Jan Wong’s China (Jan Wong, 1999)

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ISBN 1-8635-9143-5

‘To the west, China seems remote. But just as faxes, phones and the Internet have brought the outside world to China, the world’s most populous country is at our doorstep, too. Whatever happens there will affect us sooner than we think. So it matters that China has 650 million little emperors. It matters that China is searching for a spiritual glue to hold itself together. And it matters whether China evolves peacefully and democratically, or disintegrates into chaos.’ - p. 317

Jan Wong is an interesting character. A Canadian-born ethnic Chinese, she went through the left-wing political phase which most of us experience to some extent during our student days, only - unlike us - the young Wong had the courage of her convictions: she set off for China and joined Mao’s revolution. In due course the idealism wore off and the reality, and disillusionment, set in. These experiences are documented in her book, Red China Blues, and occasional references reappear in Jan Wong’s China.

Later she became the Beijing correspondent for the Globe and Mail, holding the position from 1988 to 1994. Then, in 1999, on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, Wong returned to revisit some old ground and observe the new China. She pulls no punches:

‘Xenophobia lurked in the breast of every red-blooded Chinese. In May, 1999, authorities helped fan the flames of anti-Western sentiment by initially reporting only the NATO bombing raids on Yugoslavia, without disclosing Belgrade’s massacres of of its ethnic Albanian minority. When Clinton apologised three days in a row for what he called a “mistake,” the Chinese media did not report that until the third day - and buried the news on the inside pages of the People’s Daily.

‘... The foreign ministry demanded an apology to the families of the victims, a thorough investigation and severe punishment of those responsible. Commenting on Canadian television, I remarked that the government demanding this was the same one that unleashed the army on its own citizens. And instead of just three Chinese dead, it had killed hundreds, possibly thousands. Ten years after the Tiananmen Massacre, there has never been an apology to those victims, I noted, nor any investigation or punishment, severe or otherwise, of those responsible.

‘The next day at work, I was deluged with angry phone calls.... [One] woman said I was wrong to link the deaths in Tiananmen with those killed by NATO. “It’s like when you kill someone in your own family”, she said. “Then someone on the outside kills someone in your family. How can you compare the two?”

‘“How can you not?” I said.’ - pp. 130-131

But of course it is easy for those of us in the comfortable west to take pot-shots at the Chinese government. Their task is vastly more formidable than we can ever realise; all of our experience simply dooms us to under-estimate their difficulties, and, uniquely in my experience of China commentators, Wong well understands this. For example:

‘In Gansu, about 2,000 retarded babies were born each year, many to retarded parents. In a place without a single children’s hospital, where one in five children didn’t attend school, there were zero services for these children. In the late 1980s, Gansu passed China’s first eugenics law. Mentally retarded people were prohibited from bearing children.... To the outside world, the law reeked of the Third Reich. ... But when I saw the poverty and suffering in Gansu, forcible sterilization seemed more humane than doing nothing. Children of mentally retarded parents in Gansu sometimes starved to death from neglect.’ – p. 63

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

This book collects the good, the bad, and the ugly and, though I won’t claim to agree with every word, handles the subject with a marvellous blend of sensitivity and objectivity.

Recommendation: Extraordinarily readable; highly recommended. Mums are advised to skip pages 304 to 306.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish paperback. Each chapter is introduced with one or two small photographs.

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Jan Wong’s China (Jan Wong, 1999)

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