MCLC: Tiger Head, Snake Tails review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Tiger Head, Snake Tails review
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (4/5/12):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/05/tiger-head-snake-tails-jonathan
-fenby-review

Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How It Got There and Where it Is
Heading by Jonathan Fenby - review
A wide-ranging study of the country's economic and political future
By Julia Lovell

China, Jonathan Fenby argues in his new book, "does everything on a scale
that breeds shock and awe". It has the largest monetary reserves in the
world, at more than $3.2 trillion; it consumes more than a third of the
world's supplies of key metals and half the world's cement. Every two and
a half minutes, Greenpeace estimates, it produces enough toxic ash to fill
one Olympic-size swimming pool. It is a nation of violent contrasts: it
may have as many as 600 dollar billionaires, as well as 300 million people
without access to clean drinking water. Despite the government's fixation
on national unity (its "tiger head"), Fenby asserts, it is a mass of
snake's tails. "There is not one China but a hundred, a thousand or a
million."

The extremes that characterise China mean that it is a remarkably hard
country to make sense of. The place is so large and diverse that you can
dig up reasonable bodies of evidence to back up wildly diverging
hypotheses about its future. In 2010, Robert Fogel, a Nobel prize-winning
economist, predicted in Foreign Policy magazine
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/123000000000000> that
China would end America's global dominance in 2040. By this point, he
proclaimed, "China will account for 40% of the world's GDP, dwarfing the
US (14%) as the world's largest economy". His article was paired with one
by Minxin Pei 
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/06/22/think_again_asias_rise?pa
ge=full>, a professional China-watcher who presented a more sober
perspective. Pei argued that an ageing population, environmental
degradation, inequality and corruption, and an opaque business culture
threaten to bring the country low long before it comes anywhere near
ruling the world.

Everyone agrees that China has grown extraordinarily, and relatively
easily, over the past three decades. Consensus on what will come next is
practically non-existent: perhaps the same rate of growth; or perhaps a
massive demographic slowdown, an over-inflated economy, environmental
meltdown and the strains of one-party rule will bring the whole edifice
down.

As a handbook on the confusing state of contemporary China ­ covering the
economic, political, social and historical essentials of the story ­ Tiger
Head, Snake Tails succeeds admirably. Fenby moves between the expansion of
transport and infrastructure that has unified the country logistically as
never before, the cities that are spearheading the country's economic
miracle, the poor working conditions and growing militancy of its
labourers, its diverse mass of enormous factories and cottage industries,
the push and pull between the centre and the provinces, between Han
Chinese, and Tibetans and Muslims. He takes time out to glance at Hong
Kong and Taiwan, both of which present intriguing Chinese alternatives to
the mainland political paradigm.

One of the big questions hanging over China's future concerns the
stability of its political system. Until now, analysts have observed, the
government has struck a successful tacit bargain with its people: tolerate
our authoritarian rule and we'll make you rich. Despite a phenomenal
expansion of economic opportunity, political freedoms lag far behind. The
Communist party is unflagging in its efforts to maintain its monopoly on
power: "dissidence", Fenby writes, "is equivalent to treason." Liu Xiaobo
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/liu-xiaobo>, winner of the 2011 Nobel
Peace prize, languishes in jail after petitioning the government for
democratic reform. Human rights lawyers are tortured and crippled. A
television talent show,Supergirl, that required viewers to vote for their
favourite contestant, was cancelled, at least partly because of fears that
audiences would become hooked on the idea of popular choice.

And yet beneath this rigid power structure, a barely controlled chaos
often prevails. Corruption is rife, and chancers taking advantage of
market reforms have generated scandal upon scandal: food safety, thefts of
the national heritage, horrifying rail and road accidents. One of Fenby's
most gripping chapters is on the "trust deficit" that clogs so much of
life in China. In 2008, the country was rocked by revelations that one of
its biggest baby-milk companies
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/sep/17/china.milk.infants> had
been adulterating its formula with ground melamine (essentially, powdered
worktop). Doctors are routinely bribed by patients anxious for
preferential treatment; medicines are often counterfeit. The architects of
a pyramid scheme made billions of yuan persuading gullible customers to
buy "medicinal ants" that needed feeding with egg yolk and cake every
three days. Political corruption is endemic. A couple of years ago, a
six-year-old girl ­ when asked by a television interviewer what she wanted
to be when she grew up ­ answered: "a corrupt official". One wealthy
smuggler flourished for almost two decades by handing out ten million yuan
a month in bribes to his high-level connections. As a result, China
seethes with injustices and public discontent.

There is a risk that a book summarising such a monumental story might get
bogged down in dry, statistical detail. Fenby avoids this through lively,
first-person reportage and vivid vignettes. Throughout the book, he takes
a serious-minded delight at the country's absurdities and grotesqueries:
the local government that required female civil servants to have
"symmetrical breasts"; the railway minister with 18 mistresses; the Daoist
priest who won a wealthy following by sitting underwater for two hours
without breathing ("it later transpired that he was encased in a glass box
with a supply of oxygen").

No single book could ever describe the full complexity of contemporary
China, and Fenby has made tough but judicious decisions about what to
leave out. Perhaps the most regrettable omission, though, is the neglect
of Chinese culture. Although the pace of life in China can often seem too
frenetic to permit anyone to settle down long enough to write, film or
paint anything, its flourishing literary, cinema and art scenes offer
fragmentary but intensely individual insights into this confounding
country ­ a welcome counterbalance to the big headline stories about
industry, GDP, diplomacy and political succession. But as a one-stop guide
to political and economic realities in China today, Tiger Head, Snake
Tails is fast-moving, informed and illuminating.

€ Julia Lovell's The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China is
published by Picador.