Michigan Today . . . Fall 1996

B O O K S Suggested Reading: Michigan Today takes notice of or reviews books by U-M faculty, graduates and students, and works published by the University of Michigan Press. We regret that we do not have space to publicize all of the unsolicited books we receive, nor to answer all inquiries and correspondence.

The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray
By James Miles, University of Michigan Press, 1996, $29.95.

Not only long-time China watchers but especiall those who are merely fascinated and curious about the world’s largest country but know little about it, will treasure this book. Miles, the BBC’s Beijing correspondent from 1988-94 and now the BBC World Service correspondent in Hong Kong, wrote the book in Ann Arbor last year, when he was on campus as a 1995 Journalism Fellow.

Interweaving all of the resources at a journalist’s disposal--official and secret documents, clandestine and public interviews, authorized and surreptitious journeys, deep historical and economic knowledge, intuition and a mastery of story-telling technique--Miles presents a sobering, if not disturbing picture, of the China of today and tomorrow.

"There are signs in China today that the country is being gripped by a kind of nationalist sentiment that potentially could veer toward a more closed-door policy than we have seen in the last few years," Miles told Michigan Today during a recent visit to Ann Arbor.

Fueling this nationalism is a volatile set of problems that have arisen both because and in spite of the 1990s economic boom resulting from the policies of China’s 91-year-old leader, Deng Xiaoping. "Despite the rapid economic growth of the last few years and China’s seeming confidence on the world stage," Miles said, "and despite the fact that you can go to coastal boom towns and go inland and see plenty of Chinese with mobile phones and beepers, there are a great many ordinary Chinese who look at all of this with two views: one, we’re getting richer and richer, and that’s fine, but an underclass has grown very rapidly, too."

The impoverishment of tens of millions, coupled with population growth of more then 15,000,000 persons a year, has prompted Deng to warn China’s neighbors that if they do not do all in their power to support the central government, rootless Chinese could flood their borders.

But ruined peasants and jobless workers and ex-bureaucrats are first and foremost a threat to China’s internal order. Miles quotes the "grim warning" of a book that stirred China, Looking at China With a Third Eye, by Wang Shen: "If we look back over Chinese history, we will discover an obvious truth, that every dynasty without exception was destroyed by drifters."

Not only is unemployment up in China, Miles points out in his book, the central government is losing wealth to the private sector, corruption is rampant in the public and private sectors, petty criminals and powerful gangs have mushroomed in city and countryside, and the Communist party is losing its intimidatory clout over citizens as market forces increasingly affect jobs, education, health care and housing-all areas the party used to control. And disparity in regional wealth could spark conflict that the Chinese Academy of Sciences, itself, described in a 1993 "worst-case-scenario" as "like post-Tito-Yugoslavia."

Even though China is "a Communist country that appears to have survived a domino-effect collapse, it is undergoing revolutionary change nonetheless," Miles said. "China is now more unstable than it was when the Tiananmen protest occurred seven years ago."

With no strong politician in sight ready to succeed the frail Deng, both the pro-communist and pro-capitalist forces can argue that they have the answers that could prevent the looming crisis. "Maybe the private sector could absorb people from the state sector if the government plays its cards right," Miles said, "but the crucial thing is government today lacks the mechanisms of control. Even so, it might muddle through."

"Things that happen in China can be interpreted in many different ways. It’s a country that’s endlessly fascinating. "So fascinating to him that his mother was obliged to arrange Chinese lessons for him from a family friend when he was only 10 "but positive that I wanted to be a foreign correspondent in China."

Although he doesn’t presume to predict what will happen, Miles did say what he thinks won’t happened. "Some observers say that a collective leadership or some other new form of government could emerge, but China is not ready for that. It needs someone with enormous power. Never in 5,000 years has there been a successful collective leadership."---JW.


Studies in the Economic History of Late Imperial China and The Chinese Economy, 1870-1949
By Albert Feuerwerker, the U-M Center for Chinese Studies, 1996, two volumes, $50 and $45, respectively.

Readers knowledgeable about Chinese history and about historical and economic issues relating to the waxing and waning of dynasties, the relationship between China’s center and its periphery, and the formation of China’s modern economy compared with Western Europe’s and Japan’s, will find Professor Feuerwerker’s deep and meticulous examination of China’s economic history just their inexhaustible cup of tea.

Many issues examined by Feuerwerker, the A.M. and H. P. Bentley Professor of History, resonate with James Miles’s book reviewed above. The conclusion of his chapter, "Questions About China’s Early Modern Economic History That I Wish I Could Answer," in the first volume, concedes, for example, "It is now enormously difficult to assess where either economic reform or economic history are heading in China in the last decade of the twentieth century."

The Wild Goose
By Mori Ogai, U-M Center for Japanese Studies, 204 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, 1996, $28.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

A quiet, delicate, ambivalent tale reminiscent of an Ozu film, The Wild Goose interweaves the experiences of a university student, a moneylender and the moneylender’s wife and mistress in Tokyo of the 1880s, when Japan hovered between ancient tradition and modern development. Ogai (1862-1922), an early giant of modern Japanese literature, received both a classical Chinese-oriented education in literature and medicine and a Western medical education in Germany. The beauty of the jacket, design and typeface of the novella adds an extra aesthetic dimension to the bittersweet nostalgia that imbues this miniature masterpiece.---JW.

The Sixteen Pleasures
By Robert Hellenga ’63 LS&A, Dell, New York, 1995, $11.95, softcover.

In 1966, Margot Harrington, an American book conservator, sets out for Florence to help save the city’s treasured art from water damage after the Arno has flooded. She arrives alone and without direction, yet through a series of often humorous and at times touching events, her life path unfolds before her. She finds a position restoring the library at Santa Caterina, a Carmelite convent, and discovers the only remaining and most famous copy of Renaissance erotica, The Sixteen Pleasures, double-bound with a prayer book. Margot rebinds the book with the intention of selling it to raise money for the convent. The challenge is to do so without the bishop becoming aware of her doings, as he will claim the book as his own.

Thick with art history, restoration technique, Italian cuisine and exquisite Florentine vistas, the novel takes you on a trip with a young woman in search of herself and a home.---Jane Ratcliffe.

Flyfisher’s World
By Nick Lyons ’58 MA, ’63 PhD, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, $23.

This stream of fly fishing consciousness flows from the perceptive Nick Lyons, carrying a collection of 50 tightly wrapped essays that bounce and wriggle irresistibly in the current of his gentle humor and self-deprecating wisdom. Many writers have tried to capture the essence of this peculiar sport and explain why some of us become addicted to it, but few have succeeded as well or as eloquently as Lyons. In his world, fly fishing is neither a religion as preached by some writers, nor a way of life as proclaimed by others.

"It is merely a lovely, useless activity that, somehow, has become an axial line in my life, an anchor," Lyons explains in the introduction to his 14th book. His wife, Mari, did the illustrations.

As long as you savor good writing, you don’t have to know anything about fly fishing to appreciate this marvelous book. It won’t teach you to fool a trout with a fly, but after you read it, you are probably going to want to go out and try.---John Barton.

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