China from an Everyday Perspective

...Among the first batch of reporters assigned to Peking were many long-time China specialists who approached their task with a high degree of curiosity and enthusiasm...

...The authors examine leisure activity at length in a section entitled' 'Escape.'' Rather than attempting a survey of China's long and complex cultural history, they discuss both sanctioned and illicit forms of recreation to provide a window on the nation's nonworking life...

...Every park employs dozens of ticket takers, some to collect the two cents for a ticket, some to collect the stub...

...Bureaucrats garner privileges for their families and for associates who can do a favor in return...

...Of the legal avenues, card playing, movies and Peking opera are among the most popular...

...At the same time, they do not ignore the abiding characteristics in the land where one-quarter of humanity dwells...

...Jay and Linda Mathews, while not exactly diverging from the prevailing dark feeling, add some valuable shades of gray...

...Both members of the husband and wife team were Peking bureau chiefs from June 1979 to September 1980, he for the Washington Post, she for the Los Angeles Times...

...This story is not as hypnotizingly dramatic as the arrest of the Democracy Movement leaders, but it probably gives us a more accurate picture of the nature of popular discontent in China...

...Even with the most conscientious attention to birth control, these problems will never go away...

...From here, the writers move logically to the concept of guanxi, a topic that attracts the interest of most foreign observers...

...Thus, if the constant dealing fosters corruption and inequity, it also serves to partially recreate the closely knit social fabric that many Chinese who have left the countryside say they miss...

...Even when Chinese compliment a foreigner on his proficiency with their language or understanding of their culture, they consciously set him apart...

...Chinese cities exist on make-work," they observe in the opening pages...

...The authors of One Billion, who arrived in Peking in time to report on at least the fading vestiges of the Democracy Movement, write sympathetically of their meetings with participants in it, and with other critics of the regime...

...Hotels smother in room attendants...

...Yet they never lose sight of the vast majority of the population who simply struggle to get through the work day and hope to survive the next abrupt shift in the Party line...

...Nevertheless, in covering dissident currents, and particularly the Democracy Movement that flourished in late 1978 and early '79, many reporters have seemed to forget that the person seeking them out to express grievances may be only part of a larger picture...

...A chapter on humor offers many samples of the Chinese comicdia-logue, an art form that is often the vehicle for biting social and political satire...

...The Mathewses focus is the effect China's mind-boggling population has on all aspects of public and private existence...

...When the authorities in Canton, for instance, ordered the disconnection of all television antennas because they were worried about the bourgeois influenceof broadcasts from Hong Kong, the residents complied by day and restored the hookups at night...

...They are especially instructive in their accounts of how ordinary Chinese protest government interference in their lives without overt dissent...

...The dual professional involvement has enriched their collaboration, adding breadth to the coverage and balance to the judgments...

...The government soon gave up the fight, launching a sanitation campaign instead...

...They remind us that through all the numerous trials and upheavals since 1949, "The Chinese remain committed to themselves, to the Chinese way of life and to the old Chinese dream of a more prosperous future for their web of family and friends...

...Reviewed by Bruce Shenitz When Americans first began to visit China again in the early 1970s, a three week tour or a short stint on a commune was sufficient to establish one's credentials as an authority on the country...

...The correspondents point out that "using the back door" this way is not merely a symptom of widespread cynicism and opportunism...

...The authors never gloss over or apologize for the horrors of the People's Republic...

...The Chinese," the Mathewses conclude, "have done their most interesting work in the crevices of the system...

...The exchange is often based on friendship and mutual concern, and without it life would be unbearable in what they call, with some justification, "the village of one billion...

...By skillfully integrating scholarly findings and statistics with impressions and anecdotes, the authors offer a comprehensive portrait of China's social and political institutions, and a vivid sense of both the joys and difficulties of its people...

...Imagine your own office or factory with two or three times as many employees as it has now, working in the same space, with the same volume of work...

...As for underground delights, one chapter describes the present craze for pop music tapes smuggled fromTaiwan and Hong Kong...

...The bleak tone that most of their accounts have shared has therefore been all the more disturbing...

...The tunes are largely sentimental and romantic, fulfilling needs not met by such Socialist standbys as "Song of the Locomotive Engineers...

...A nurse, for example, obtains a hospital bed for a friend's mother because the friend has arranged a good job for the nurse's husband...

...Indeed, the traditional matchmaker, who decides young people's fate "with a good deal of kibitzing from outsiders," is viewed as part of the system...

...Although they are by no means the first to address this issue, it remains an apt motif...

...Western correspondents face a variety of difficulties in gauging public opinion inside the People's Republic...

...Even self-operating elevators always have operators...

...The objective of OneBillion, Jay and Linda Mathews explain, is "to tell the stories, jokes and conversations which illumine these unchanging Chinese needs...

...They have succeeded admirably...

...These include a prison network comparable to the Gulag, a stringent birth control policy that sometimes compels abortion in the third trimester, the re-emergence of female infanticide, and the persistence of hunger in the countryside...

...The Mathewses ability to maintain a fair perspective is further evident in their estimation of Chinese political attitudes...

...Usually translated as "relationships" or "connections," this is the human machinery that keeps China functioning-and governs the distribution of scarce commodities and services...

...After relations were normalized in 1979, however, and hundreds of teachers, scholars, businessmen, and journalists from the U.S...

...took up residence in the People's Republic, it became clear that the largely sanguine impressions gathered during the brief visits were on the whole deceptive if not inaccurate...

...The central theme of the book is expressed in the title...

...How can an American or a European grasp the crowding...

...Beyond the constraints imposed by any closed society, they must contend with the fact that their physical appearance unavoidably marks them as strangers in a country with a long isolationist tradition...