Chings

Dick Wilson

• Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China by Paul Theroux
  Hamish Hamilton, 494 pp, £14.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 241 12547 2
• Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform by Orville Schell
  Pantheon, 384 pp, $19.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 394 56829 X
• The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa by Philip Snow
  Weidenfeld, 250 pp, £14.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 297 79081 1
• Ancestors: Nine Hundred Years in the Life of a Chinese Family by Frank Ching
  Harrap, 528 pp, £12.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 245 54675 8

The idea of China is elusive. Not only was its civilisation different from those that shaped the West, but it flowed earlier and more continuously – and mutual contact was tenuous. The picture of China that we carry in our heads is a misleading collage. It builds first on the exaggerated respect paid to Chinese institutions by the French Enlightenment in the 18th century, and is then overlaid by the risible images of China’s feeble response to Western imperialism in the 19th century, and now in the 20th century by the figure of that extraordinary half-god, half-demon, Mao Zedong. Since much of Chinese life today bears no obvious relation to these images, we find it difficult to view it for what it is, instinctively reaching back instead to the things we think we know. As Paul Theroux remarks in Riding the Iron Rooster, ‘China exists so distinctly in people’s minds that it is hard to shake the fantasy loose and see the real China.’