 China is a society that has “been dragged from Stalinism to the extreme
fringes of capitalism in less than 20 years,” says Duncan Hewitt. “It’s
not unlike the changes in Eastern Europe, but on a much bigger scale.
The whole value system has been shaken, but people are still expected
to believe in Communism.”
Speaking in his home city of Shanghai, Hewitt – a respected China hand
who first studied in Xi’an in 1986 – is methodical and calm, warming to
his new role as interviewee rather than interviewer. An experienced
journalist, he has just published his first book: Getting Rich First:
Life in a Changing China (Chatto and Windus. ISBN: 978-0701178970). The
455-page tome is one of the most accessible and finely balanced
dissections of modern Chinese economy and society currently available.
“It’s the book I said I would never write,” Hewitt, says. “But perusing
bookstore shelves four years ago, I saw that most books written about
China were either about the Cultural Revolution or macroeconomics. I
wanted to explore the human side – how people’s lives have been
affected and how they rationalise this amazing ongoing urban
transformation.”
Hewitt knows China well, a fluent Mandarin speaker he first visited the
country to study in 1986. He returned, via a stint in Hong Kong, in
1997 as a correspondent for the BBC, firstly based in Beijing and later
in Shanghai. He now writes for Newsweek and other publications.
The book is centred around Deng Xiaoping’s famous assertion that
national wealth generation would best be served by allowing some of the
people to get rich first, and then funnelling this newly created
affluence throughout Chinese society from the top down. “Since then,”
Hewitt says, “China has experienced a social as well as economic
revolution. We have seen many of the enormous changes that western
countries went through over forty years following World War II, but
compressed into less than half that amount of time.”
A sharp observer and fine storyteller, Hewitt recounts personal tales
and musings from Chinese people he encountered on his journeys across
this vast country. Along the way, he discusses the young “Me”
generation, analyses media industry changes, meets migrant children in
an unlicensed mountain school, ponders religion with a Shanghai Bishop
and talks with young fans of the Japanese costume game Cosplay. He also
looks at the growing generation gap between the economically empowered
young generation and the nation’s often bewildered elderly citizens for
whom New China is rapidly passing by.
“To live in China in the early years of the twenty-first century is to
be surrounded by change, on a scale and at a pace arguably
unprecedented in human history,” Hewitt writes. “Almost everything
around me would have been completely unimaginable in China twenty years
ago.”
Hewitt’s ability to tease out often overlooked thoughts and sentiments
from ordinary people, allied with a neat sense of pacing and structure,
has resulted in an eminently readable account of the ongoing evolution
of modern China – one that, unusually, is not burdened by endless reams
of upwardly-curving economic statistics.
Last update : Monday, 10 September 2007
|
|
|
News & Interviews 
(0 vote)
