China Wakes (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn), Mandate of Heaven (Orville Schell), The Rise of China (William H. Overholt)
Barnes, Fred
A funny thing happened to my family—two adults, four kids—as we ate dinner last summer at the penthouse restaurant of the Sheraton Hotel in Shanghai. Our waitress, a young woman who spoke perfect...
...China's response will consist of "ranting, threatening, and eventually acquiescing...
...Back in the United States, having four kids is often seen as hopelessly backward and even ecologically harmful...
...The American role as power broker is critical...
...The policy, rigidly enforced since 1991, dramatically boosted the ratio of male to female births, resulting in "more than 1.7 million missing girls annually...
...Deng, a hero to Overholt and devil to Schell, gets balanced treatment from Kristof and WuDunn...
...And it has produced, writes Sheryl WuDunn, "a dramatic rise in the worst kind of discrimination: that which denies females even the right to exist...
...Now that is no longer feasible...
...He traces the course of Communist rule, starting with the 4 million killed between 1948 and 1955...
...Worse, for an upwardly mobile woman, a large family is viewed as a career wrecker...
...writes Kristof...
...So they choose an abortion instead...
...On the right, the big story in China is the economic boom that has spurred a growth rate of nearly 10 percent for the past decade...
...You can make the argument," WuDunn writes, "that in the post-Cold War world, the most important man in the world is Deng Xiaoping...
...CI The American Spectator October 1994 75...
...The one-child rule not only suppresses the natural desire of parents to have several kids, it does so through abortions (frequently forced), sterilization, and infanticide...
...We didn't notice this extraordinary event," admits WuDunn, who covered China for the New York Times from 1988 to 1993 along with her husband, Nicholas Kristof...
...No more...
...It was one of the major policy decisions of that period, but because it happened in the Chinese countryside, nobody had a clue...
...world, China's one-child policy...
...She doted on my kids, especially my nine-year-old son...
...She said she yearns to get married, move to America, have lots of children...
...By comparison with all this cruelty and bloodshed, Kristof and WuDunn estimate 400 to 800 people were killed when Deng's troops attacked Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989...
...Since peasants frequently want sons and 900 million of China's 1.2 billion people are peasants—well, you can guess what happens...
...Thus, American pressure can help on human rights, arms sales, coercive abortions, etc...
...Kristof says he held "the conventional liberal view that the Communist Revolution itself was not such a bad thing for China...
...For William Overholt, a managing director of Bankers Trust Company based in Hong Kong and author of The Rise of China, the boom's blessings blot out unpleasant aspects of Chinese life, including the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the one-child policy...
...Schell succumbs to youth worship, but it's true the Tiananmen rebels are appealing...
...Kristof and WuDunn admit they don't...
...He zinged reporters who relied on refugee accounts and never visited China...
...disapproval...
...Few leaders in recent history have so dramatically improved the lives of as many people as Deng did in his final years...
...Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961 was more disastrous: 30 million starved to death...
...They don't say a leftist like Edgar Snow, author of the Mao-idolizing Red Star over China, was blinded by ideology or fooled by Maoist propaganda...
...During the worst Maoist atrocities, Kristof and WuDunn write, reporters in Hong Kong had a better take on China than journalists in the country...
...Given China's zeal for capitalism, it's bound to evolve benignly, he thinks, and China's takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 will be peaceful...
...We should also be more open about embracing Taiwan in its march toward democracy," she says, and "play a deterrent role to reduce the risk of a mainland military attack...
...Schell's favorite is Wu'er Kaixi, who dressed down Premier Li Peng on national television...
...Kristof and WuDunn—he's a Harvard CHINA WAKES: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A RISING POWER Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn Times Books /408 pages / $25 MANDATE OF HEAVEN: A NEW GENERATION OF ENTREPRENEURS, DISSIDENTS, BOHEMIANS, AND TECHNOCRATS LAYS CLAIM TO CHINA'S FUTURE Orville Schell Simon & Schuster /447 pages / $25 THE RISE OF CHINA: HOW ECONOMIC REFORM IS CREATING A NEW SUPERPOWER William H. Overholt Norton/431 pages /$25 reviewed by FRED BARNES 74 The American Spectator October 1994 grad from rural Oregon, she grew up on the West Side of Manhattan and went to Cornell—offer a corrective...
...They bravely wade through Chinese history since 1949 and confess their rosy assessment of Mao's rule was wrongheaded...
...His problem is that his economic determinism gets the better of him...
...The U.S...
...Thirty million...
...This may sound wishy-washy, but it works...
...This wasn't to avert starvation...
...On the left, Tiananmen Square looms large, as does the unsavory side of the free market revolution that has obliterated the legacy of the left's former hero, Mao...
...In Mandate of Heaven, Orville Schell, a prolific writer on China (seven books), treats environmental problems as far more disturbing than coercive abortions and sterilization...
...My fear is now that President Clinton has extended most favored nation status to China, the U.S...
...After all, who knows if the signs of dynastic decay (mindless repression, widespread corruption, flourishing of cults) point to the collapse of China...
...In truth, the world knows very little about the one-child policy, or about the role of modern technology in effectuating it...
...If he returns to China, Wu'er says, "either I want to do something that is really politically meaningful, or I want to become a billionaire...
...He regards the student movement as evidence that themandate of heaven was "slipping from the hands of China's older Communist generation, and that the traditional virtues of righteousness, sincerity, loyalty, conscientiousness, and compassion that Chinese once considered to be the sine qua non of good rule were passing into the hands of a younger generation...
...Neither did diplomats, scholars or Chinese intellectuals...
...particularly conservatives) will think its job is done...
...No, the waitress never mentioned the policy, but it had to be in the back of her mind...
...T he indictment stands...
...It may well be that in China today, the modern machine that is having the most far-reaching impact on society is not the personal computer, the FAX or even the car, but rather the ultrasound scanner," says WuDunn...
...Roughly 170 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty in the Deng era...
...The compulsion was ideological: the cannibalism took place in public, often organized by Communist Party officials and people indulged communally to prove their revolutionary ardor...
...We don't give the government full credit for the rising living standards," they say in a chapter written jointly...
...This is not what my wife is used to hearing...
...It's not...
...But our Chinese waitress was envious...
...I don't think Overholt or Schell do either...
...The sooner, the better...
...Then came the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s...
...Never before had so many died in one country for any reason, either war or natural disaster...
...In 1994, though, Schell finds Wu'er working at a restaurant near San Francisco Airport...
...His embrace of "market Leninism" spurred China's breathtaking economic success since 1979...
...Of the 1.7 million missing girls each year, perhaps the largest number were simply detected before birth by ultrasound and then aborted...
...Contemporary China is not another Soviet Union, nor is it the totalitarian Chinese state of 1966 but rather a gigantic, vintage 1972 South Korea," Overholt insists...
...Foreigners sometimes point to China's new problems and get a bit hysterical," writes Kristof...
...American influence on China is limited, concedes WuDunn, but the Chinese are anxious to avoid U.S...
...But there's a caveat...
...Our waitress, a young woman who spoke perfect English, whispered to my wife Barbara how fortunate she is to have so many children...
...Yet China experts and the press have scarcely broached the subject of zealous enforcement of the one-child policy...
...That is a pretty good indictment of the state of China-watching today...
...Maybe he should get out more and talk to the Chinese refugee in the street...
...I don't...
...That was my brush with the most coercive "family planning" scheme in the Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...In Overholt's defense, he doesn't aim to give a social portrait of China...
...Kristof obtained secret Communist Party documents that acknowledged widespread cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution...
...Before the new family planning policy, a couple could afford to raise daughters and simply try again for a son," according to WuDunn...
...Three decades later, what is most striking about [Greene's] remarks is how wrong they were," says WuDunn...
...Or if the positive indicators (soaring economy, improving public health) are more significant...
...presence is a principal reason why there was no second Korean War, no serious warfare between Beijing and Taipei, no major war between neighboring Southeast Asian states, no dangerous worsening of Japanese-Chinese tensions," Overholt writes...
...Fundamentally the economy is booming not because of Communism but because Communism is collapsing...
...And the left wonders why it's wound up on the dungheap of history...
...As Kristof and WuDunn point out, China watchers overlooked the tens of millions killed by Mao Tse-tung's policies, and they aren't much better now...
...The darkest side of this economic miracle," he writes ominously, "was probably the exploitation of China's natural resources and the degradation of its environment...
...Another apologist, Felix Greene, wrote a well-received book called Awakened China in 1961...
...Parents don't want to "waste" their only chance for a child if ultrasound tests show it's a girl...
...Corruption, religious zeal and public skepticism may be the hallmarks not of a disintegrating country but simply of a normal nation...
...One final issue...
...China needs to preserve Hong Kong's prosperous economy...
...Schell concentrates on Tiananmen Square and its aftermath, and his reporting is vivid and detailed...
...And that was in Mao's benevolent period...
...But they note that Snow was wandering around China in 1960 during the worst days of the famine and denied its existence...
...K ristof and WuDunn, who write alternating chapters of their book, take an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach on where China is heading...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
