Review of Richard Baum’s China Watcher

Forty years.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Feast your spherical peeps on a tightly summarized saga of four decades of delicious China watching, courtesy of retired UCLA scholar and eminent US Sinologist Richard Baum.

That’s essentially what you’re getting in this 296pp cut of around-the-horn PRC goodness, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom. Oh yes!

For the writer, it’s a veritable walk down memory lane which began right about the end of the chaotic Cult Rev years. Carrying through to Deng’s Reform and Opening years, it continued into the rip-roaring goodness of the Special Economic Zones/SEZ era.

Baum witnessed the Xidan Democracy Wall protests of the late ’70s, the acorn-collecting, squirrel-like saving eighties, the craven PLA turkey shoot on that enormous square in front of the ochre-colored Imperial complex bearing the portrait of that revolutionary dude (the same dude on the book cover above — and no, I’m not taking any sort of position whatsoever on the law-enforcing slaughter of hundreds of unarmed civilians), and Deng’s famous 1992 Southern Tour.

He wraps things up with China’s “in the wilderness” 1990s, its 2001 WTO ascension, the nation’s mid-naughts economic consolidations, the beginning of the Hu Jintao era, the SARS epidemic, the Sanlu milk scandal, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Tibetan and Uighur riots of the same year, the glorious Olympic Games (China’s neo-adolescent “coming out party”), all the way up to the bright harmonious koombayah future — hexie shehui-style.

Baum, moderator of the famous Chinapol listserv, opted to compile a decidedly non-scholarly work of non-fiction this time ’round tailor-made for the Zhongguotong (China Hand) and layman alike. What an impressive piece of work indeed! If Baum doesn’t publish again for the rest of his academic career, China Watcher will have been a fitting cap on a marvelous career dash. Still, if he’s not into the whole swan song thing, rest assured the author can publish again and I’ll be right back here with yet another snappy review.

The book is organized chronologically and reads for the most part like an autobiography.

While not clinging rigidly to the autobio genre nor being doctrinaire about time lines and similar nonsense, Baum leapfrogs across history, embellishing on lesser-known phases of China’s magical development story for the benefit of readers who aren’t as well-versed in Sinology, writ large .

While you’ll likely have heard of the bulk of events Baum faithfully transcribes, I was grateful for his “five sides of the coin” elaboration on stuff that’s now become lore in the Western contemporary historical canon. Examples? The aftermath of the Shanghai Communique of 1972, the on-again, off-again China-Taiwan kerfuffle, not to mention the months, weeks, and days leading up to that human cull which took place in that square in a certain northern capital on that certain summer day back in 1990 less one year. ;-)

What Baum does excellently in China Watcher is supply a wide-angle lens treatment to the major events of the past four decades, the sorts of things only a person who was actually on the ground at the time can write about credibly. Imagine getting the fly-on-the-wall play-by-play half-an-hour before the recording of the Zapruder film, and you’ll readily realize what I mean.

Rather than replicate Angilee Shah‘s stellar June 2010 review at China Beat, I thought I’d do another one of my famous chapter-by-chapter breakdowns for what’s quickly becoming a twenty-ten must-read.

CHAPTER LISTING:

1) The Occidental Tourist: Nice play on words here about the famous 1988 film. Baum describes in this chapter how he actually “fell” into China studies, rather than actively pursuing career Sinology. It all began as a dare to prove to his father wrong that the Chairman wasn’t anything like Stalin, that Mao was up to something better with his new movement. Like a good movie script, this was the inciting incident of Baum’s fateful meeting with noted UC Berkley China experts Bob Scalapino and Chalmers Johnson. Baum would never look back…

2) A Dissertation Is Not a Dinner Party: In 1966, Baum boarded a trans-Pacific flight with his then-wife Carolyn and infant son Matthew in tow, landing on the rainswept island of Taiwan, or what was then referred to as the Republic of China/ROC. As part of his dissertational studies, Baum was obliged to undergo intensive Mandarin training in Taipei as he boned up on his research methodologies. Basically, his writ was to glean as much information as possible about the PRC in the days before free visits to China were restricted only to “friends of China.” Lots of Hong Kong stuff features in this chapter. Baum got close to the People’s Republic, but didn’t get the PRC cigar. Peering over into the fishing village of Shumchun (then-Shenzhen), he longed to see the Chinese up close and personal though it wasn’t to be. For those keen on reading what Taiwan was like under dictatorship (and a KMT/GMD intelligence dragnet), this is your chapter!

3) Confessions of a Peking Tom: A key chapter colored by the backdrop of the higher-level political machinations which took place at the chaotic end of the Mao era. China opens itself to the world with the official exchange of diplomats between the US and China. The Kissinger-Nixon-Mao confabs, the changing of the Zhongnanhai guard, the trial of the Gang of Four (boo!), the Hua/Deng rivalry (yay!), and finally, Baum’s heartfelt admission about his bitter academic rivalries fomented around this time that would dog him for the rest of his academic career. We track with Baum as his renown swells within “China watching” circles, and he peppers us for the first time with his limerick-spinning abilities that were used like poison-tipped projectiles to offend his most stalwart detractors back in the day. Funny!

4) Through the Looking Glass: Baum enters China for the first time, crossing over the Friendship Bridge (HK’s Lowu crossing) in May 1975 along with a delegation of “95 of the world’s fastest, strongest athletes.” Just like that, he was suddenly inside. The delegation visited three large Chinese cities: Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing during the competitions, and it was great to read what those places looked and sounded like back in the late seventies. Communist Party (CCP) political machinations reverberate behind-the-scenes as Baum visits various scenes of past Chinese Cult Rev crimes. There are banquets, social customs, and Maoist political doggerel galore!

5) Democracy Deferred: The death of Mao. The rise of Hua, then Deng. China closes the books on 1966-1976′s Cultural Revolution. The Xidan (Democracy) wall. Democracy posters and placards. Civil unrest. Baum’s second and third trips to China, this time as a full-fledged accredited academic. The arrest of democracy advocates Wei Jingsheng and Fu Yuehua, foreshadowing the more brutal clampdowns that are to come a decade later on that large square at the center of Beijing where students and academics went on long hunger strikes and then built this tall statue thingy to commemorate a certain non-existent aspirational Chinese political ideology and then “taken away.” You know the place I’m talking about, right?

6) Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics: From ’84 to the late 1990s, Baum lectured aboard a Chinese cruise ship that would ply the country’s eastern seaboard. He was in China often to witness first-hand its workforce’s rapid evolution from a gaggle of faceless employees at state-owned factories (SOEs) to the nascent getihu entrepreneurs. Baum tells of the rabble-rousing CCP reformers Fang Lizhi and Hu Yaobang, and the CCP’s desire to avoid a catastrophic meltdown as had been steadily affecting the USSR. Then…the early days of those fateful big square demonstrations by Chinese students during that year’s spring. You know what I’m talking about, right?

7) The Road to Tiananmen: In February 1989, Baum is hastily flown to Camp David along with several prominent US Sinologists to debrief then-President Bush (I) about the latter’s upcoming China visit. He’s asked about the wisdom of inviting dissident Fang Lizhi to the US Embassy’s sponsored banquet. Baum vociferously advises against it — Fang’s a marked man, he tells the President’s handlers. But to no avail. The White House invites Fang anyways, but he’s prevented from attending the dinner by the Sinostapo. Later in May of that year, Chinese student protests commence in earnest in the Square, heralding worse things to come. Soviet Premier Mihail Gorbachev‘s visit to Beijing is a pretext for students to clamor for greater political freedoms. The poop is almost ready to hit the Chinese fan. D’oh!

8) After the Deluge: The human cull happens. Fish in a barrel. Blood everywhere. International censure. Hell breaks loose in the PRC. Baum is bravely back in China by August 1989 and the country is under total dissident lockdown. Baum-er can’t get an honest word in edgewise about the spring’s events nor from any of the Chinese academics or CCP members who agree to meet him. They feel compelled to senselessly blather the government line, doing so for the “benefit” of their prominent foreign academic guest. It frustrates him, especially the faux-exhibits to the glory of the PLA he’s taken to during this trip. Excellent p152 breakdown of the various stages of Chinese “friendship or enmity” (friend, friendly personage/youhao renshi, “those who really love China but know all the vices of Chinese communism/not easily fooled,” “those people who love China but hate Chinese communism,” and lastly, “those who either didn’t know or didn’t care much about China”).

9) China Rising: Explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the wake of the month after May on the day after the 3rd, er…Incident (wink, wink). The fall of Soviet and Eastern European “Communism” for all-time. The Velvet Revolution and the bloodless handover of power in in the Eastern Bloc nations. China makes a Faustian bargain with its citizens: we continue to pump through strong economic growth and a life of wealth and privilege for you and your families, but you leave the governing and statesmanship to crooked us. The handover of British HK to China in 1997. Former HK Governor Chris Patten flipping the bird to Beijing. The NATO/US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, 1990. W.’s first Presidential term, and what that suddenly means for Sino-US relations.

10) God in the Machine: The rapidly improving state of the Chinese telecommunication network — especially mobile — and the origins of the Great Firewall of China. Pernicious Internet censorship and the more than 100,000 cops who monitor the Chinese internet daily. Forbidden search phrases, taboo web pages, and restricted foreign sites. Jing Jing and Cha Cha reminding Chinese netizens that certain material is potentially objectionable. The origins of Richard Baum’s Chinapol news group, with more than 900 subscribers in twenty-five countries throughout the Americans, Europe, Asia, and Australasia (and I quote from p178: 397 scholars, 262 journalists, 98 NGO and think tank analysts, 96 diplomats and government analysts, and a scattering of independent consultants, international lawyers, and others). Internet activism, Chinese-style!

11) The Wild, Wild West: In July 2001, Baum casts off for his first trip to Western China. He meets up with Kevin Stuart, who teaches English to a group of upwardly-mobile Tibetans out of his Xining, Qinghai apartment. Stuart is organizing a school for local kids who are game to improve their English speaking skills. Baum returns the following July 2002 “to visit five western Chinese provinces by air, train, bus, boat, taxi, and on foot,” toting along eight UCLA undergraduates, three graduate students, plus three faculty members to man the school in Xining where Stuart has set up shop. Baum witnesses first-hand China’s Great Western Development and how slow the process has been taking to get western Chinese incomes to rise to the level of those in its eastern cities. He’s warmly welcomed by the various Tibetan communities he meets along the way and is dismayed to witness how condescending the Han majority — specifically Beijing — is with its Naxi, Tibetan, and Mangghuer minorities, likening them to “little children needing the guidance of their Han parent.” The first rumblings of the riots which will soon rock Tibet and Xinjiang throughout most of 2008.

12) Beijing Revisited: Baum is back in Beijing during the fall of 2005 to collaborate in the establishment and running of the Joint Center for International Studies (JCIS) at Beijing’s Beida (Peking University) along with Professor Jing Qingguo. He inspires his Chinese students to read material that challenges the CCP line and inspires several of his students — which Baum discovers years later — to think divergently about the events that transpired at the end of the previous century. Baum also witnesses the massive changes which have taken place in Beijing since his last visit during the mid-’90s: the construction boom, the astronomical price of real estate, the hazardous pollution and atrocious air quality, and the manner in which the Party deals with annoying citizens standing in the way of its bold economic plans. The construction campaign for the 2008 Beijing Olympics is now in full swing.

13) China Watching, Then and Now: Admittedly, this was the most boring chapter of Baum’s entire work. Baum goes over the history of “China watching” as a career activity, recalling the centers where China watchers once reviewed the best material on offer about the PRC before free travel to China commenced in the 1970s. He talks about how some former hardcore Maoist ideologues have now recanted their ostensibly erroneous ways and the ramifications it has had for their academic careers and lives. Baum also complains about the current crop of China watching recruits, how they differ from his day and why. He maintains an undecided opinion about the state of contemporary Sinology. You decide.

14) The Gini in the Jar: This penultimate chapter was, conversely, the most interesting of the entire book. In it, Baum discusses the financial and societal costs of China’s sudden explosive growth during Reform and Opening, and selects Shenzhen as a ready example of what he means. Baum also reviews the state of you know what kind of rights legislation in China, and about the legacy of the human cull in that Square from a couple of decades back — you know which one I’m talking about. Bolstering his argument are a range of different statistics which point to the storm clouds gathering on the PRC’s horizon, and what could occur if the economy suddenly tanks and Beijing can no longer fulfill its promises to constituents about their collective future security. Will the whole edifice come crashing down? Will there be massive civil unrest? Baum’s views are worth a read.

15) Loose Ends: Anything which somehow wasn’t resolved in any the previous chapters is dealt with — just as the chapter’s name indicates — here. In case you were wondering what befell some of his colleagues, comrades, and fellow academics over the intervening years, Baum hammers through the list of notable personages we’d read about in previous sections, tying things up nicely. There was the divorce with Carolyn, the arrival of his grandchildren, and his future prospects.

The book’s final paragraph is a fitting bookend to this exquisite chronicle. I’ll quote it here in its entirety in closing (p291):

Blessed with an inquisitive nature, outstanding role models, rich opportunities, and abundant good fortune, as a young man I became powerfully drawn to the lure of contemporary China. Almost from my first classroom encounter with Arthur Steiner, China has been my passion, my calling, my own personal Shangri-la and Chimera rolled into one. Although three decades of economic reform and global engagement have made China’s political and social reality far more accessible — and far less bizarre — then they were in Mao’s time, the People’s Republic remains for me a profound puzzle. Ever changing, ever fascinating, and ever frustrating, it compels my attention even as it stubbornly defies comprehension. I cannot look away.

So what do you say? Will you be acquiring your copy of China Watcher today?