From: xiong@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Bo Xiong)
Subject: FWD: CND Books and Journals Review, Sept. 14, 1992
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 05:48:07 GMT

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review )|_______/
                            
                            14 September 1992


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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
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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, reviews from newspapers and journals and excerpts 
                 etc to  cnd-editor@library.uta.edu  Thank you.
               
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1. "Laogai: The Chinese Gulag" by Hongda Harry Wu ...................... 52
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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.  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.

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.

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.

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.

(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...")

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2. "Manhattan's China Lady" by Zhou Li ................................. 21
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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.

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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.

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4. Where Hong Kong Has the Edge - A Journal Article .................... 80
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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