Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land ed. by Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (review)

This volume collects fifteen essays on contemporary Chinese society written by journalists and scholars well-known in their respective fields. As indicated by the subtitle, the main motif is change. China, we are told, is changing, and changing so fast that its people struggle to keep up. Lives are unceasingly transformed by powerful forces; identities are taken on only to be shed and replaced. This heady brew of individual repositioning and risk-taking has, in turn, produced a nation that is remarkably diverse. Society is flourishing; the state, retreating. Accordingly, each of the essays describes a China in which individual decisions about belief, style, and self-expression are of central importance to understanding contemporary and future realities.

So what have ordinary citizens of the People's Republic of China—the "characters" referenced by the title's only mildly distracting pun—chosen to make of their newfound freedoms? In the first section of essays, "Doubters and Believers," we learn that they have become Daoists, neoconservatives, and impetuous young dreamers. In the next section, "Past and Present," the reader encounters impoverished urbanites, casualties of the Cultural Revolution, and transnational Buddhist communities torn by Cold War divides. "Hustlers and Entrepreneurs" introduces rural migrants, aspiring automobile industry change agents, and artists and online gamers for hire. "Rebels and Reformers" focuses on a charismatic Uyghur educator, an independent geologist, and a law professor. "Teachers and Pupils" gives us expatriate school children, an ambivalent Young Pioneer and her parents, and two passionate guitarists. Each essay combines interviewing with more general background that connects individual narratives to larger trends. Taken as a whole, these fifteen stories offer confirmation that China is changing, and that differences within China are multiplying. When compared with conventional scholarly understandings of the Mao years, they suggest that Chinese society is now a society of more: more belief systems, more economic opportunities, more inequalities, more complexity, more aspiration, and more uncertainty.

Of course, much the same could be said of post-Cold War societies generally, which is not to argue that past decades were so unlike the present, but rather that is has become accepted to see them this way. China is still a de facto single-party state. Its economy is still state-dominated. Its society is still roiled by periodic ideological and anti-corruption campaigns, and political dissidents are arrested (though in fewer numbers) and their families harassed. Surveillance and information controls are pervasive, and may be tightening further. Ethnic inequalities define state policy and security concerns along the western frontier. Political patronage and social advancement remain profoundly intertwined. To what extent, asks the skeptic, does the end of the Mao Zedong era really mark a historical dividing line? In the volume's brief afterword, it is suggested that China's twenty-first century present resembles the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution (as if industrialization were not one of the main stories of the Mao years) but such juxtapositions, while certainly intriguing, are not sustained by evidence or analysis. A more convincing case could be made that new technologies and U.S.-driven globalization, as well as anti-U.S. nationalism, are among the more notable changes reshaping social relations in China today. Indeed, these are the themes which emerge from several of the more perceptive essays, and they provide a compelling, even original, supplement to the volume's main thesis that post-Mao China can be easily distinguished from its Maoist predecessor by virtue of a bigger GDP and kinder, gentler Communist Party.

Another major change, noted by Pankaj Mishra in the volume's provocative foreword, is simply that journalists and scholars have more access to China than at any other time in the PRC's history. By collecting contributions from multiple luminaries of the broader China-watching community, and pairing these with well-honed pieces written by scholars and insightful...