A Nation of Real People

Party Time: Who Runs China and How
by Rowan Callick
Black Inc, 2013, 304 pages, $30

Rowan Callick has always been the doyen of Australian journalists on China, and in Party Time he stakes a claim to be one of the best in the world. His subject, the Chinese Communist Party, isn’t one to be taken on lightly. The party is massive, secretive, and is one of the keys to understanding what modern China is about.

It’s a pleasure to read a book on China written by an author who starts out without preconceptions. We’ve all read the others. They fixate on the name of the party, decide what it’s all about and spend the next 100,000 words trying to stuff it into their preconceptions. They give us a bit about socialist economics and State Owned Enterprises, usually supported by a stream of dubious factoids from some obscure American university. They top it off with anecdotes about jailed artists, police oppression, slave labour and the weird ways of the Chinese super-rich. We’re told that China will have a middle class one day or that it’s “burgeoning”.

Not so Rowan Callick. He wears out copious amounts of shoe leather doing what journalists are supposed to do—going and interviewing the people who matter. It struck me that this is possibly the first time in English that interviews with such a wide range of relevant people in China have been put together in one place.

I was particularly struck by the interviews with people associated with the Party School. This is a key institution in China where all the intellectual issues surrounding politics and society are discussed. Note how little Marx and Lenin come into the equation. Callick talks to legal academics—progress in the strengthening of the legal system is one of the most important aims of China’s reformers; so far progress has been patchy. He talks to journalists and bloggers. I did feel here that an important lacuna was the absence of an interview with the notoriously liberal press of Guangdong. Perhaps another time.

And we see him in places where journalists rarely tread. Lots of people have views about the world’s largest telecommunications manufacturer, Huawei, which is usually described as “mysterious” or under the secret hand of the state (odd when we consider that it’s a privately owned company whose main shareholder was denounced as a rightist in the Cultural Revolution). But very few journalists seem to have taken the trouble to visit Huawei’s meticulously groomed campus in Shenzhen, not for want of trying on Huawei’s part.

A particularly gratifying bit of leather-wearing-out from my perspective as a Shenzhen resident was that Callick actually visited Shenzhen and wrote rationally about it. You’d think that the 15 million people of China’s third-largest city which grew rich purely on market reform would be worth an occasional visit, but most China journalists don’t seem to agree. And if we’re talking about politics, Shenzhen’s position as the showcase of what reform can do remains essential.

There’s another aspect which goes hand in hand with this critical and inquiring approach. Callick treats the Chinese as people, not blue ants or weirdos. To the English-speaking world China has always been a country of the mind, a giant Rorschach Test into which we read all our fantasies on utopias and dystopias. In this scenario the Chinese aren’t really people. Pierre Ryckmans put it characteristically succinctly during his 1970s debate on human rights in China. If I recall correctly, Ryckmans reduced the argument to the almost but not quite absurd by accusing his opponent of thinking that human rights were not important to the Chinese because “they are not human”.

Sadly this remains a problem of reportage on China. Stories of the antics of the super-rich are just one manifestation. Callick by contrast gives deeply and movingly human pictures of his interviewees. We are talking about real people like you and me.

I suppose my one disappointment is one of balance. The paradox of daily life in Chinese cities is that it’s very normal. People go to work and come home and walk their dogs. They plan their holidays and worry about their children’s schooling. There are some people who are oppressed. There are innumerable problems of law and politics. But for the average person on the street the government has less influence on their lives for good or bad than it does in most Western countries, Australia included.

On balance it is not an oppressive society. Sometimes I got that impression in Callick’s book. Sometimes I didn’t. But in a book where the emphasis is on politics this is to be expected. If other journalists were as meticulous as Callick we wouldn’t have to read the rambling which passes for China comment in Australian newspapers.