China in Ten Words

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• The pain that the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.
• It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.
• “We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.”* Such were the words of the Confucian philosopher Mencius, citing six worthies in antiquity who suffered untold hardship before achieving greatness. Man is bound to make mistakes, he believed, and it is in the unceasing correction of his errors that human progress lies.
• Politics, history, society, and culture, one’s memories and emotions, desires and secrets—all reverberate there. Daily life is a veritable forest and, as the Chinese saying goes, “Where woods grow deep, you’ll find every kind of bird.”
• In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king.
• Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole.
• We encounter all kinds of words in the course of our lives, and some we understand at first glance and others we may rub shoulders with but never fully understand. “The people” belongs in that second category. It’s one of the first phrases I learned to read and write, and it has clung to me in my travels through life, constantly appearing before my eyes and sounding in my ears. But it did not truly penetrate my inner being until my thirtieth year, when an experience late one night finally allowed me to understand the term in all its potency. It was only when I had a real-life encounter with it—disengaged from all linguistic, sociological, or anthropological theories and definitions—that I could tell myself: “the people” is not an empty phrase, because I have seen it in the flesh, its heart thumping.
  • In America it feels like we have lost our sense of “the people.”
• You can imagine people’s reaction: what can it mean when the great leader Chairman Mao has gone so far as to write a big-character poster? It can mean only one thing—that Chairman Mao is in the same boat as ordinary people like themselves!
• I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have a leader—all we have is a leadership.
• China’s model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption—all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society.
• China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So in China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict.
• when the world is ailing, revolutionary impulses are stirred, just as when the body is ailing, inflammation ensues.
• So I had no choice but to leave the house and, like a man with a rumbling stomach on a search for food, I went off on a hunt for books.
• Every night when I went to bed and turned off the light, my eyes would blink as I entered the world of imagination, creating endings to those stories that stirred me so deeply tears would run down my face. It was, I realize now, good training for things to come, and I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.
• Having lived so long in a reading famine, we found it a matchless pleasure just to feast our eyes on the new covers of these classics. Some generously held the books up to our noses and let us sniff their subtle, inky smell. For me that odor was a heady scent.
• “Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it’s only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me.”
• If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.
• “To recall one’s past life,” Martial wrote, “is to relive it.”
• But in one respect the two genres are much the same: writing big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution and keeping a blog today are both designed to assert the value of one’s own existence.
• Years later young people often ask, “How does one become a writer?” My answer is always simply: “By writing.” Writing is like experience: if you don’t experience things, then you won’t understand life; and if you don’t write, then you won’t know what you’re capable of creating.
• A basic image of the world is planted deep in your mind, and then, like a document in a copy machine, it keeps being reprinted again and again throughout your formative years. Once you reach adulthood, whether you’re successful or not, whatever you accomplish can only partially revise that most basic image; it will never be entirely transformed. Naturally some revise the image more and some revise it less.
• Lu Xun continued with typical acerbity: Money is an unseemly topic that may well be deplored by gentlemen of lofty principle. But I tend to think that people’s views differ not only between one day and the next but also before and after meals. When people admit that money is necessary to feed oneself but still insist on its vulgarity, then one can safely predict that they still have some undigested fish or meat in their systems. They’d sing a different tune, I’m sure, if you made them go hungry for a day.
• It was as simple as that: his position on the distance between the sun and the earth, which he had defended to the hilt for twelve months flat, collapsed in ruins at once before my fictitious Lu Xun. In the days that followed he was pensive and subdued, tasting alone the bitter flavor of defeat.
• Ignorance engendered mystery, and mystery became allure, triggering my creative instincts.
• “Mr. Lu Xun says” was really just a way of jumping on the bandwagon.
• The fate of Lu Xun in China—going from being an author to being a catchphrase and then back again—reflects the fate of China itself, and in Lu Xun we can trace the zigzags of history and detect the imprints of our social upheavals.
• I feel that for a reader to truly encounter an author sometimes depends on finding the right moment.
• When a writer is reduced to a catchphrase, he is bound to be the worse for it.
• Behind all the glorious statistics in China today, crises tend to lurk. The loans that Chinese universities have relied on to fund their enrollment expansion already exceed 200 billion yuan. This staggering debt is likely to become another fiasco for China’s commercial banks, because Chinese universities lack the wherewithal to repay their loans.
• Our economic miracle—or should we say, the economic gain in which we so revel—relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments, for an administrative order on a piece of paper is all that’s required to implement drastic change. The method may be simple and crude, but the results in terms of economic development are instantaneous. That is why I say it is the lack of political transparency that has facilitated China’s breakneck growth.
• Mao offered a memorable definition of what revolution means, and during the Cultural Revolution we could recite it backward. It went like this: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence.†
• What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.
• When I realized how this teacher was savoring the other’s downfall, I was struck with horror, for all along I had been so sure they were best friends. Later I would always shudder when I saw teachers in the playground engaged in seemingly intimate conversation. Even the gruesome street battles didn’t frighten me as much as that false veneer of camaraderie.
• “The weak fear the strong,” the Chinese saying goes, “the strong fear the violent, and the violent fear the reckless.”
• In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era, whereas today’s society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong’s remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. “We should support whatever the enemy opposes,” he said, “and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right; nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might sometimes be wrong.
• Decades later we still talk endlessly about disparities, but no longer are they vacuous ideological disparities. Today they are real, down-to-earth social disparities; gaps between rich and poor, city and village; differences between regions; inequalities in development, income level, and allocation; and so on. Huge social disparities are bound to trigger mass protests and individual acts of resistance. When we beat that young peasant with bricks, he never once struck back with his fist; now when an official—without using any violence, just doing his job, enforcing regulations—simply confiscates a bicycle cart and the things on it, he is stabbed to death by the hawker. Why is this? I think it is because when “disparity” moves from narrow to broad, from empty to real, it demonstrates how widespread are China’s problems, how intense its contradictions.
• if you define the poverty line in China as a 2006 income of 600 yuan or less, then there are 30 million Chinese living in poverty; if you raise the threshold to 800 yuan, there are a full 100 million. When I pointed this out at a talk in Vancouver in 2009, a Chinese student rose to his feet. “Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness,” he objected. This remark made me shudder, for it is not just a single student’s view; a substantial number of people in China today would take a similar line. Surrounded by images of China’s growing prosperity, they have not the slightest inclination to concern themselves with the hundred million who still struggle in almost unimaginable poverty.
• At that time “grass roots” in Chinese simply meant “roots of grass,” but within a few years we imported from English a new meaning, and in China “grassroots” has come to be used in a broad sense to denote disadvantaged classes that operate at some remove from the mainstream and the orthodox.
• When this millionaire Garbage King was interviewed, he struck a modest, unassuming pose. How had he discovered this business opportunity? the reporter wondered. “I just did the things nobody else was willing to do,” he replied. This straightforward answer reveals a secret about China’s economic miracle. Chinese people today, inspired by a fearless grassroots spirit, have propelled the economy forward by seizing every possible opportunity.
• The same goes for paper napkins, socks, and cigarette lighters: however humble such products may be, the minute they claim a significant market share, they are perfectly capable of becoming an empire of wealth.
• “The barefoot do not fear the shod,” the Chinese say, or as Marx put it, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, and they have a world to win.”
• After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while the economy began breakneck development. Because of this paradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on the other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.
• The social fabric of China today is shaped by a bizarre mixture of elements, for the beautiful and the ugly, the progressive and the backward, the serious and the ridiculous, are constantly rubbing shoulders with each other. The copycat phenomenon is like this too, revealing society’s progress but also its regression. When health is impaired, inflammation ensues, and the copycat trend is a sign of something awry in China’s social tissue. Inflammation fights infection, but it may also lead to swelling, pustules, ulcers, and rot.
• In economic terms, leverage is a monetary policy, confined to profit-and-loss risk management issues; in capital markets it simply makes it possible to clinch large deals with a relatively small outlay—as the Chinese expression goes, “using four ounces to shift a thousand pounds,” or as Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” But now we clever Chinese have found a place for leverage in common and everyday bamboozling. Bamboozling is everywhere, and so leverage is everywhere, too.
  • #Storytelling
• “The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears”—that famous Great Leap Forward mantra—turns out to be an apt description of bamboozlement’s essential nature. Its logic is confirmed by another Chinese homily: “The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating.”
• Landmarks are differentiated with incongruous names like Black Sister Toothpaste Street, Sixth Sense Condom Bridge, Sanlu Milk Powder Square, and AB Underwear District—every brand in China leaving its mark on the city landscape, from things you eat and wear and use, to furniture and automobiles, lovemaking accessories and paraphernalia for new parents.