The Chinese

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"By the time I left China," writes John Fraser, "I had been involved in events that still make me shake my head in wonder: addressing a mass gathering of over 10,000 Chinese, being chased through the streets of Peking at midnight by members of the Public Security Bureau, and trying to maintain new but emotionally potent friendships amid an atmosphere of danger and tangible repression."
An exciting and passionate personal odyssey of adventure. The Chinese is also the most revealing and cliche-shattering portrait of the inhabitants of the People's Republic of China yet to appear.
While other North American journalists were waiting to gain entrance into China, John Fraser had been based there for years—as the award-winning Peking Bureau Chief of the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1977 to 1979, when his reports were carried in newspapers throughout the world. Because he headed the oldest established Western newspaper bureau in China (a fact not unappreciated by the Chinese... Tovább

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"By the time I left China," writes John Fraser, "I had been involved in events that still make me shake my head in wonder: addressing a mass gathering of over 10,000 Chinese, being chased through the streets of Peking at midnight by members of the Public Security Bureau, and trying to maintain new but emotionally potent friendships amid an atmosphere of danger and tangible repression."
An exciting and passionate personal odyssey of adventure. The Chinese is also the most revealing and cliche-shattering portrait of the inhabitants of the People's Republic of China yet to appear.
While other North American journalists were waiting to gain entrance into China, John Fraser had been based there for years—as the award-winning Peking Bureau Chief of the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1977 to 1979, when his reports were carried in newspapers throughout the world. Because he headed the oldest established Western newspaper bureau in China (a fact not unappreciated by the Chinese leadership), Fraser had unprecedented access to news sources.
Fraser's keen eye, objectivity and ever-growing affection for the Chinese people stood him in good stead. He also had the "unbelievable good fortune to be in China at a remarkable, unprecedented time in its history —when the movement at the Xidan Democracy Wall flourished and the Chinese people were, for the first time under Communist rule, given the opportunity, and were in fact encouraged, to make contact with Western foreigners." During that four-month period and after it had ended, the author "was forcibly made aware of a world quite different from the one generally presented by the Chinese Communist Party and reinforced by the majority of Western observers."
Not content to visit model communes and model homes, and aided by activists who risked their lives to meet and talk with him, Fraser got to know people from the widest possible range of Chinese society, from young students desperate for education who cannot be accommodated to old men of integrity destroyed by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In a monstrously overpopulated, underemployed
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country where three men do one man's work (inefficiently at that) and every other person seems to be a bureaucrat, he met parents punished for having more than two children; men of fifty-five who had given up their jobs prematurely to avoid having their unemployed children banished to menial labor in the countryside; children still taught religion privately despite rigorous government opposition. Seeing families who shared tiny apartments gave him a lucid insight into a society where lack of privacy and sexual prudery go hand in hand (and marriage is not sanctioned for those under twenty-five).
Fraser found a people in general far better off than before the revolution. But he also saw beggars in rags and human beasts of burden everywhere—in contrast to the political elite who whisk around in limousines with chauffeurs and bodyguards, shopping in stores and eating in restaurants open only to them. Obviously, the classless society conjured up by a relentless propaganda machine is hardly that (especially for women and national minorities like Tibetans and Mongolians).
The Chinese emerge as a heroic, fascinating people of abiding humanity who surprise you with their understanding of the past and their hope for the future in the face of seemingly unsolvable problems. "Clearly," writes the author, "the party and the government are serious about trying to modernize the country and even i f their definitions of free speech and democracy remain travesties, they are lesser travesties than those which prevailed for over a decade. The spirit of the Democracy Wall is down, but not out. To dismiss that movement is to dismiss the potential of the Chinese people to rise above their lot."
Tlte Chinese is a remarkable, exciting book, an invaluable and captivating portrait of a people.
Calligraphy by David Wang jacket design by One Plus One Studio Vissza