Troy Parfitt

This is an incredibly difficult book to review. On the one hand, it can be read as a travel book, since the author does such a thorough job of documenting his experiences in both China and Taiwan. On the other hand, it is also a stream of conscious reflection on the topic of whether China, and the Chinese are capable of becoming the superpower for the next epoch.
It is made difficult for me to review this because the subject is China, a place where my ancestors came from, and Taiwan, where I was born and lived until I was nine. When the author asked me to peruse his blood and sweat, I was less than enthusiastic. Now, after having read the book, that whole feeling of awkwardness returns anew.
This is not going to be a hack job. I found the author’s observations interesting and was able to travel vicariously through China to places I’d never been to and obtain the feel and the flavor of the place. He definitely travels differently than I would, but he does go to some very interesting tidbits of China that I would not think to travel to. His observations are straightforward and at best blunt, at worst unkind. But you can not fault him for being disingenuous.
It seems, at first, that the author really does not like the people that he’d lived with for so many years. His assessment of the people of China and Taiwan are not kindly and are at times typical of westerners in their occidental centric view of the world. Almost all of his views seem to indirectly reflect his western viewpoint and prejudices. Now, he does this without being arrogant or imperialistic. Instead, his matter of factness is what saves him from being an absolute prig. It is a strange read. Where at times one wants to debate him on his observations and conclusions, there really is nothing on which one can hang on in order to accuse him of being just a Sinophobe. After reading a while, one gets the feeling that the author will say these things to his own blood just because this is how he feels. I was able to absorb his words much better after I came to this conclusion.
In addition to the travelogue, the book also tries to be an unorthodox history of modern China, gathering and revealing some of the gossipy anecdotes concerning the Nationalists and Communists during the fight towards republic and the battles that ensued closely after during the war against Japan. These stories have been fodder amongst those who survived the Second World War and are living outside of China. That was a romantic period for many people of my parent’s era. It was, the center of gossip for that generation. These are great stories and may or may not be good history, but they are juicy. These stories are not really documented rigorously in Chinese or western history of China so it was good to see them in print finally.
The third purpose, and the primary motivation for the author to write the book, is to prove unequivably, that the recent hoopla surrounding the denouement of western powers and the rise of the Asian potentate are merely wishful thinking and are the results of overactive imagination. I agree with the author that the so-called old China hands who fall all over themselves in praising and predicting upcoming China epoch are both self-serving and despicably naïve. Extrapolation of the existing facts into a fanciful wet dream is what these old China hands are very good at, yet they are rarely correct. They do manage to sell a lot of books.
Unfortunately, the author does not approach the topic in an astute nor interesting manner.
The author pretty much states his thesis at the very beginning: the Chinese can’t be dominant in this world because they are not westerners, their systems and bureaucracies are not consistent with western bureaucracies, their mindset are not in line with western thought. Admittedly, Chinese philosophies of politics, governance, commerce, seem quaint and outdated in light of the modern society. But they have managed to be pragmatic enough to be highly successful playing in the westerner’s world. And that is the key to the present regime in China, their ability to hold on to their dogmatic Marxist ways while also heeding the siren song of the capitalist economy. This is, in essence, the strength of the modern China, that there is no hard and fast rules, that pragmatism and flexibility arte the hallmarks of their success. Does this chameleon like tactic mean long term domination of the economic and political arenas of the world? I wouldn’t know, but to dismiss them out of hand seem to be overly harsh and rash. The Confucian ideal and the society it promised has never fully existed in any form anywhere. China is the closest, but even so, the ebb and flow of life has forced China to embrace and distance themselves from the ideals because after all the dogmatism so inherent in the Chinese character, a far stronger characteristic is their ability to adapt and survive, nay, to thrive in the face of contradictory times and chaos. They may not do things right the first half dozen times, but they manage to live through it all. The lived through the Great Leap Forward, they lived through the Red Guard, they will live through the present era. Note that they have always just lived through it but never dominated, and this may or may not be their dominant time. Regardless, drawing conclusions in a linear way about such a nonlinear subject is to asking to be wrong.
What the author did was to visit China and Taiwan in an entirely superficial and shallow way. His interactions with his students and common people give him one view of Chinese society, what he is not privy to is the central power structure. In China, it is the central politburo, in Taiwan it is the boardrooms of the companies and government ministries creating the economy. He is not the first to look at China in such a superficial way and begin to draw superficial conclusions, what they don’t see is that the Chinese are survivors and they won’t allow any dogmatism to prevent them from surviving, and surviving beyond the next meal.… (altro)

Parfitt, a Canadian who taught for ten years in Taiwan, traveled extensively . around Mainland China. This book is more of a travelogue than a scholarly analysis of why or why not China will ever rule the world, but writing from his personal experience and a wide reading of literature about the two Chinas, and with his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese, Parfitt does have something to offer us.

On the plus side, he is an excellent observer and he captures what he sees very vividly with excellent detail. Having lived in Mainland China and travelled to some of the same places Parfitt goes in this book, I certainly recognized many of the locations as well as the human behavior he described. These travelogues, despite some shortcomings I discuss later, are the highlight of the book, and they cover a lot of the country.

On the other hand, Parfitt is just about the most negative writer I have ever read. Traveling requires opening your mind and seeing past some of the obvious difficulties to find something of value. Parfitt, however seems to get lost in his own frustrations and prejudices so often in this book that he misses out on lots of good stuff. His observations about how polluted much of China is are certainly on target, but he harps on it way too much. His observations about how the people he meets lack of knowledge about things outside of China and their parroting of Chinese government propaganda are also true to a great extent—but the same criticism could be leveled against most high school students in the USA or watchers of Fox News or MSNBC. Perhaps Canadians are smarter.

Parfitt seems to attract trouble wherever he goes. Frequently he says locals laugh at him, threaten him, or just plain ignore him. And even when not confronted personally, wherever he goes, he seems to find himself in the midst of loud arguments and fights between Chinese. I would agree that there are probably more fights in China than I see in the United States, but in my visits to China, they would still be a notably rare occurrence, not something I see every day! As for loud arguments, Chinese talk incredibly loud in general, but I’ll give Parfitt the benefit of the doubt since I don’t understand much Mandarin.

In Parfitt’s travels around China, he also goes on and on about taxi drivers not being able to find his hotel, the train station, the main street of the town, read a map, or basically do anything. And no one he asks on the street is able to offer any help either, or if they do, they point him in the wrong direction. In my travels in China, I occasionally met a taxi driver who wasn’t completely sure of a location, but was eventually able to find it by making every smaller concentric circles around the probable destination, but I never met one who couldn’t find the train station. This makes me wonder if Parfitt is so objectionable that people just like to give him a hard time.

This book tries very hard to do a lot of things. Interspersed with the travelogues, Parfitt presents interesting capsule biographies of various individuals, including Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek and discusses important events in Chinese history. He especially likes puncturing the accepted version of history, whether it concerns the actual events during the Boxer Rebellion or the fact that the killings in “The Tiananmen Square Massacre” didn’t take place in Tiananmen Square. In reading through these various gleanings from Parfitt’s extensive reading, it is difficult to understand his own attitude toward China. On the one hand, he understands the depredations of foreigners against China that the current Communist government uses to instill a dangerous sense of nationalism in the population. On the other hand, he seems to have little respect for the Chinese character and no respect for the Chinese intellectual tradition, which he dismisses as hogwash. He is certainly right, however, in showing that the current Government, with its promotion of Confucianism (which Parfitt despises), is not that different from the empires that came before it.

Oddly enough, given his ten years in Taiwan, Parfitt isn’t really that positive about it or its citizens either. He gives the Taiwanese credit for being much more polite than the Mainlanders, but underneath the veneer, he still thinks they have the same character faults. Most of his students, he says, list “sleeping” as a hobby and have the same unquestioning attitude about what they are taught or told by the government. Nevertheless, he does have some sympathy for Taiwan, most manifested by his asking Mainlanders why they have over 1000 missiles pointing at Taiwan, a fact no one seems to be aware of.

In fact, Parfitt has problems with other nationalities in the book as well-- a Japanese lady tourist who won't leave him alone, and an ignorant Croatian. It seems he spends most of his life finding fault with others. I am not saying those faults don’t exist, but why waste so much time obsessing over them?

Most problematic for me is that for someone who has spent so much time in China and speaks the language, Parfitt seems to have very little interest in Chinese food. I lost count of how many times he eats at Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s, and when he does eat Chinese food, it seems more out of necessity than anything else. The height of this folly occurs when he visits Hangzhou. After a brief time, he dismisses the Hangzhou and its West Lake, one of the great places to visit in all of China (I spent my honeymoon there), as an uninteresting tourist trap and leaves the city as quickly as he can. How can anyone go to Hangzhou and not eat Beggars Chicken or Dong Po Pork? How can someone go to Xian and not partake of the out of this world dumpling banquet? Or Shanghai’s steamed or fried dumplings? Parfitt would instead talk about the restaurant being dirty or there being trash in the street or someone glaring at him or a fight breaking out. It is the wonders of authentic Chinese cooking that make it easy for me to put up with the admitted downsides of China.

So, in the end is Parfitt right that China will never rule the world? Is the whole Chinese way of thinking so out of kilter that its influence in the world will be limited? Maybe and maybe not. Parfitt makes the mistake of judging China by how the masses think and act, but China is not ruled by the masses. (Nor for that matter is America, Canada, or any other country in the world.) Its political and business leaders are perhaps more sophisticated and shrewder than he would give them credit for. Furthermore, it is doubtful that China wants to rule the world in the sense that America or Britain or the empires of the past may have wanted to. China mostly wants to rule China—and its definition of China certainly includes what Russians would call the “near abroad”—in other words, Tibet, islands in the South China Sea, and so on. I don't think China has any ambitions to open a naval base in Iceland or an Air Force base in Algeria. So given the limited scope of its ambitions, perhaps China’s ultimate success depends upon how much the West lets its own character faults hinder our progress.… (altro)

Troy Parfitt lived for two years in Seoul, South Korea, ten more years in Taipei, Taiwan, and made an extensive trip through China and recorded his impressions of the country, its history, and its people. His overall conclusion is that the country is backward. It is in a terrible dilapidated condition, its history has been constantly revised to reflect a rosy but untrue picture, and the majority of its people is kept in ignorance and is not ready for democracy. Many people outside of China focus on the progress that China has made. China’s military spending, for example, is second to that of the United States. But Parfitt saw bad conditions in the country and concluded that it is far from being a modern state.

Parfitt discusses the many changes in recent times in China, such as the opium war, the end of the two millennia dynastic rule in 1911, how Dr. Sun Yat-sen stumbled into creating the “Chinese Democracy,” and the Russian involvement in the new China, among many other interesting and informative historical facts.

He describes the crowded spaces in the cities, the repugnant smells, the cigarette smoke, and the urine running in the streets. He rode on a major artery and saw that it was “in a serious state of disrepair.” He states that tranquil, easygoing, and gracious people “are hard to come by.” There are signs saying “Please be Civilized,” but the signs don’t help. In “the Chinese world, (the people are) eager… to submit to an authority figure – to any authority figure,” but not in respect to civility (emphasis in the original). He cites some of the many lies that the Chinese government inserts in newspapers. “For decades, meteorologists have not been permitted to report temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius (or 95 degrees Fahrenheit)” so that “workers across the nation are not to be given the day off.” When a disaster struck China and 7,000 school classrooms collapsed, the Chinese government hid this from their people so that they wouldn’t ask why the buildings housing their children had been so shabbily constructed. He tells us that “China jails more journalists than any other nation.”

“China,” he writes, “is a nation of much fakery; there is fake sushi, fake stake, fake gravy, fake music, fake goods, fake pharmaceuticals, fake news, fake weather reports, fake education, fake rights, fake laws, fake courts, fake judges, a fake congress, a fake constitution.” A Chinese music label may say that the song is sung by Barbara Streisand, but it is only a Streisand imitator. The Chinese axiom is “Foreigners are easily fooled.” But while they are misleading the foreigners, the “Chinese people perennially fool themselves.”

His stories about the people he meets are fascinating. One woman picks him up and offers him a selection of free teas, since he is a foreigner. He drinks the teas and she demands payment for them. He asks a government official about the Chinese ideology and the woman is unable to answer. He visits a hospital where a frazzled physician in an ill-lit ward treating children turns a blind eye to “evidently infected wounds (that) were not attended to. To be sure, there wasn’t a nurse or bandage in sight.” A doctor was leading a camera crew around showing the young children. He lifted the foot of a young girl and casually said, “Her feet will have to come off. What a shame. She’s so cute.” Then he let the foot fall and the girl shrieked in pain. These are just some of the hundreds of tales that Troy Parfitt tells.… (altro)