Tide Players

"Yes, she writes a bit about, for instance, Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, who are the property developers behind the Soho China chain. What’s interesting is that Jianying Zha is both an insider and an outsider. She’s of Chinese descent; she was raised in China, and then moved to the US around college. So she’s gone back and forth ever since and has real relationships with a lot of the people who are making big changes in China – whether culturally or financially. She’s able to write with real intimacy and understanding about why people made the kind of choices they made. But she is ultimately also morally candid. She’s an outsider, and so, for instance, in the case of her brother, she asks very hard questions about whether being a dissident in China has the kind of impact that her brother imagines it does, and whether it was worth the nine-year sacrifice. In the end she’s hugely admiring of him on one level, and also quite struck by the tragedy of his experience, that he hasn’t had nearly the impact that he thought he would. It’s true, almost nobody in China has heard of him, except for the very small group of people around him. I return to that problem over and over again. Should that be the verdict on somebody’s life? I don’t think so. On the other hand, when you look at history, it’s very often the logically indefensible acts of people who are possessed by an idea that create history. That’s one of the reasons I like the book, it balances people like him against people who are more or less ruthlessly practical like these property developers who figured out a loophole in the system years ago. They figured out the need in China for a certain kind of low-cost, ostensibly modern architecture and have ridden that wave to enormous financial success. Put these two stories side by side and you get a very complete picture of the place. Yes, it’s all over Beijing now – for better or for worse. And the property developers as a class loom large in the Chinese consciousness these days, because property developers have become the face of the gap between the rich and the poor and issues about justice and equity which are so dominant in the Chinese conversation. Rightly or wrongly, property developers have really become an icon of this era in China’s economic story. When you come to China, it makes a deep impression on you that can also be misleading. On the one hand, we are struck by the incredibly fast and impressive development that’s happened here. That’s everywhere and it’s in some ways typified by developments like Soho. But you only get a certain impression of a country by seeing what it makes available to you at first sight. If you don’t push on any doors that are closed, if you don’t take the time or have the interest, to find out what it is that a country or a community seeks to shield from view, then you’re only seeing one part of it. This is an enduring struggle for journalists in writing about China. Because if you dwell only on the dissidents and the terrible stories of villainy out in the woolliest corners of the provinces, then you’re really only giving a negative impression of China. But if you dwell only on the incredible new buildings and new airports and the fact that middle-class Chinese are now grooming their dogs at the cost of the GNP of some small African republic, that gives a totally distorted picture of the country as well. It’s really only the latter that’s available to you at first sight. As a responsible visitor, I’ve always felt I need to push on doors that are not being opened to me. Of course if you’re only visiting for a short time it’s harder to do that – but you can do it by reading and by taking the time to educate yourself. Yes, if you’re online overseas you’re able to read all sorts of things that your average Chinese citizen cannot read. So use the opportunity! It’s sort of exciting and it really does give depth to the experience. Professor Yasheng Huang, whose book I’ve also recommended, has this funny line he told me once about what he calls Airportology. It’s his version of the worst kind of writing about China (or India for that matter), which is when you come to a new country and you step through this spectacularly beautiful new airport, which China now has – built by Norman Foster. And you come away with the illusion that that is an indicator of the country’s overall economic, political and spiritual health. And it’s not. It’s an airport. It tells you something important about the level of infrastructure, but there are many other ways to measure the performance of a country, which are not as simplistic. That made a big deep impression on me."