From: unregistered@newcastle.ac.uk (sundaram)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: FWD: CND Books and Journals Review, Sept. 14, 1992
Date: 15 Sep 92 11:05:29 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.china
Organization: Cadcomp graphics

In article <BuLust.IA@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>, xiong@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Bo
Xiong) wrote:
> 
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>             |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
>              \_______/  (Books & Journals Review )|_______/
>                             
>                             14 September 1992
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 1. "Laogai: The Chinese Gulag" by Hongda Harry Wu ...................... 52
> 
> 2. "Manhattan's China Lady" by Zhou Li ................................. 21
> 
> 3. "The Tyranny of History" by W.J.F. Jenner
>    "The Dragon's Brood" by David Rice ................................. 169
> 
> 4. Where Hong Kong Has the Edge - A Journal Article .................... 80
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Editor's Note:   We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
>                  you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
>                  would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
>                  comments, reviews from newspapers and journals and excerpts 
>                  etc to  cnd-editor@library.uta.edu  Thank you.
>                
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 1. "Laogai: The Chinese Gulag" by Hongda Harry Wu ...................... 52
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
> Publisher: Westview Press; 247 pp. $34.95
> 
> Chinese communists: Blood stained; a review of:
> 
>   Laogai: The Chinese Gulag. by Hongda Harry Wu.
>     Westview Press; 247 pp. $34.95
>   Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet. by Mary Craig.
>     Harper Collins 374 pp.
> 
> China has a terrible record of human rights.  It holds 15 million people in
> labor camps and executes around 20,000 people each year. The death penalty
> is applied for crimes as insignificant as the export of cultural relics and
> works partly through quotas allocated to each province.  Chinese military
> power also holds captive millions of people in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner
> Mongolia. It remains a mystery why these evils have attracted so little
> attention.
It remains a mystery why all your bullshit gets redistributed by Bo Xiong
>Part of the explanation is a reluctance of outsiders to make too
> much of China's cruelties lest they jeopardize opportunities for investment
> and trade.
Oh yes...let all the peasants pillage their ancient and cultural heritage
and 
make a quick buck selling them to the West.
> 
> A comprehensive account of Chinese (meaning the Beijing regime's) behavior
> is still awaited.  It does the people of Tibet no particular good to have
> yet another paean to the virtue of the Dalai Lama, like Mary Craig's, when
> part of the reason that Tibet is under Chinese rule is that Lamaist Buddhism
> failed to provide good government.  A more sophisticated study of the
> politics and economics of Chinese rule might even demonstrate effective ways
> for outsiders to help Tibetans and other Chinese minorities.
> 
> Mr. Wu's effort is not so disappointing.  After nearly 20 years in Chinese
> labor camps, he is remarkably academic in his analysis of the scale of the
> Chinese Gulag.  Although he is often vague about his sources for viciousness
> he did not see, he still provides the most comprehensive documentation of
> where and how China handles its prison population.  Mr. Wu's explanation of
> why China behaves like this falls back on ideology, a plainly unsatisfactory
> approach when Chinese economic ideology has changed so drastically even
> while its ruling Communist Party has remained in power.
Have you considered that Mr Wu may be schizoid if not down right
mad...that's
why he keeps rambling on and on with unsubstantiated dogshit or is it
because dogshit in print is more valuable to western publishing houses.
> 
> In fact, one of Mr. Wu's most unexpected revelations is the part played by
> prison labor in China's surge into the international market economy.  The
> Gulag makes so much money that it more than covers its costs.  One of the
> reasons for the success of joint ventures with China is the fact that prison
> labor is so cheap.
One of the success of joint ventures in China is because...the ordinary
peasants work hard in the newly set up factories....a change from the
backbreaking labour of tilling the land. Fuck your mouth if you have twist
the truth to sell your
bullshit. What is more evil? Engendering lies to sell your lousy book and
take away the hopes of millions of workers seeking for a better furture for
their country through hard work.
> 
> Enthusiasm for China's market economy fades as one contemplates the map of
> labor camps in Guangdong province, the richest part of China's Gold Coast
> and increasingly integrated into the international economy.  But then it is
> the people in Hong Kong who are happy to buy organs for transplant from
> prisoners in Guangdong, the tissue being matched before the "donors" are
> executed.  Even before 1997, Hong Kong and China are well on the road to one
> unpleasant kind of convergence.
Really? Enthusiasm has faded.. doesn't square with facts...mister.China's
market economy is booming and in spite of your attempts to smear the good
names
of all those establishments from HongKong,Japan and Taiwan now investing in
China.
> 
> (The review is accompanied by a cartoon from Danziger of the Christian
> Science Monitor.  A party official is busy showing off a humming prison
> workshop (armed guards are patrolling) and says to the visiting foreign
> businessmen: "Of course, as we Chinese move toward capitalism, we retain
> some of the traditions of communism...")
Yes wow....how cute, Harry....feel better now that you are no longer
incarcerated? Pity the rest of the world now that your scummy jism is
flooding the market. 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 2. "Manhattan's China Lady" by Zhou Li ................................. 21
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: XU Ming Yang
> Publisher: Beijing Publishing House
>            516 pages; $1.70
> 
> Bright Lights, Big Money - "If I can make it there, I'd make it anywhere,"
> go the lyrics of the pop song about New York City. They might have been
> written by Chinese emigre Zhou Li. Arriving in the U.S. metropolis from
> Shanghai in 1985, she had $40 in her pocket. A university student majoring
> in management and international trade, she supported herself by baby sitting
> and waiting tables. Now she is on top of the heap and boasts, "I have my own
> trading company and manage multimillion-dollar businesses." Not to mention a
> ritzy town house and yearly vacations in Europe. Zhou, whose import firm
> sells China-made textiles and other goods in the U.S., preaches the gospel
> of equal opportunity in "Manhattan's China Lady", exhorting other Chinese to
> follow her example. "Don't look down on yourselves ... Fear no setbacks!"
> 
> Chinese authors are discovering that there is money in writing about making
> it big abroad. Zhou's autobiography is well on the way to becoming a best
> seller; "A Beijinger in New York" was a hit earlier this year with its
> rags-to-riches account by violinist-turned-businessman Cao Guilin. Other
> popular titles include "A Chinese Girl in Tokyo" and "My Fortune Is
> in australia". Books about Chinese abroad once focused on hardships; now they
> paint a glowing picture, and Chines entrepreneurs who are eager to try their
> skills in other countries are treating them as useful guides on how to
> succeed in business by really trying.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 3. "The Tyranny of History" by W.J.F. Jenner
>    "The Dragon's Brood" by David Rice ................................. 169
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: XU Ming Yang
> Source: The Weekend Australian Review 9/12/92
> Review written by: Diana Giese
> 
> The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China's Crisis
> by W.J.F. Jenner
> Allen Lane, 255pp, $45
> 
> The Dragon's Brood: Conversations with Young Chinese
> by David Rice
> HarperCollins, 294pp, $39.95
> 
> Professor Jenner could be seen as his own toughest critic. "This book has
> been a set of mainly gloomy reflections," his final chapter begins. "It has
> not tried to present a balanced argument or to dwell on all the things that
> are good and attractive in Chinese cultures."
> 
> Instead, he argues that China is so imprisoned by its past that its very
> survival is at stake. He sees not only the unitary State, but its value
> systems and intellectual traditions, as inadequate for the future.
> 
> Does this mean his books a a jeremiad? Not necessarily: his admiration of
> the "good and attractive" aspects is a constant subtext. "It is because I
> care about the future of the country and its peoples that I raise
> uncomfortable issues," he writes. "A crisis is a point at which choices have
> to be made and from which things can get better as well as worse."
> 
> Jenner is professor of Chinese and head of the China Centre at the
> Australian National University. Drawing on an impressive knowledge of
> history, ancient and modern, on social and political analyses, on detailed
> reading of Chinese literature and other documents, and on his controversial
> theory of the innate conservatism of the written script, he has produced a
> book that offers insight after insight, page after page.
> 
> His approach is constantly qualified. Disagree with me by all means, he
> invites. He encourages the opposing ideas which he contends that Chinese
> high culture - "one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition" -
> disallows. His arguments have already provoked lively discussion in academic
> circles since they were aired in the lectures on which the book is based.
> But not only there, because they are accessible to anyone who cares to
> discover more about the one-fifth of humanity who are "the Chinese", whether
> they end up agreeing with him or not.
> 
> How do we know about China, Jenner asks. "However far back we go, the
> written records tell us mainly about regimes, rulers and officials." They
> tell us that "States have always been absolutist", challenged only by "a
> rival absolutism". Within the State, certainly for the last thousand years,
> rank has been assigned as a reward for service. Responsibility for subjects,
> grouped in patriarchal families, tied together by bonds of obligation, has
> been that of the father-monarch and his officials: "That subjects should
> choose for themselves what their best interests are and who should lead has
> not been part of the tradition."
> 
> Peasants have for centuries been nearly invisible, "part of the landscape
> ... sleeping on the back of a water buffalo" in a painting that is an urban
> functionary's sentimental image of rural life. In the official records the
> women are denied even a name of their own. Detailed studies of village life
> began only this century.
> 
> If in our culture "in the beginning was the Word", in non-phonetic Chinese the
> character has an existence and meaning independent of mere speech. "Any
> character or combination of characters can carry a weight of association
> accumulated over thousands of years."
> 
> The script in which records are handed down has "a beauty, a subtlety and
> meaning" that raise it, through calligraphy, to "the supreme art".
> Handwriting skill in China places people socially, as speech does elsewhere.
> While some Westerners learn to speak the language quite well, few master
> calligraphy: "Written Chinese is a code that demands a lifetime's
> apprenticeship."
> 
> Literacy is necessarily imparted through rote learning, through copying and
> repeating what has already been written. It is a code that relies on
> implied, rather than explicit, meanings. "It can juxtapose powerful images,
> rich in association, without having to state their grammatical connections."
> And then comes the crux of his argument: while this has made possible, for
> instance, "wonderfully concise and ambiguous classical poetry", it "does
> less to help the formulation of clear arguments ... it inhibits analytical,
> logical thinking and sharp definitions.
> 
> "The Chinese writing system is so marvelously self-contained,
> intellectually absorbing and aesthetically captivating that it does not have
> to refer to anything outside itself." It faces "backwards and inwards".
> 
> The Chinese last judgement has for centuries been the written historical
> record: to leave a name that would be "handed down through ten thousand
> antiquities". The danger with this preoccupation with the record comes "when
> you think your past makes you so special you don't need to turn anywhere
> else for inspiration".
> 
> What are some other implications? Some 20 years ago, Jenner was studying
> reels of microfilmed publications of the late 1960s, skimming through them
> in search of what he wanted. This fast-forward viewing showed him how
> completely the documents of the Cultural Revolution were divorced from
> subjective reality. Instead of discussion of how China, or even a particular
> school or work unit, might be run differently, "ideologically
> indistinguishable rival factions" used the same fixed abusive terminology
> against each other.
> 
> It could be argued, of course, that this sort of thing is hardly exclusive
> to China. People using more permeable languages and writing systems can also
> become prisoners of jargon. But Jenner is only one of many, both inside and
> outside the country, who see the script as a conservative force.
> 
> Those who are most likely to question the unitary high culture are, he says,
> the children of the Cultural Revolution's urban upheavals and banishment to
> the countryside. "If you have beaten up, possibly even killed, an official
> and a schoolteacher or two in your teens and rebelled against your parents
> and the local Party bosses, you can never quite be reabsorbed by a value
> system that depends on unquestioning acceptance of the authority of such
> people."
> 
> Religion is also resurfacing as a provider of myths and symbols. Jenner
> draws attention to millennarian cults, "like an underground river of fire,
> coming to the surface only when social or political structures are under
> strain or cracking". This tradition presents the world as evil and as ruled
> by forces that must be removed through cleansing violence. He sees the
> communists' 1949 victory and the Cultural Revolution partly as its
> manifestations. He links it with other, more current ones, with the heroic
> man who fights for honour and his less heroic relative, the urban hustler.
> 
> The younger brothers and sisters of the Red Guard generation he portrays as
> disaffected, "without any ideals or illusions".
> 
> David Rice, a journalist who trained other journalists for the New China
> News Agency, is also interested in China's new generation: "This book is
> about the young people of China, and what they think and feel in the daily
> lives."
> 
> This is the sort of large claim a scholar like Jenner would never make. Rice
> is, however, a skilled and sympathetic interviewer and has extracted some
> interesting discussion from his 40 informants.
> 
> What they told him is filtered through translators and presented
> thematically, rather than by building up a portrait through extended
> contextualised quotations, the approach taken by the other oral
> history-based account of a people, Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye's Chinese Lives,
> of which Jenner was both an editor and translator.
> 
> Rice's young intellectuals are not as varied and tend to talk rather
> earnestly and blandly about issues such as the individual versus the group,
> the generation gap, and the one-child family policy creating Little
> Emperors. The grubby idiomatic vigour of "Lives", its frankness, cynicism
> and humour, appear only rarely. The voices of Tiananmen, however, recorded
> in the square during the time it was occupied by the students, are vivid and
> affecting. He concludes with a post-Tiananmen epilogue that explores
> cautious hopes for the future.
> 
> Jenner's suggestions for ways out of China's impasses in the future include
> official recognition of the diversity of the Chinese: "The State needs to
> insist that the inhabitants of Harbin and Canton speak different dialects of
> the same language, even though it is immediately obvious to anyone hearing
> the two tongues spoken that they are different languages."
> 
> Instead of the "imperial lingua franca", the tongues that people actually
> speak in their daily lives should be recognised. The principal Chinese
> languages are all spoken by sufficient people to make local-language
> television and radio, for instance, "as practicable as in a medium-sized
> European country". The infrastructure of broadcasting, and printing and
> publishing facilities, are already in place in dozens of provincial centres.
> 
> Recognition of one kind of diversity may lead to others, he believes. He
> champions the "little traditions" of storytellers, balladeers and low-class
> local opera that the high culture has devalued.
> 
> It is "at levels below those China's bureaucratic historians usually
> condescend to notice" that the great transformations of the future will
> occur. The new patterns of making and trading are those of the coastal areas
> with their phenomenal economic growth, led by "local officials,
> entrepreneurs and local officials turned entrepreneurs".
> 
> They may be able to show the way forward, against the spectres of chaos,
> civil war or famine raised by those whose interests lie in continuing
> central control, including the foreign powers which might also have to deal
> with the human cost of change.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 4. Where Hong Kong Has the Edge - A Journal Article .................... 80
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
> Source: The Economist 8/28/92
> 
> One of the most momentous and least understood events of this half-century
> is East Asia's rise from poverty.  The high rates of economic growth
> consistently achieved over decades by the Asian tigers - Hong Kong,
> Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea - have almost no equal anywhere at any
> time.  THis difficulty is compounded by hte wide divergence in circumstances
> and policies of the four countries.  Alwyn Young, a business professor at
> the Massachusetts Insititute of Technology, has written a paper ["A tale of
> two cities: Factor accumulation and technical change in Hongkong and
> Singapore", to be oublished in the "Macroeconomics Annual" (1992) of the
> National Bureau of Economic Research.] which looks at how Hong Kong and
> Singapore did it.  If his analysis is right, it augurs ill for Singapore in
> the next decade or two.
> 
> Hong Kong and Singapore started on a similar footing in 1945. Both were
> city-states, British colonies (with a British legal and administrative
> system) making their living as trading ports. Neither manufactured much.
> Both were populated mainly by immigrants from southern China.
> 
> In 1960 the two territories had roughly the same GDP per head, which grew
> over the following quarter-century at an astonishing and virtually identical
> 6% a year in real terms.  Both were free traders, allowing foreign goods and
> money to flow where they would.  Both climbed the same industrial ladder,
> moving up from textiles to plastics to consumer electronics to financial
> services.
> 
> There were two crucial differences.  First, Hong Kong, its population
> luckily swollen by sophisticated Shanghainese refugees from Communist China,
> had a vastly better educated populaiton than Singapore's until well into the
> 1980s.  Second, Hong Kong had a laisser-faire government (to the point of
> not investing even in needed infrastructure until street riots forced it
> to); Singapore had an extremely interventionist one.
> 
> The government decided which industries Singapore should go into and when.
> Through its Central Provident Fund levies on companies and workers, it
> compelled private savings of around 40% of GDP. Through state-owned
> compaines and boards, the government chanelled much of these savings, as
> well as its large excess of current tax revenues, into investment it
> favored.  It welcomed, indeed heavily subsidized, direct investment by
> foreign multinationals.
> 
> The sources of economic growth in the two territories turned out to be
> startlingly different.  Between 1960 and 1985 Hong Kong saved and invested a
> more or less consistent 20% of GDP. Singapore, which in 1960 invested half
> as much as Hong Kong, surpassed it in 1967 and has invested a larger share
> ever since: by the late 1980s Singapore's investment as share of GDP was
> more than 40%, more than twice Hong Kong's rate.
> 
> In the two decades after 1970, Hong Kong's output per worker went up more
> than 2.5 times, Singapore's a little more than twofold.  Not much difference
> there.  However, Hong Kong's output per unit of capital stayed roughly
> constant over the 20 years; Singapore's fell by more than half [see chart in
> the original article].
> 
> The alarm bells about Singapore's use (or misuse) of capital keep ringing
> louder.  By the mid-1980s Singapore's incremental capital-to-output ratio -
> meaning how much extra capital was needed to produce and additional unit of
> output - was twice Hong Kong's.  As you would expect from an ever-increasing
> use of capital, which in the early 1960s had been 40%, by the late 1980s had
> fallen to 11-12%, one of the lowest rates in the world.
> 
> Most damning of all, Mr. Young finds that over the two decades after 1970,
> 56% of Hong Kong's increase in output per worker cam from a rise in "total
> factor productivity" (how much can be produced by combining given units of
> land, labor and capital). Singapore's total factor productivity fell by 6%
> over those years: in other words, 106% of Songapore's growth in output came
> from adding capital.  To put it crudely, Hong Kong got richer by becoming a
> lot more efficient in the way it used people, capital and technology.
> Singapore became richer by thrusting its hands ever deeper into its
> citizens' pockets - through taxes, forced savings and subsidies to
> multinationals - and throwing the money at the problem.
> 
> Economic-growth buffs will find it interesting that Hong Kong seemed to
> benefit so much from the better education of its people.  For Singapore,
> however, Mr. Young's analysis has a gruesome and immediate practical
> implication.  If he is right, Singapore has very few years of growth left
> along the old lines: it simply cannot extract much more savings from its
> people - already the biggest savers in the world - to support its growing
> craving for capital.  Mr. Young's cruel comparison is to the Soviet Union,
> which turned in respectable growth rates from the 1930s to the 1960s by
> pouring on the capital.  Everyone knows what happened after that.
> 
> +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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> 
> Forwarded to SCC by Bo Xiong in Chicago
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan