Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar; HarperCollins; Price: Rs.395; 273 pp
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Although the super-human People’s Republic of China — the world’s most populous (1.3 billion) and fastest growing economy clocking annual GDP growth rates of 10 percent-plus per year since 1978 — is the most discussed and written-about country in recent times, it remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In neighbouring India — the second most populous (1.2 billion) country worldwide — where dilettante post-independence leaders were hitherto given to proffering India’s large population as the excuse for non-performance, China’s huge national development effort which has lifted over 500 million people out of abject poverty during the past 60 years, raises embarrassing questions.
Why has high-potential, resource-rich independent India gifted with strong academic and entrepreneurial cultures, remained a laggard in the global development race? How has the PRC managed to attain 92 percent literacy, and particularly high women’s literacy, despite its disabling tradition of binding women’s feet? More significantly, how despite its late start, has this communist-propaganda suffused country managed to build great universities, four of which are ranked among the top 200 in the world, while only 63 percent of India’s adult population is literate, and our best university is ranked 274? And how come China where English, the global language of learning and knowledge is virtually unknown, has managed amazing engineering feats such as transforming ancient Shanghai into one of the world’s most modern cities and building the Beijing-Lhasa railway line which rises over 14,000 ft. above sea level, when India has barely any manufacturing or engineering innovation to show after six decades of detailed central planning?
The answers — perhaps not wholly satisfactory but honestly attempted — to all these and more questions are to be found in this intelligent account of the five years (2002-07) Pallavi Aiyar spent in Beijing, as a correspondent of the highly-respected Chennai-based daily The Hindu. A well-grounded alumna of St. Stephen’s Delhi, Oxford University (UK) and the London School of Economics, Aiyar arrived in China in 2002 (at the behest of her Spanish fiancé working with the European Commission in Beijing), to teach English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. While teaching she also learned to speak and write Mandarin, a qualification which enabled her to become the “first and only Chinese speaking Indian foreign correspondent in China”, writing for the Indian Express and later for The Hindu.
Although essentially a diary of her China years, Smoke and Mirrors is also a compendium of intelligent observation and measured comment, mercifully shorn of the over-detailed trivia which characterise run-of-the-mill personal memoirs. Instead the author has made a determined and successful effort to translate the impact of the economic reforms initiated in 1978 by the late Chinese premier Deng Xiao Ping, which have transformed communist China into a global economic powerhouse, upon actual people with universal quirks and personality traits.
But communist China’s new-found prosperity, which the author makes plain, outdistances democratic India’s half-hearted efforts in that direction by a massive margin, has been bought at a heavy price which most middle class Indians are unlikely to be willing to pay. The reality, graphically illustrated through this insightful work, is that all 1.3 billion people of the PRC are pathetically dependent upon the mercy and goodwill of party functionaries and government officials. In China, unlike in India, there is no alternative grievance redressal machinery. Trade unions, independent media, opposition parties, and an indepen-dent judiciary are conspicuously missing.
Although Aiyar believes that having kept its promise to deliver material prosperity to the people, the communist regime in China is there to stay for the foreseeable future, this reviewer begs to differ. As China transforms into a middle class society, the thoughts of its historically intelligent, cooperative and hard-working people will incrementally turn to philosophical issues such as rule of law, freedom of expression and democracy. An appeal for democratic reform and protests against human-rights abuses among China’s fledgling middle class, whose support is crucial for the Communist Party, is inevitable.
Increasingly the eyes of the people of China are looking across the Strait of Formosa towards Chinese Taipei (aka Taiwan), where economic affluence has been demonstrably delivered under a democratic system of governance. The day is not far when Taiwan will conquer communist China with the force of its ideology, a denouement which will usher in a new era of global prosperity.
Dilip Thakore