From: gaojeng@durras.anu.edu.au (J. Gao)
Subject: CND: Books & Journals Review, Thu, 10/1/1992
Summary: CND
Keywords: CND
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date:  1 Oct 92 04:03:56 GMT

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                             October 1, 1992

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1. Weedy, Greedy and Seedy --
   "Shanghai"  by Harriet Sergeant .................................... 104

2. From Stylish to Stylised --
   "Chinese Graphic Design in the
    Twentieth Century"  by Scott Minick and Jiao Ping .................. 36

3. More of the Same --
   "Almost a Revolution"  by Shen Tong ................................. 50

4. The Maelstrom That Mao Built --
   "Voices from the Whirlwind"  by Feng Jicai .......................... 67
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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, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. Weedy, Greedy and Seedy --
   "Shanghai"  by Harriet Sergeant .................................... 104
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 3/21/92
Review written by: Simon Winchester

"Shanghai" by Harriet Sergeant.
Jonathan Cape, London. US$32.30

On one level this book, just like the city it describes, is a mess that
depresses. There are other parallels: the book, like the city, looks fine
from afar, has all the appearance of elan and elegance, seems to have dash
and the potential to amuse - but at the end it leaves the reader much as the
city left its former inhabitants, with a feeling of dejection and emptiness,
a rather sour taste, and some puzzlement about why the whole enterprise,
the city itself, was conceived in the first place.

All of which is a great pity. Harriet Sergeant (apparently now Mrs Cohen, a
surname she deliberately did not vouchsafe to the handsome young Palestinian
terrorist who once danced with her in the coffee-shop of an old hotel on the
Bund) is clearly a thoughtful and resourceful woman. Moreover, she enjoys
the kind of connections ("we were at a party at the Hong Kong Governor's
House to celebrate the agreement between Britain and China over ... 1997. My
middle-aged companion told me that he had never forgotten the first Shanghai
girls he met ...") that allowed her to examine with ease all the intricacies
of expatriate reminiscences of the place.

So her pointillist technique, admirable for the telling of a tale as complex
and many-layered as that of Shanghai, relies a great deal on her talks with
such Yangtze grandees as Sir William Keswick, Sir Christopher Chancellor,
Sir William Hayter - men (and now a few women, including the notorious Emily
Hahn, still alive in New York City, and still fascinated by gibbons, like
the Mr Mills she once carried with her all over town) with some of the most
extraordinary stories to tell.

"Tony" Keswick, of Jardine Matheson, the firm of opium-dealers turned
trading empire, pops up in the text with great frequency, and his stories
are more extraordinary than most - not the least being his account of the
time when, as Chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, he was shot in the
chest and the arm by a deranged old Japanese. "They carried me off to a
hospital which appeared empty but for a small Chinese coolie. He knew iodine
was the stuff so he got a bottle and said 'Where's the hole?' ... and poured
iodine in till it ran out the other side. That was the most painful part of
the whole thing."

There are innumerable such tales in Sergeant's elegant-looking book, most of
them involving figures who might well be described as "colourful," but who
turn out on closer examination to be very little more. The Britons she
describes are generally rather weedy, the Chinese are rather greedy, the
rest - the French, the White Russians, the Japanese - exceptionally seedy.
And it is the aspect of the book - as well as its irritatingly patchy
organisation - that ultimately dismays. For the figures of whom Sergeant
writes are so unremittingly provincial, amoral, arrogant, ignorant and
unpleasant that their flavour becomes the book's flavour too. It is a bit
like looking for excitement at the bottom of a pond: you may well turn up
old prams and the occasional lost engagement ring, but unless you are a
particularly adept forager, the slime gets to you in the end.

One might think that writing about a city of unutterable squalour, peopled
by the ignoble and unworthy, set down on a dirty river in a dismal swamp,
and having the most filthy weather, non-stop, would inevitably result in a
book of equivalent wretchedness: but as Collins and LaPierre found together
in Calcutta, or as Mayhew and Hogarth found individually in London, there is
often bright metal behind the tarnish. A more considerable writer - a more
adept forager - would, I suspect, have discovered it in Shanghai before too
long.

(I, too, should come clean: six years ago I agreed to write a book about
Shanghai, but eventually cancelled the contract, making the excuse that I
found the city's present condition far too dull and her past far to lacking
in romance. So I abandoned the quest with which Sergeant persevered, and I
readily salute her for sticking so resolutely to her task. What she has
written nonetheless reinforces my conviction of six years before: this is a
story that, despite having the appearance of promise, is just not quite
interesting enough to tell.)

All these criticisms, however, relate to the book simply at the level of
reportage. There is another level, however, at which the book succeeds
brilliantly - and that is at the level of polemic, and of warning. For the
yesterday that made Shanghai what she is today is very much the today that
will make Hongkong what she will be tomorrow. And in many ways this portrait
of the grim and rather humourless decadence of half a century ago on Soochow
Creek is not all that different from a portrait of the lives of those who
move and shake today on The Peak and over at Sai Kung and up t Fan Ling.
Much the same devil-may-care extravagance, much the same racial intolerance,
much the same spectrum of corruption and venality and utter amorality, and
much the same lamentable leadership still, it has to be admitted,
characterises today's Hongkong.

True, we may not go around sniffing the lotus-petal-shaped shoes in brothels
where all the girls had trotters instead of feet; true, one may not haunt
the bars of Lan Kwai Fong and have opium pills handed out on a silver tray,
like afternoon tea; true, one does not imagine the police here spend a great
deal of their time buggering one another, as seemed to have been the habit
of many of Shanghai's finest not so long ago. But at the same time - regard
the seedier bars in Wanchai; or observe the quality of many of the local
judges; or hear the tales of eternally sozzled Peak wives in their
Mid-Levels hair-salon; and recall the policeman who supposedly killed
himself by shooting himself five times in the chest; and look at the endless
parties, and the vulgarity of the local socialites - perhaps it is not
altogether unreasonable to suppose that history may judge Hongkong in the
closing imperial years almost as harshly as Sergeant judges Shanghai.

Yet there probably is a difference. There will be kinder words to be said
about Hongkong, one feels, whatever the measure of the final years. For this
place has done some good, has been some excellence, has created something
more than simply wealth, has carried out an experiment for the betterment of
many, has been a paradigm of the benefits of Capital.

Of Shanghai, little can be said by good and interesting people that is
either good and interesting: which is why Sergeant's book, though admirably
and painstakingly researched, illustrated and presented, fails to be a great
deal more than an augury, and one that like most auguries is hardly much of
a pleasure to regard.

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2. From Stylish to Stylised --
   "Chinese Graphic Design in the
    Twentieth Century"  by Scott Minick and Jiao Ping .................. 36
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts & Society 3/14/92
Review written by: Don Cohn

"Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century"
by Scott Minick and Jiao Ping
Thames and Hudson, London. US$38.80

Having produced the world's first illustrated book in 868, the Chinese spent
the next 1,000 years churning out billions of supple string-bound volumes
from woodblocks. And when Western lithographic presses first appeared in the
treaty ports in the 19th century, along with electricity and Western ideas,
modern Chinese publishing was born.

Judged from their covers, the early fruits of the industry, centred in
Shanghai, are remarkable for their sophistication. Graphic art produced
in the Paris of the East in the 1920s and 1930s is cosmopolitan to a fault,
borrowing boldly from art deco, cubism, futurism and expressionism, and
blending these foreign themes with shyer native elements. The
self-confidence that went with this openness to the outside world was lost
in the xenophobic warfare waged by the communists on the cultural front over
the past 40 years. What the authors call the Shanghai style was swept under
the rug of Socialist Realism.

As a study of a hybrid art form that flourished during a complex period in
Chinese history, this book leaves much to be desired. Firstly, the text,
which attempts to place modern graphic art in its historical and social
context, reeks of the worst qualities of the prose of the People's republic:
it is superficial, biased (most likely out of ignorance of the subject) and
wanting in analysis.

Second, while the 250 illustrations mitigate the annoying text to some
degree, in temporal terms they fail to cover the purported subject of the
book - the 20th century. The years 1900 to 1927 are represented by a single
tiny advertisement from 1918; there is a splendid selection of examples from
1927 to 1937, but not a single item from Japanese-occupied Shanghai
(1937-45); and more imaginative treatment could have been given to perverse
manifestations of artistic excess during the Cultural Revolution, such as
the cult of Mao buttons, some of them so large they resemble Mao's head on a
plate.

The book ends with selections of posters and handbills from Tiananmen Square
in 1989. A warning: keep your eyes on the pictures, avoid the text.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. More of the Same --
   "Almost a Revolution"  by Shen Tong ................................. 50
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts & Society 3/14/92
Review written by: Nancy Langston

"Almost a Revolution" by Shen Tong
Houghton Mifflin, Boston  US$19.95

Shen Tong was one of the student leaders of China's 1989 pro-democracy
movement who escaped to the US. By accounts outside this book, he was a
workhorse of an activist, organising the news centre at Peking University
which disseminated information about the students' aims and activities. More
interestingly, he was a member of the committee which tried to establish a
dialogue with the government.

Frankly, after reading his memoirs, one is hard put to know which side was
easier to deal with - the government or the students. Ultimately, the choice
was made by default because the leadership was crude (and stupid) enough to
substitute bullets for words.

The overwhelming impression Shen's book leaves (probably to his chagrin) is
a paraphrase of the adage about teaching: people lead the way they are led.
The poisonous infighting among the student leaders mirrored the factionalism
of their elders in the politburo.

The name-calling, charges of betrayal and theft, and, in the case of the
"commander" Chai Ling, an order to her deputies to remove her
hunger-striking husband to the hospital when he disagreed with her - all
this would have been familiar enough to the oldsters.

For a fleeting moment in the corridors of power, there must have been
expressions of bewilderment too, the sort that inevitably lace the
mutterings of any country's founders. These children are fed, the leaders
think. They are clothed, sheltered, and they go to university. What more do
they want?

Shen Tong and his colleagues never put a fine point on what they meant by
democracy and freedom. And their flowery speeches about dying for the
motherland did not illuminate their views. As the China scholar Lucian Pye
had pointed out, they had to cloak their real demands in grandiose rhetoric
so as not to appear selfish or interested in their own material well-being.
What they wanted was a system with some semblance of fairness, in place of
the one where, whether it is getting a good job, special medical treatment,
housing or simply a pack of Panda cigarettes (Deng's brand), connections or
bribes are necessary.

Shen describes a generation who saw their parents "eat bitterness"
throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They saw their families lose their jobs,
their homes and sometimes each other. The primordial cry from Tiananmen was:
"We cannot let this happen to us."

One only fears that, yet again, the thousands of resourceful, brave and good
people who made their way to Tiananmen Square were let down by their
leaders. The elders would not learn new ways and the young chiefs had
learned too well the old ones.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. The Maelstrom That Mao Built --
   "Voices from the Whirlwind"  by Feng Jicai .......................... 67
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts and Society 8/30/92
Review written by: Gopal Sukhu

"Voices from the Whirlwind"  by Feng Jicai
Pantheon Books, New York. US$22.00

The Chinese communists seized their moment in history in 1949, then
squandered it in purges, terror campaigns and economic incompetence. But
they were so adept at covering their failures with all of the shining,
mendacious imagery of progress that they long fooled many Western
intellectuals and even themselves. Gradually, from the mid-1950s to the
mid-1960s, vividness of delusion became the measure of mental clarity. It is
a short step over the edge into the 10-year psychotic episode called the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Anyone who doubts that the memory of that rabid era continues to gnaw at the
heart of the Chinese people need only go to China, make friends and ask
discreet questions - or read Feng Jicai's "Voices from the Whirlwind", a
collection of anonymous personal accounts by survivors of those times. The
reader should approach the book charily, however, for there are scenes in it
that will make him wince in horror.

In "Avenger," for example, a graduate of a technical college works as a
cadre in charge of production in a factory. He is zealous, hard-working and
honest. After the onset of the Cultural Revolution, he divides his energies
between his work and the compulsory copying of Mao's sayings onto posters.
One day his concentration wanders. Instead of "Whatever the enemy opposes,
we should uphold," he writes "Whatever the enemy opposes, we should oppose."
The ink is hardly dry before he finds himself denounced, imprisoned, beaten
daily, denied water and forced to perform all his natural functions in full
view of the "workers." Later, the workers, on a whim, decide to castrate him
with a pair of scissors. He resists desperately, protecting the target of
the onslaught with his hands, which his attackers continue to stab till the
flow of blood repels them. Before letting him go, however, they deform his
ears with pliers.

If terror is the instrument of control in the totalitarian state, the
Chinese communists democratised it to an unprecedented degree. Anyone could
visit terror on anyone else to the extent that his class status, ability to
fracture logic and capacity for violence permitted. The Red Guards were the
vanguard of this ferocious irrationality. A doctor in an account entitled
"Was I Really Guilty?" tells how she and her parents made a suicide pact to
escape the ordeal of a Red Guard search-and-seizure: "I know that if you
puncture the carotid artery in the neck, the embolism produced will result
in immediate death .. My mother said how lucky they were to have a doctor
daughter to help them die .. We decided I'd kill them first and then do it
to myself." She managed to cut only her father's throat before the Red
Guards returned to imprison her not merely for murdering him, but for saving
him from "just punishment."

"Class struggle" was often a guise for personal vendetta, power-mongering
and greed. It engendered a chaos that allowed secret depredations untrussed
by even flimsy political pretexts to go unpunished. This was particularly
evident in the case of rape. "They Who have Suffered Greatly," a harrowing
account of a man's attempt to prevent his sister's suicide after she was
raped by a local official, presents anecdotal evidence of the prevalence of
rape, mainly of teenage girls, especially in those work brigades that were
sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." At least one cadre was
executed for raping "dozens of educated girls," but many others went free -
including the violator of his sister - because their stigma-dreading victims
did not report them.

The stories in "Voices" are unburdenings - of intense anger, regret, sorrow
and horror - but they leave one with a sense that something has been
withheld. Among all the objects of blame - the opportunists, Red Guards,
Gang of Four, etc. - we never find Mao or the communist party, which, no
doubt, has something to do with the fact that the Chinese Government had a
hand in the publication of the book. This can only mean that rancour against
them is still building up, but we will have to wait longer to hear it
uttered.

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