Through a mosaic of diverse portraits of Chinese thirsty for knowledge and success, Evan Osnos shows a complex and complex China, in search of prosperity, power and recognition.
A prosperous China
Since Xi Jinping came to power in November 2012, works on the mixed results of the two mandates of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have flourished. The former leadership team, retrospectively judged to be a little weak, failed to fulfill its promises of social protection, harmony and rural development. The Bo Xilai scandal and the revelation of the extent of the fortune accumulated by the family of “ Dad Wen ” speak New York Times a month before the transfer of power dramatically revealed the flaws in the system: corruption and divisions within the Party.
This work, which takes the field and contextualizes these episodes, is the fruit of the eight years (2005-2013) that Evan Osnos spent in Beijing as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune then New Yorker. An outstanding narrator, the investigative journalist draws up a precise and fair assessment of today’s China: a country where the Chinese Communist Party has turned away from the reform of thought and the control of private lives in favor of invest in the project of restoring to China the prosperity, pride and strength it has been seeking for 150 years. Through the story of this long stay in China and his repeated encounters with a certain number of colorful characters, Osnos accounts for the contradictions which make the portrait of the country very difficult to sketch. China is indeed both the new superpower and the largest authoritarian country in the world. She is like this
the world’s largest customer of the Louis Vuitton brand, is immediately after the United States for purchases of Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini, but it is led by a Marxist-Leninist party which wants to ban the word luxury from advertising billboards. In terms of life expectancy and income, the gaps between its most prosperous cities and its poorest provinces are those that distinguish New York from Ghana. China has two of the ten largest Internet companies on the planet, it also has more Internet users than the United States, but it is doubling its efforts to create a system of repression of freedom of expression of a unprecedented scale in history. It has never been as diverse, urban and prosperous as it is today, and yet it is the only country in the world to keep a Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison (p. 15).
Rather than sticking to the unified official narrative, the author opts for an eclectic mosaic of in-depth portraits to tell – as much as possible on their own terms – what the Chinese experienced during these years of dizzying development (“ during my stay, the number of Chinese traveling by plane doubled, cell phone sales tripled, subway mileage in Beijing quadrupled » p. 13). Its common thread is the hope and ambitions they nourish and which are at the heart of China’s transformation.
The author thus relies on excellent Anglo-Saxon academic work as well as serious personal research and prolonged and repeated conversations with various unclassifiable personalities, whom combativeness brings together: a Taiwanese captain who deserted to join China in 1979, became a fervent defender of Chinese miracle » and chief economist at the World Bank (2008-2012) Lin Yifu ; Chen Guangcheng, the blind masseur turned lawyer campaigning against abusive expropriations and for the defense of the rights of the inhabitants of his native village Dongshigu, and whose exile in the United States and his conservative turn have caused much ink to be spilled ; Gong Haiyan, the creator of the first major online dating site in China ; protest artist Ai Weiwei ; the famous blogger writer and racing car driver Han Han ; the daring economic journalist from Caijing then Caixin Hu Shuli ; Cheung Yan, the billionaire “ garbage queen » (she made her fortune in the recycling industry). Osnos also makes the voices of anonymous people heard like this poet he discovers when he interviews a street sweeper near his home, or this group of doctoral students in social sciences who are part of the fen qing (angry young people), or nationalists who have been rebelling since the repression in Tibet in spring 2008 against biased international media coverage of their country. He also follows ambitious young people like Zhang Zhiming or Michael, a follower of the English learning method concocted by Li Yang, “ Crazy English », whose portrait tragically illustrates the intensity of the expectations, efforts and frustrations of Chinese youth.
According to Osnos, the period he describes is similar to the Golden Age (Gilded Age) American described by Marx Twain and Charles Warner, where each man sought to realize his dream. However, the Chinese population has moved faster than the political system which fueled its development. The population’s demands in terms of information, transparency and participation are increasing:
40 years ago, the Chinese had almost no chance of making a fortune, knowing the truth and practicing religion. Their political system and poverty prevented them from doing so. They had no way to start a business or satisfy their desire, they had no weapon to resist propaganda and censorship, they had no hope of finding any source of inspiration outside the Party. . Then everything changed. In just one generation, they have been able to access all three of these things and they want more (p. 16).
A pessimistic view of China
The contribution of this rich work of synthesis is to make accessible the complexity of developments (economic, social, political, technological, media, ideological, etc.) in contemporary China. It brings together and effectively illustrates what is documented in nearly a hundred academic works. It addresses recent significant developments linked to the enrichment of a part of the population such as the emergence of the tourist industry, the explosion of corruption and the evolution of the Chinese art market. Osnos’ view of China is pessimistic. He describes a population in turmoil, anxious and frustrated, a China losing its identity, ideological, moral and spiritual benchmarks and in search of “ fortune “, of “ truth » and “ faith » (the three main parts which organize the work). It is with a disillusioned tone that he describes the source of the legitimacy of the Party which promises prosperity and demands loyalty. According to him, faced with the obvious oligarchic evolution of the system, the meritocratic myth no longer holds. It provides concrete elements to understand the extent of the phenomenon that corruption has taken on in recent years: the messaging systems of Chinese Internet users are flooded with spam offering false invoices, the number of Party officials having fled abroad between 1990 and 2008 is estimated at 18,000 and the loot they took with them at $120 billion, the money circulating in Macau, much of it spent by corrupt officials, is thus six times greater than in Las Vegas. The reporter investigated the causes of the high-speed train accident in Wenzhou in 2011 and the extraordinary corruption network within the Ministry of Transportation under Liu Zhijun, called “ Liu The Great Leap ”, who had been served for corruption and inappropriate sexual behavior (he allegedly maintained up to 18 mistresses) a few months before the train accident. The Party has long been aware that if it does not reduce the scale of the phenomenon, corruption will lead to its downfall. For several years, it has severely punished its members who have made mistakes. According to Andrew Wedeman of Georgetown University, 668,000 Party members have already been convicted and 350 have been executed. The campaign led by Xi Jinping has further intensified the repression, in order to prevent the phenomenon from truly getting out of control.
Which word best represents China ?
Evan Osnos shows introspection when he questions the relevance for foreign journalists and academics to dwell on the fate of dissidents who are almost completely unknown in China and who have acquired immense notoriety elsewhere. Can we indeed consider their case as representative of what the majority of Chinese experience? ? This is a rarely asked question that deserves to be further developed. How can we not feel sorry for the fate of men and women repressed because they had the courage to stand up against an authoritarian government and demand more freedom? ? Is it nevertheless not problematic that the media coverage of these persecuted figures (Osnos also mentions the opportunism of their radicalism, to the extent that it allows them to achieve international notoriety) in the major foreign media takes so much time? place, to the point of barely taking into account the daily life of the rest of the Chinese population (more than 1.3 billion men and women), the policies and reforms that affect them ?
Osnos finds a compromise: the energy and means spent by the Chinese government so that people do not talk about them in China justify the importance of devoting articles (or book chapters) to them, but also of not s leave it there and try not to just cover up the repression that is actually still taking place in China. It thus highlights the complexities of the conditions in which journalists and Internet users speak out, express themselves and demand accountability from governments (at different levels) despite censorship, which Osnos expresses through an ingenious literary process. and hilarious. He transcribes the alerts he receives on his cell phone in which the China Digital Times (California website) relays the directives that the Ministry of Propaganda sends to the various press outlets and websites:
Bzzzz
Websites should immediately remove the article titled “ 94% of Chinese people are unhappy with the disproportionate concentration of wealth at the top of the social hierarchy “. (…)
(During the Arab Spring) Do not make any comparisons between the political systems of Middle Eastern countries and ours. When the names of officials from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or elsewhere are mentioned in our media, the names of Chinese officials should never be mentioned in close proximity. (pg. 214)
Osnos fortunately does not stop there and reports, although too briefly, the rise of citizen journalism, the innovations encouraged by the need to circumvent censorship and the extraordinary dynamism of debates on the Chinese web. It describes in particular the rise (and censorship) of nationalist sites critical of Western media and the fiery reactions to accidents provoking general indignation such as the Wenzhou train accident, and the reaction of the local government, which prefers to bury the train and the body to limit the scandal ; or when seventeen passers-by ignore little Yueyue, hit by a van on a rainy day before a poor and illiterate grandmother comes to her aid.
By following the economic journalist Hu Shuli, he also reports on a phenomenon essential to understanding a widespread posture within Chinese intellectual elites, namely the loyal opposition. The criticisms formulated and the encouragement for the pursuit of political reforms are not aimed at tearing down the system but, on the contrary, at consolidating power. They are acceptable to reformers within the Party, whose legitimacy rests largely on results, because they are part of their effort to resolve the problems that China must overcome and could thus allow them to remain in office. Like this successful book, this beautiful portrait allows Evan Osnos to put his finger on an essential element of understanding the Chinese situation while moving away from a misleading and excessively simplified account of a population Chinese repressed, gagged and depoliticized in the face of an illegitimate and beleaguered monolithic party-state.