Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004
pages 9-10 | 3077 words
Spreading Tinder over Dry Scrub
John Gittings
- One China, Many Paths edited by Wang Chaohua
Verso, 368 pp, £20.00, November 2003, ISBN 1 85984 537 1
The newsagent at the end of my lane in Shanghai always sold out of Nanfang Zhoumo (‘Southern Weekend’) within hours. For those reporting on China, this famous – and to the Communist Party leadership, maddening – investigative weekly published in Guangzhou was, and still is, essential reading. One week it might contain a serious discussion on the death penalty, the next a critique of the restrictions imposed on migrant workers, or an exposé of the penetration of the China market by US agribusiness. None of these topics is explicitly forbidden, but they are all sensitive subjects that the Communist Party prefers not to air.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 14 · 22 July 2004
From Xiaomai Feng
John Gittings, in his account of One China, Many Paths (LRB, 8 July), errs on three basic points. He Qinglian is not 'the only contributor to the volume who has been forced to leave China because of her views'. Its editor, Wang Chaohua, was one of the 21 most wanted students by the government after the Tiananmen massacre, and is an exile. So too is Wang Dan, twice imprisoned for his role in the same events, and her interlocutor in a round-table on the upheaval of 1989 that ends the book. Nor is it the case, as he suggests, that – either in China or in the book – 'the intellectual debate has not so far been an exploration of Many Paths,' but simply an echo of 'Deng's de facto capitalism'. Deng's capitalism is clearly rejected by nearly all the contributors to the book, among whom can also be found sympathetic views both of the Chinese Revolution and of socialism, as well as sharp critics of these. Finally, it is wrong to say that the question 'what will happen to the Communist Party?' remains unasked in the book.
Xiaomai Feng
Cambridge
Vol. 26 No. 15 · 5 August 2004
From John Gittings
Feng Xiaomai is quite right (Letters, 22 July); my apologies to Wang Chaohua and Wang Dan, forced into jail and/or exile after 1989, whose dissident roles are well known and admired. I meant to say that He Qinglian is the only intellectual in more recent years to have been forced out of China for her views. However, Feng misunderstands my point about the debate in One China, Many Paths to which all three contribute. I do not regard this debate as an 'echo' of Deng's capitalism, but it has to operate within the context of a policy that has prevailed. Hardly anyone now expects the Communist Party to collapse – as many did after Tiananmen – or the dominant economic system to be radically changed. The argument is over evolution and reform. This does not diminish the importance of a book which, as I wrote, illustrates 'the growing diversity of Chinese intellectual thought'.
John Gittings
Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire
