn between contemporary events and history appear forced. There is a certain romanticisation of Chinese civilisational attributes and less focus on the real departures that China has made in its embrace of modern industrial development. The Chinese dream put forward by President Xi Jinping is no more than a very modern and familiar quest for power and influence but cloaked in selective historical imagery. Trying to deconstruct the Chinese mystery, Ms Gescher ends up in being enthralled by it. 

In her preface she says, “The Chinese people were not the first to have settled as a civilisation, but the fact that they can look back across a continuum of 5,000 years means that they have a 5,000-year perspective on what I expect to be the greatest question of our time: What does it mean to be human in the world of the state?”

This is ascribing excessive value to Chinese historical experience, which at the end of the day has become a powerful modern state not by being more Chinese but rather by embracing the modernising experience of the West. The Chinese state today may have echoes of the centralised empires of the past but its main features are that of a Leninist one-party state. Its authoritarian instincts may hark back to the templates of the past but this is hardly unique to China nor does it have a special quality that makes it somewhat more noble than the less subtle versions we see today. 

One may agree with Ms Gescher that the Chinese experience will have lessons for the rest of the world. It would have been more interesting to analyse how the rapid modernisation of China is impacting its traditional culture and attitudes. What, for example, is the difference between the modernisation of Japan, also heir to a Sinic culture, during the Meiji restoration and the later Chinese version? China’s experience in dealing with issues of environmental pollution and ecological degradation will also have lessons for the rest of the world but so far these lessons have been negative. How China deals with relations between the Han majority and major ethnic groups like the Tibetans and the Uighurs will be of interest to a world that is becoming more diverse and congested. 

Ms Gescher says, “The question of what it means to be Chinese will become a metaphor for the question of what it means to be human in the world of states.” But being Chinese has so far been equated to being Han, and China has been unable to assimilate its major ethnic groups in a more inclusive identity. Would this really be an example for the rest of the world? One would hope not.

One should commend the immense research and scholarship that has obviously gone into the writing of this monumental work. It is a good introduction to Chinese history and culture and useful in tracing the threads of current Chinese state behaviour to templates of the past. But the very rich complexity of this history should lead to more nuanced conclusions than is on offer here.
 

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary and is currently senior fellow, CPR