China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

Preface

xi Preface Since first peering into the Chinese looking glass from a Hong Kong hilltop in 1968, during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, I have spent my academic career puzzling over the ever-changing political landscape of contemporary China. Over that forty-year span I have witnessed the death throes of radical Maoism, the birth contractions of the post-Mao reform era, the emotional upheavals of the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations (and subsequent bloody repression), and the rise—some say peaceful , some not—of a globalized, marketized Chinese economic powerhouse. In an effort to make sense of these momentous changes, I have written several books and made more than three dozen trips to China, traveling to twenty-three of its twenty-seven provinces, lecturing at fourteen of its universities, and speaking with thousands of Chinese people, from senior Politburo leaders to ordinary peasants and workers. Having been deeply immersed in the study of Chinese politics for such a long time, my reactions to what I have seen and heard have been complex, varied, and sometimes quite intense. By inclination neither a credulous “panda hugger” nor a cynical China basher, I have at times been deeply moved and inspired by what I have witnessed in China; at other times I have been just as deeply dismayed and appalled. Throughout my career I have struggled to maintain a certain professional distance and detachment from my object of study. Keeping China at arm’s length has not been easy. Objectivity is an elusive grail, and facts do not always—or often—speak for themselves. Events like the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen massacre strain one’s capacity for dispas- xii preface sionate analysis. Personal sentiments and emotions seep in unannounced, subjectively skewing and coloring one’s perceptions. In writing this book, focusing on China’s convoluted journey from Maoism to modernity, I have discarded my customary impersonal, scholarly mode of presentation. Gathering together a wide variety of previously undisclosed personal experiences, observations, impressions, and anecdotes , I have endeavored to weave these into an accessible, user-friendly guide to China’s post-Mao development. This is China up close and personal , a record of one man’s intellectual and emotional odyssey—including a fair number of embarrassing missteps—through the ever-changing, ever-fascinating landscape of a renascent, reinvented Middle Kingdom. The book is written largely, but not entirely, in the first-person singular. Its point of view shifts periodically from the perspective of the watcher to that of the watched—and back again. And there are only two solitary footnotes in its three hundred pages of text. Unable to shed completely the habits of a lifetime, however, I have appended at the end of the book a set of supplemental notes keyed to the narrative content of each individual chapter . The payoff for this dual sacrifice of clinical detachment and meticulous documentation is, I hope, a gain in the depth, texture, and spontaneity that come from authentic, unsanitized personal reflection and introspection, grounded in a lifetime of observation and experience. My indebtedness to colleagues and friends who contributed to shaping this enterprise—some consciously, some not—is enormous. First, to my University of California mentors, Robert A. Scalapino, Chalmers Johnson, and the late H. Arthur Steiner, I owe the inspiration that kindled a lifetime of fascination with Chinese politics. The idea for this particular book grew out of a suggestion by Barbara Pillsbury, who several years ago urged me to record some of my more amusing China-watching adventures. Once I started down that road, I found it hard to stop. Most of the writing was done during a magical sabbatical year spent in the south of France, dans l’ambiance enchantée de la Provence, where I enjoyed the gracious hospitality of Alain and Josette Hontanx. Along the way, several people read portions of the manuscript, providing critical feedback, making timely corrections to my flawed memory of events that transpired long ago, and generally forcing me to write more lively, candid, and compelling prose. Among those who helped to improve the manuscript (though they bear no responsibility for its remaining flaws) are Jan preface xiii Berris, Roger Detels, John Dolfin, Irv Drasnin, Steve Fitzgerald, Bruce Gilley , Tom Gold, Merle Goldman, Harry Harding, Joyce Kallgren, Bob Kapp, Perry Link, Barbara Pillsbury, Sidney Rittenberg, Michael Ross, Dorothy Solinger, Kevin Stuart, Fred Teiwes, Anne Thurston, Marc Trachtenberg, Andy Walder, and Chaohua Wang. My agent...