This is China! blog

This past weekend I had the pleasure of introducing Simon Gjeroe to local Suzhou residents interested in hearing dramatic tales from the China’s warlord period. We had gathered for a monthly Royal Asiatic Society (Suzhou branch) talk on Chinese culture and society. Simon is proprietor of Beijing Postcards, which sells reprints and books of photos taken by foreigners visiting China in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The warlord period in China took place during the roaring 1920s, when warlords shifted sides and assassinated each other as often as they changed concubines, and when the majority of expats in Northeast China lived in the lap of luxury. Simon gave us all a unique peek into the life and times Zhang Zuolin, one of the mightiest warlords in China during the chaotic 1920s, as chronicled and photographed by the Danish arms dealer and adviser to Zhang, Robert Christensen. He also showed a 25-minute long documentary about the era, all of which was made up of photos and film footage taken by Christensen himself.

Simon revealed that five years ago Chinese were universally embarrassed by the photos taken of the country in the late 1800s through mid-1900s. “Why,” they would ask him, “do you want to look at old photos of how poor China was?” Now, Simon said, the Chinese make up the majority of his customers in Beijing. I was astonished when Simon pointed out that nearly all the old photographic and film images of China are from foreigners. The Chinese have little idea of what their lives really were like during the end of the Qing and warlord periods.

That is, not beyond the latest rounds of soap operas on Chinese TV.

Listen to my interview with Simon here .

Technorati Tags: beijing postcards, bill dodson, china, history, robert christensen, simon gjeroe, warlords

This past weekend Paul French came out to Suzhou to introduce his latest book to the Royal Asiatic Society. Midnight in Peking is a recounting of the true-life murder of a lovely British expat in 1937, just as the Japanese are about to sweep into the city. I interviewed Paul about the book and discussed with him his motivations for excavating the story and for trying to solve what has been a cold case for more than 70-years. The book has been top of the readers’ lists in Hong Kong and Australia for the past month.

Listen to the interview here.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, china, detective, midinight in peking, murder, mystery, paul french, peking

Paul French is giving a book talk in Suzhou this weekend, Sunday, at the Bookworm downtown. Penguin books just published his murder mystery, Midnight in Peking, in which he digs into the unsolved, real-life murder of a beautiful British expat, Pamela Werner, in Peking in 1935, days before the Japanese invade the city. It’s Paul’s 7^th book, his first historical fiction.

Apparently, Pamela’s body was horribly mutilated and dumped in a gully in the British legation. Though the mystery was never solved, Paul takes a crack at it based on the notes from the Chinese and British investigations, interviews with people who actually knew the girl (survivors are in the nineties, now) as well as the notes her father left behind in pursuit of the truth and justice. Orgies, drugs, booze and other unmentionable stuff (like the stuff I just mentioned) were apparently involved in the circumstances of the crime, making this an especially good read. A couple weeks ago the novel was the third best-selling book in Australia. The book will be on sale at the Bookworm.

The Suzhou Bookworm, Gunxiu Fang 77, Shi Quan Jie. 30rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 70 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer. For more information, contact Bill Dodson at bdodson88@gmail.com.

Technorati Tags: bookworm, midnight in peking, paul french, royal asiatic society, suzhou

Georges Simenon is one of my favorite mystery writers. He wrote over 200 novels in his lifetime, including the Commissioner Maigret mysteries – engaging, compact, and just plain fun to read.

Now Shanghai just might have it’s own Georges Simenon in the person of Paul French. Penguin Viking has just published his novel, Midnight in Peking. Paul is author of several books on the history of Westerners in China before 1949, and is also a well-known China market analyst.

According to the book’s website, one bitterly cold night in January 1937, just as the Japanese army is sweeping southward to capture Peking, the body of a Western woman is dumped, mutilated, in the Foreign Legation Quarter:

… It belongs to Pamela Werner, the daughter of a former British consul to China, and when the details of her death become known, people find it hard to credit that any human could treat another in such a fashion. Even as the Japanese noose on the city tightens, the killing of Pamela transfixes Peking.

Seventy-five years after these events, Paul French finally gives the case the resolution it was denied at the time. Midnight in Peking is the unputdownable true story of a murder that will make you hold your loved ones close, and also a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era.

The Shanghai launch of the book will be at the Glamour Bar this coming Sunday, September 18, 4:30pm:

Information: http://www.m-theglamourbar.com/Upcoming-events.html
Tickets: 6350 9988 or reservations@m-onthebund.com
RMB75, students RMB20 – tickets include a drink

Try not to miss the event; I’m sure it will be huge fun.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, midnight in peking

I’ve just finished reading Tim Harford’s new book, “Adapt: ‘Why Success Always Starts with Failure“, in which he discusses situations that present Fundamentally Unidentified Questions (FUQs). Econometrician Josh Angrist actually came up with the concept and the term (and the acronym), Hartford writes.

A prime example of a FUQed situation Hartford offers includes the effect of carbon dioxide emissions on the world’s climate. No one knows for sure what – if any – outcome there will be from fouling the air as we have since the beginning of the industrial revolution, since we cannot run control experiments with another earth that, for instance, has no emissions produced by industrialization.The implications for earth and human civilization are ultimately unanswerable. We’ll know when we get there, in other words.

As I was reading this chapter I thought about China and its great experiment to build a sustainable society founded on socialism with Chinese characteristics; or, read another way, capitalism run wild with an autocracy as steward. It’s rather a unique experiment in world history, given that it involves nearly a fifth of humanity building infrastructure and manufacturing stuff at a pace never before seen in human history.

This weeks’ Economist Magazine (September 2, 2011 issue)  also put me in mind of the extent to which China is FUQed. The magazine’s survey of Chinese business structures includes basically four different kinds of experiments, all vying for viability in China:

1. completely State-owned Enterprises (SOEs);
2. joint ventures between SOEs and foreign manufacturers involving technology transfers and market access;
3. fully privately-owned Chinese companies in which the government frequently mettles;
4. local government champions

As the Economist writes, “At the very least, they constitute an important series of large-scale economic experiments with implications for China’s economy and, because of China’s size, the world, too.”

Now that’s got to be F*@#ed up.

The folks at Bachelors Degree Online pointed out a rather nice list of Chinese classics in translation (and more updated fare, as well) that anyone who would like to gain a greater sense of Chinese culture and modern society would likely benefit from reading. I’ve only read a couple on the list, and seen the classic soap operas upon which they’re based. My favorite is The Water Margin, which has wonderful fight scenes and characterizations big as life.

Enjoy.

I recently had the opportunity to host Graham Earnshaw at the Royal Asiatic Society’s latest gathering in Suzhou. Graham is CEO of Sinomedia, which publishes the China Economic Review, among other media. Graham is also publisher of Earnshaw Books, which reprints the stories of China Hands from before World War II, and which publishes the Old Tales series of books that relate the more salacious stories of cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore.

His latest book The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet is a travelogue about his journey on-foot from Shanghai to the Tibetan plains. It’s a fun, insightful and languorous read. Highly recommended.

You can listen to my podcast interview with Graham here.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a dinner party in Shanghai where Oded Shenkar was also in attendance. Shenkar is author of the business book  The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job. He is also Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management  and Professor of Management & Human Resources at Ohio State University. He is a small, relaxed man who laughs easily and is an excellent listener. We swapped book publishing stories (his publisher is also John Wiley, albeit the American division; I worked with the Singapore division on my book) and the trials and tribulations of a writer and researcher trying to get his ideas across as unadulterated as possible to as wide an audience as possible.

He told the story of the Chinese translation of The Chinese Century, which was translated by a state-run publisher. He said the Chinese edition was much shorter than the original English version. “They cut an entire chapter of the book …,” he said, then paused for effect. “…the chapter on intellectual property rights violations in China!” he laughed. Also, he added, the Chinese version in the frontispiece notes how Shenkar had “accepted revisions of errors in the original English-language version,” or some such verbiage. “Imagine,” he laughed again, “it was like I had written  some kind of Mao-era confession!”

Shenkar’s latest book is Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge (Harvard Press, 2010).

Graham Earnshaw’s The Great Walk of China is a genuine pleasure to read. I had been reading the journal entries he had been publishing at the back-end of The China Economic Review (of which he is the publisher) for years, and always looked forward to getting through the magazine to see what Graham had gotten up to. In 2006 Graham decided to walk from Shanghai to Tibet in a due-west direction, over hill, over dale. Along the way he talks with whoever would like to pass the time with him and hands out his business card to all and sundry – even to local police, who find his foreign-ness disorienting and disconcerting. Graham has been living in Greater China for 30 years, and speaks, reads and writes Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese languages.

Along the way Graham chats with grannies, children, farmers, students, teachers, former Red Guards and more. I admire how he refuses to be bullied by local constables who want to mark out their territory, and was fascinated by the remnants of the Cultural Revolution he discovers. The cognitive dissonance between the Party’s exhortations writ large on crumbling brick walls and the realities of modernization closing in on the countryside are jarring. His writing is unpretentious, and his approach companionable. It’s a very different sort of read than other travelogues about China, in which writers tend to distance themselves and judge the Chinese they meet during their travels. The book is an affectionate look at the country and its people.

I found it a great read because it’s so easy when you live in China long enough to get jaded about The Chinese Way, the blah blah blah about 4,000 years of history, the pushing and jostling for poll position – whether buying train tickets, flagging a taxi or buying steam buns – the spitting. Graham’s book helped remind me of what attracted me to China in the first place, why I do have a level of admiration for the people, and the extraordinary recent history that many of them have lived through.

Highly recommended.

Graham will be talking about his book on Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 4pm at The Suzhou Bookworm, Gunxiu Fang 77, Shi Quan Jie, as part of the Royal Asiatic Society series of talks on Chinese culture and history through Western eyes. He’ll also be introducing the writings of some of those writers of a bygone era, which Earnshaw Books has re-published.

30rmb for students; 50 rmb for members; 70 rmb for non-members. Includes one glass of wine or beer.

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting Helen Wang in my adopted home of Suzhou. Helen is the author of The Chinese Dream, which has garnered a fair amount of critical acclaim. Helen is a native of Hangzhou, and has lived in America for 20 years. She calls the San Francisco Bay area home. She was visiting Suzhou to give a book talk about The Chinese Dream at the local Bookworm. She was gracious enough to accept my invitation to tour some of the more charming and traditional lanes of Suzhou, with its gardens, canals and tea houses. It was a great opportunity for two authors to sit down together to complain how much hard work goes into writing books, how the pay is lousy, and how rewarding the process ultimately is.

Though my book China Inside Out covers three critical issues China’s middle class – property, education, and health care – Helen’s book discusses Chinese people’s aspirations and how they went about realizing the good life for themselves. As was my feeling three years ago, when I first read the manuscript, I find the most engaging interviews (she interviewed more than a hundred Chinese people in researching the book) to be in the chapter on religion: the ultimate search for meaning beyond simply making money to show off to your neighbors.

During the intimate and animated book talk later that evening, one Western participant voiced his observation that the young Chinese he teaches are interested first, second and third in making money. He expressed his doubt about interest in a hereafter beyond gaining reassurance that an individual would be able to make more money. I chimed in with my observations that there seems to be a nascent movement among young white collar professionals toward charity donation and work.

Nevertheless, The Chinese Dream is a good read for American audiences that would like a translation of some of the Chinese motivations involved in the development of China’s middle class. For Western expats steeped in the day-today vagaries of the China’s middle class, the book requires a more nuanced sell.

Technorati Tags: book reviews