Books

The Party’s ending

The Changing Face of China by John Gittings; Oxford University Press; Price: Rs.385; 372 pp

There is an emerging consensus of informed opinion around the world that the new millennium is all set to become the Chinese century. With its impressive annual GDP growth of 9-10 percent, which it has sustained since 1978, the world’s most populous nation (1.5 billion) which right up to the 15th century regarded itself — and not without just cause — as the centre of the world or Middle Kingdom, is poised to take its place at the head of the global top table. The five centuries interregnum when Chinese civilization went into decline, and the humiliations its people suffered particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries until the communists led by Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949, is just a bad memory.

Within neighbouring India which like the Middle Kingdom was also a superpower until the 16th century, and whose historical memory of exalted status has been re-ignited by economic reforms of 1991, there is general acknowledgement that in the great development race, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is way ahead. But there is inadequate awareness of the widening distance between the two nations which follow divergent, competitive ideologies.

Currently PRC’s installed electricity capacity is 531,000 Mw (cf. India’s 83,288 Mw); 300 million tonnes of steel (51); 419 million tonnes of fertilizer (44). Moreover China boasts 3.48 million km of highways (0.72); 85 percent literacy (65); attracts $45 billion annually as foreign investment ($10 billion) and 22 million tourists (cf. India’s 3.5 million). Indeed on most parameters of development, the Chinese dragon which has established itself as the consumer goods factory of the new globalised economy, is streets ahead of lumbering elephantine India.

Nor is this a matter of mere competitive statistics. As any Indian businessman/trader in Hong Kong, Malaysia or Indonesia — where archetypical representatives of the two communities face-off on a daily basis in the high street — will vouch, the Chinese harbour deep-seated contempt for Indians, whom they would dearly love to reduce to subordinate status. Moreover there’s the inconvenient truth that the first round has already gone to our aggressive northern neighbour. In the 1962 Sino-Indian border war fought in the north-east, the People’s Liberation Army humiliated its Indian counterpart, and currently occupies a large swathe of Indian territory. Worse, China claims that the whole of Arunachal Pradesh (area: 87,343 sq. km; pop: 1 million) as Chinese territory.

That’s why it’s important for all sentient Indians who can look beyond their noses to read this salutary history of communist China, penned by author-journalist John Gittings who was the China specialist and East Asia editor of the highly respected London-based liberal daily, The Guardian for over two decades (1983-2003). The Changing Face of China recounts the socio-economic history of this fiercely competitive nation from the time its legendary communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949 to the year 2004.

What are the prime factors behind this amazing rise of communist China repeatedly written off as a basket case plagued by a huge population, inefficient central planning and a confused self-serving dictatorial oligarchy dominated by the tyrannical Chairman Mao? The answer to this question is detailed in this marvellous work of scholarship and insight, which highlights the great failures of its communist regime and gives credit to the resilience and perseverance of the essentially entrepreneurial Chinese people whose thinking, as Gittings says in his foreword, has always been "far more ‘liberated’ than of its leaders".

Contrary to the popular belief harboured by India’s communists and the Left, the rise and rise of modern China isn’t the handiwork of Chairman Mao who ruled China with an iron hand until his death in 1976. The bourgeois leaders of India’s freedom movement — Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Ambedkar etc — were intellectually much better equipped than Mao and his gang who established the PRC two years after India’s independence. In actual fact, the much eulogised Mao was a crude peasant with little regard for human life, who transformed China into a vast laboratory for his ideological experiments of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

After summarising the troubled history of communist China during the Mao Zedong era, over two-thirds of The Changing Face of China focuses upon the socio-economic development and modernisation of the world’s most populous nation. According to Gittings, the turning point for China came in 1975 when in his last public appearance before the Fourth National Peoples Congress, prime minister Zhou Enlai outlined the ‘four modernisations’ — comprehensive modernisation in agriculture, industry, defence and science and technology — which China should aim to achieve during the period 1986-2000, after completion of the ‘relatively comprehensive’ industrial and economic reforms of the period 1965-80. This simple but clearly articulated agenda was enthusiastically adopted and accelerated by Deng Xiaoping to transform China (which to the credit of its Maoist leadership had successfully invested in primary education and health) into a contemporary powerhouse.

But hang on, the great development race between the two Asian tigers isn’t over yet. It’s still maintainable that India’s infrastructure built on democratic foundations, is stronger than communist China’s. Our northern neighbour didn’t have post-independence India’s free press and media or even its agonisingly slow independent judiciary, which could have prevented the violent excesses of the Chinese development effort.

It’s arguable that with its huge toll of lives during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and party excesses on a daily basis, the Chinese Communist Party has generated a huge reservoir of subterranean resentment within the populace, and it might collapse as dramatically as did the 70 million member Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1985-89. My bet is that within the next half century, Taiwan will ideologically re-conquer mainland China. That’s when the explosive entrepreneurial energy of the Chinese people will be fully released, and the United States of China will become the new millennium’s undisputed superpower.

Improved communications guide

The Voice of Authority — 10 Communication Strategies Every Leader Needs to Know by Diana Booher; Tata McGraw Hill; Price: Rs.350; 212 pp

Although most vice-chancellors, principals and educationists living in the ivory towers of academia don’t seem to know it, education institutions and corporates have a lot in common. Both deliver valuable goods or services, need to be driven by strong objectives, need to develop on-the-ball employees committed to teamwork and innovation, and provide customer satisfaction. Very often the fundamental difference between a successful and respected education institution/company and also-rans is the quality of leadership. Benchmark education institutions require inspirational leaders who can deliver value to students, motivate and retain faculty, and encourage pedagogy innovations, as much as the corporate world.

And the prerequisite and hallmark of great leaders, says Fortune 500 consultant and internationally renowned business communication expert Diana Booher, is that they need to be "great communicators". "Success in business is all about how well you communicate — to your co-workers and customers… Companies lose employees and customers every week because they can’t teach people to communicate clearly and candidly with each other. Period. It’s that simple. And that complex," writes Booher, who has authored over 43 books including the best-selling Communicate with Confidence.

In this lucidly written book, which vice-chancellors, principals and teachers as much as corporate honchos managing multi-billion dollar businesses need to read, Booher digs into over 25 years of consulting experience with some of the largest international business enterprises to give readers ten clear-cut strategies to communicate effectively. From the most basic and routine messages to more sensitive bad news, there’s advice on how to manage reactions, communicate with clout and lead others with success.

Each of the ten communication nostrums is elaborated in a separate chapter with a generous dose of real-life examples, anecdotes and specific ‘how to’ guidelines. For instance in the chapter ‘Is it Clear’, Booher provides mind-bending examples of convoluted messages versus clear ones. An exhortation to use technology couched as "the efficiency with which an operation utilises its available equipment is an influential factor in productivity" can be more profitably phrased as "if you use your equipment efficiently, you can do more". She provides a list of 22 "bureaucratic buzzwords" such as thought leaders, deliverables, rightsizing, core competencies, etc that have been so "overused that the meaning has long since been lost". This is followed by useful advice on how leaders can communicate clearly: avoid phoniness and insincerity, use plain English, start with a punch line, and avoid using set templates for communicating important messages.

In a new era when corporates, NGOs and education institutions are heavily dependent on modern technology — the mobile phone, e-mail, text messaging, online chat and blogging — to convey information, Booher puts a premium on face-to-face communication. "New technology appears and disappears from the scene. The one constant is human communication. Don’t hide behind technology," she advises in this compendium, which includes a useful table advising readers when to e-mail, phone, or talk face-to-face.

Although ex facie a simple DIY textbook offering homilies, actually The Voice of Authority is a well-researched study peppered with anecdotes which substantiate the effectiveness of the author’s communication strategies. For example, she quotes the Watson Wyatt Communication ROI Study which found that companies with effective communication practices have a 19 percent higher market premium and a 57 percent higher shareholder return (over five years) than companies with ineffective communication practices.

While the volume is written with corporate leaders in mind, the ten golden communication strategies detailed are as likely to prove useful to aspiring leaders in any walk of life. Recommended reading for educational heads struggling to inspire and motivate teachers, handle crises and lead successfully.