China in Ten Words [Hardcover]

China is a paradox: hard-charging capitalist country and communist stronghold. There's a Wild West mentality now, with every man, woman, and child for him or herself, and at the same time still tied closely to the one-party state, a political system that brooks no dissent. Yu Hua, a best-selling novelist in China, dissects his country through the prism of his own life in China in Ten Words, and sees the contradictions as having more in common with the country's past than the average outside observer would see. It's obviously an uncomfortable truth: his book cannot be published in China, even though he lives in Beijing and continues to be popular as a novelist.

Hua centers his argument around ten themes, his ten words. They range from, at the beginning of the book, "people" and "leader" to the two final words, "copycat" and "bamboozle." "People" is a signal word in modern China: after all, it's officially the People's Republic of China. But "the people," when Yu Hua was growing up (he was born in 1960, during the disastrous Great Leap Forward) had a very different meaning than it does now. He dwells on what he considers the major turning point for China: the role of the Chinese people in the Tiananmen Square in 1989, and how, once that movement for political freedom was crushed, economic freedom was the only freedom available.

What Hua shows again and again, often through personal anecdotes from his childhood and news accounts of contemporary times, are the startling parallels between the Maoist past and the capitalist present. Many of his stories revolve around the Cultural Revolution, which started when he was six, and only petered out in his later teenage years. It was a time of denigration of past values ("to rebel is justified," Mao told them repeatedly): teachers were scorned; tradition was viewed with deep suspicion; everyone, even family members, were suspect. We've read many accounts of communities turning on themselves during this period, of scores being settled brutally.

What's revealing is how the same themes repeat now, as the profit motive makes people treat their fellow Chinese without compunction (think of the horrific working conditions for the former peasants making our iPhones). Corruption is endemic; cynicism is the rule. And just as in the Cultural Revolution, those who rise quickly to the top of the heap are often quickly swept away, and lose everything.

"Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That's because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development," he writes.

That's made very clear in the final chapters. It's open season now for copycats: nothing is sacred, from the products people buy to quotes in the newspaper--often completely made up, shamelessly. Even Mao: the Great Helmsman inspires an impersonation contest held on national TV: the winner is a woman. Hua wonders, upon seeing one of his pirated books for sale on the sidewalk near his home, when someone else will start publishing as Hua.

It's all part of the big bamboozle, or huyou. Hua details one corrupt practice after another, often citing very recent examples that he's heard of or read about. It's not just businessmen on the make; the bamboozle permeates society. And, Hua says, all this bamboozling leads to no good end: we are heir to our actions. His is a warning to China, but the fact that his book won't be read there--at least, not officially--is not a good sign that the country will come to terms with the structural weakness in its foundation.

China in Ten Words is a very personal book, and eminently readable. As a novelist, Hua knows how to tell stories, and it is those stories that pack much more of a punch than a merely political or historical tome might have. Hua tells us how he got started as a writer: being part of the writers' union seemed a lot cushier than his job as a 21-year-old high-school educated dentist, yanking teeth eight hours a day in a small, nowheresville town.

With persistence and determination he makes the leap to the better life, and at the same time, he's telling us about how China has changed: it used to be you were told where you'd work, and that would be that. In other words, some of the changes China has undergone are certainly positive (millions no longer in dire poverty, for starters). The question is, can the country resolve its inherent contradictions without the upheaval it's historically put itself through? Hua doesn't have the answer, but he's not optimistic.

I have just read the review on the TIME magazine on this book and looking forward to read the book itself, but in the meantime I share the review, if this is allowed by Amazon...

"Has China really changed so much since it moved from "Mao Zedong's monochrome era" to Deng Xiaoping's "polychrome era of economics above all"? Answering his own question in China in Ten Words, author Yu Hua suggests that one kind of madness has simply been replaced with another. New airports and highways are announced in wild numbers today, just as during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) crazily inflated harvest figures led to more than 8 million people dying of hunger in Sichuan province alone. The feast-or-famine cycles, the brutality, the grand talk of giving poor citizens better lives have, he says, "simply donned a different costume."

Yu is a seasoned novelist, with such dissident explosions as To Live (1992) and Brothers (2005) under his belt. His latest work is a discursively simple series of essays explaining his country's recent history through 10 central terms -- from people and leader to copycat and bamboozle. Yu uses them to cut back and forth between China today and the China he grew up in. The violence is a constant. As a boy, the author and his friends mugged strangers for their oil coupons. Today, as he describes in the chapter "Revolution," shareholders "punch and kick, spit and curse, smash chairs and break cups" in order to grab control of companies.
(See all-TIME 100 best and most influential nonfiction books.)

What has changed, according to Yu, is the intensity of moral degradation. The heart of his outrage comes from his sense that "since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole." In 2004, he notes, 10 million people went to Beijing seeking redress for injustices in their home districts, only to be harried by police and forced to sleep rough. As he puts it, with typical directness: "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."

Such charges are not new, of course. Neither are rending descriptions of life in the 1970s, which can be found in novels like The Vagrants, by Yu's younger, U.S.-based contemporary Yiyun Li. But while her book is a catalog of horrors, Yu's ability to find absurdity in sorrow can make the sorrow even harder to bear. Citizens of the second largest economy in the world rank 100th, he points out, in per capita income. China may soon become the planet's largest consumer of luxury goods, but many parents do not have enough to pay for a doctor's visit, or banana, for their children. Newspapers brag (falsely) that Bill Gates is going to lease a luxury apartment in Beijing -- and yet this paradise is a place where impoverished peasants must pay bribes for the privilege of selling their own blood to vendors supplying local hospitals.
(See the all-TIME 100 novels.)

Content to let reality indict itself, Yu describes sex-industry entrepreneurs running their brothels on Communist Party principles (complete with "self-criticism sessions"). He writes of a township in southwest China that changes its housing laws to favor newlyweds -- prompting almost 95% of its households to go through fake divorces and then false new marriages. Though the details sound casual, they pack an almost allegorical force: the first person to buy a 100 million-yuan ($16 million) apartment in one city, Yu notes, was one of the aforementioned blood dealers -- a "blood chief," who was said to have "commanded the loyalty of a hundred thousand" lesser vendors.

It's not easy to distill the history of 1.3 billion people across half a century into stories even a fifth-grader could understand. But Yu has made a game attempt. In the chapter "People," he describes how briefly, in 1989, the "people" really did assert their freedom as communist propaganda had promised. But now, "''the people' has become a shell company." Caustic and difficult to forget, China in Ten Words is a people's-eye view of a world in which the people have little place."