An Excerpt from a Review of Yu Hua's China in Ten Words

At the center of Yu Hua's China in Ten Words is a confrontation with the current economic state of the China. Poverty in China is in many ways as mysterious as the culture and three thousand year history of the country. Yu Hua informs us, “Consider, in contrast, the following figures: if you define the poverty line in China as a 2006 income of 600 yuan or less, then there are thirty million Chinese living in poverty; if you raise the threshold to 800 yuan, there are a full 100 million.” (Hua 160) Hua does not include the exchange rate, which during my visit to China in 2010 was about 6 yuan to the dollar. The exchange rate is important for we Americans who already know $600 dollars is to little money for a person to live off of in this country. In U.S. dollars the numbers Hua gives us translate to somewhere near $100-$120 a year. U.S. poverty income level for 2011 according to the Department of Health and Human Services is $10,890; while a November, 2010 article on China Brief listed Suzhou as having the highest income out of cities with the highest disposable income in China of 117,200 RMB (19,533 U.S. Dollars)(Devonshire-Ellis). Though the Chinese are doing well, the doing well has a series of clauses which if consistently studied may reveal contradictions the average poor American and African-American is at least familiar with. When Hua discusses disparity in his chapter by that name he is attempting to articulate the gap between the poor and the rich in China.

My relationship with China is, albeit, an idealistic one. In 1991, after returning to D.C. from a short stint in New York, I was directed to Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching, by a professor of mine. I can still visualize picking up the book from the shelf of a Walden books in Landover Mall, Prince George’s County, Maryland. The edition was a Penguin classic, translated and edited by Lin Yutang. Today, the copy is frayed. The binding has come off. Inserted within the book is the surface of the spine bearing Yutang and Lao Tzu’s name. Many years ago, it had a dust cover and when I opened it, these words stood out:

The Tao that can be told of
Is not the absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given
Are not absolute names.

The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the Mother of All Things.

Therefore:
Oftentimes, one strips onseself of passion
In order to see the Secret of Life;
Oftentimes, one regards life with passion,
In order to see its manifest forms.

These two (the Secret and its manifestations)
Are (in their nature) the same;
They are given different names
When they become manifest.

They may both be called the Cosmic Mystery:
Reaching from the Mystery into the Deeper Mystery
Is the Gate to the Secret of All life (Yutang 41-42)

Lao Tzu whose work is widely read and engaged throughout the world belongs to an ancient China which contrasts dramatically with the bustling vision of capitalism we are presented with in Ten Words; but that was the China which intoxicated me for the past twenty years. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution which both occur during the period of the People’s Revolution comes at the tail end of an extremely long civilization. Lao Tzu, Confucius and Sun Tzu, author of the Art of the War, have been studied in the West for quite some time. The Art of War in particular has gained prominence as a study guide for business people. China’s vast civilization still serves as a mystery for many of us; even the Chinese themselves, and more study needs to be done which views the current ascendancy in relationship to this cultural legacy. A Washington Post Report in October of 2011 entitled Global China: New Master of the World Economy presented the following quote by Henry Kissinger:

In much of our literature, China is now described as a rising country. No, Chinese thinks of China’s as a rising country in 18 of the last 20 centuries. In 18 of those centuries China was the most powerful country in the world. Then there was an aberration in the Chinese mind and experience of the 19th and early 20th century in which China did not catch up with the Industrial Revolution and was temporarily weak. The Chinese think they are reclaiming the place that has historically been China’s (Kissinger AA2).

There is an irony to all of this. One might imagine from Hua’s analysis that many of these older cultural elements have been dwarfed by the pursuit of capitalism or the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I would like to propose the idea that the Chinese Revolution, and the consequent failures of the Great Leap Forward are in fact extensions of the Chinese zeal for reconciling their great past with the modern world. The current ascendancy is simply a sign of the success.

The current state of China like America presents a series of perplexing problems to be resolved; but what other country has taken on the difficult past of reconciling the age of colonialism and imperialism and ended up anywhere near the top of the world’s economy list. What makes China so fascinating is the presence of its rich cultural tradition in spite of the cultural revolution. The danger and shortcomings are symptomatic of dramatic change. Hua asks, after explaining a radical change in the discussion of love and sexual intercourse among Chinese young people in the last twenty years:

What has made us move from one extreme to the other? Countless answers could probably be offered, but I doubt that such a cascade of responses will really provide a clear explanation. One point, however, is clear: when society undergoes a drastic shift, an extremely repressed era soon becomes a very lax one. It’s like being on a swing: the higher you soar on one side, the higher you rise on the other (146).

And while Hua makes few mentions of the old China or the long cultural past; here he sounds like Lao Tzu who said,

Stretch a bow to the very full,
And you will wish you had stopped in time.
Temper (a sword edge) to it’s very sharpest,
And the edge will not last long. (Yutang 79)

Like the great country we live in, China as an emerging power is cultivating it's own power to process and correct it's mistakes. Too often our view of the contradictions and struggles of other countries makes us think they are less like us, than like us. Our history of slavery, and the current imprisonment rate are enough to make us reconsider such a position. We are not with blaring contradictions to freedom, democracy, and world supremacy. If we are confused, we only need to read the news or study the history books.

Personally, my vantage point for studying opposites and their reversion is spawned and informed by Chinese culture. My excitement about the current trend of the country is how they will manage these difficult solutions. And in many ways my excitement is a selfish one. I just finished reading King Leopold’s Ghost, a very popular and depressing story of the beginning of the Congo’s encounter with the Western World up until the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Unfortunately, the Congo unlike China is still dominated by the consistent and pervasive problems left by a legacy of colonialism and is nowhere near the top of the world’s economy. I agree with Hua, China is far from perfect, and the current state of the country reveals a thousand contradictions which must be resolved; but who outside the Western World has traveled so far on that path.