China In Ten Words summary

In July 1966, the 72-year-old Mao made an appearance in Wuhan. The city was hosting a mass swimming event, and Mao unexpectedly joined the swimmers in the freezing cold Yangtze river. After his dip, he posed for a photograph wearing just his trunks. The reaction was immediate and positive. People remarked on his excellent health and praised him for his athleticism.

It was through this type of behavior that Mao earned the respect of the people. He was an ideal representative of the Chinese concept of a leader, or lingxiu. A key part of that idea is that a leader should be close to the people. That’s something Mao went out of his way to demonstrate.

Books were a scarce commodity during the Cultural Revolution. That didn’t mean reading – yuedu – wasn’t a key word during the author’s childhood. In fact, he remembers four distinct chapters in the development of a reading culture in China.

When he was very young, books were basically non-existent. Texts containing ideas the Communist Party disagreed with were called “poisonous weeds” and had mostly been burned. If you wanted something to read, your only option was to browse one of the two books found in every home in China: the Selected Works of Chairman Mao and his Quotations – the so-called Little Red Book. Dry as these texts were, Yu learned to enjoy them by scanning the biographical footnotes for interesting vignettes.

In December 1973, a young schoolgirl called Huang Shuai wrote to the Beijing Daily. Huang complained that her teacher was unjustly victimizing her because she’d criticized him. The letter struck a chord, and she became something of a minor celebrity. No wonder – attacking established authorities and undermining teachers played a major role in the Cultural Revolution.

It was in this frenzied atmosphere that Yu first found his way to writing, or xiezuo. Like Huang and many other young writers, he became a “red pen” – an author who sided with the political forces driving the revolution forward. Adopting the pseudonym Spring Shoots, Yu and his friends produced big-character posters attacking their school’s faculty, an act which won them the praise of the local propaganda team. Growing bored of such posters, he wrote a play in which resourceful peasants thwart a greedy landlord's attempt to sabotage socialist reconstruction.

How many authors did you know about when you were a child? Chances are, a few more than Yu. For Chinese kids growing up in the Cultural Revolution, there were pretty much just two writers out there: the poet and leader Mao Zedong and Lu Xun, an early twentieth-century author whose name became a byword for the revolution.

So why was Lu’s work so important? Well, Mao was a huge fan. In fact, it was thanks to the Chinese leader that Lu – who died in 1936 – became such a well-known figure thirty years later. The reason for that was simple. Lu had been fiercely critical of the society of his day, which made his work attractive to the Communist Party as it attempted to discredit old institutions and practices.

Lots of Western thinkers link economic growth to political democracy. So where does China, one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, fit into this idea? Well, one way of looking at it is that the country’s recent experiences are part of a tradition of revolution, or geming, that goes back to the mid-twentieth century. A key part of geming is risk-taking, exaggeration and instability.

Take the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” an attempt to rapidly industrialize the nation while simultaneously collectivizing its agriculture, which began in 1958. Reality and expectation diverged, and provincial officials began making exaggerated claims about how much food they were producing and showcasing communal dining halls in which peasants were invited to feast on all the produce they’d supposedly grown. But despite these grand claims, the policy was actually failing. Grain stocks were soon depleted, and famine swept the country. In Sichuan Province alone, over eight million people died – one in every nine.

During the 2006 World Cup, a film crew traveled through southwest China. To celebrate the global soccer tournament, then watched by over one hundred million Chinese citizens, they organized a soccer match for children in a poor village.

The kids had never heard of the game, let alone played it, so the crew decided to teach them the rules. After the cameraman accidentally kicked the ball into some cow dung, he washed it in a small pond before returning it to the penalty spot. When it came to their turn, the children carefully cleaned the ball in the same manner, understanding this to be a key part of the game.

The word “grassroots,” or caogen, used to mean just that – the roots of a grass plant. Over time, however, its meaning has shifted, and now it is closer to the English term that refers to ordinary people participating at the lowest level of a social structure. In China today, it refers to humble peasants whose successes have allowed them to climb the social ladder.

A good example of caogen are the “blood chiefs” who buy blood from poor peasants and sell it to hospitals and private clients. One of these chiefs became so fantastically wealthy that he bought a luxury apartment in a brand new tower block. Then there’s the “garbage king,” a man who made it big by buying trash from street-sorters and reselling it to factories. The new Chinese class of millionaires is full of “button kings” and “sock kings” who followed a similar path.

When Yu started working as a dentist, he had no medical training. His understanding of how to remove, treat and fit teeth was shaky at best. He learned on the job, taking cues from his chain-smoking boss, a man who had started pulling teeth on the streets. Yu wondered how to describe the position he’d had in those years. Things fell into place when he came across a new Chinese buzzword – shanzhai, meaning “copycat.” He’d been a copycat dentist!

Shanzhai isn’t quite as negative as its English translation – in fact, it comes close to justifying fake and pirated products. So, where does the word come from? Well, it took off when knock-off Samsung and Nokia cell phones first appeared on the market. Because the makers of these dodgy phones didn’t have to spend money on research and development, they could sell them for much less than their competitors. The devices were soon everywhere.

The Chinese word huyou originally referred to an unsteady swaying motion, similar to what one might experience on a fishing boat being rocked by the waves. Today, however, it’s taken on a new meaning that’s much closer to the English word “bamboozle” – to cheat, typically by overhyping something.

The verb first appeared in its new guise in the early 2000s after comedian Zhao Benshan used it in a skit called “Selling Crutches.” Like the English idiom about selling sand in the Sahara desert, Zhao’s gag hinged on the idea of conning someone into buying something they don’t need – in this case, getting a man with perfectly functioning legs to believe he has a disability and selling him crutches.