《21世纪的中国：每个人都必须知道的》(China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know)，华志坚(Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom)著，牛津大学出版社出版，建议零售价16.95美元，192页
《中国观察者：一个北京窥探者的自白》(China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom)，包瑞嘉(Richard Baum)著，华盛顿大学出版社出版，建议零售价29.95美元，336页
《社会火山的迷思：当代中国的不平等感与分配不公》(Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China)，怀默霆(Martin King Whyte)著，史坦福大学出版社出版，建议零售价27.95美元，264页
《中国战略：如何利用全球增长最快经济体的力量》(The China Strategy: Harnessing the power of the world's fastest-growing economy)，谢祖墀(Edward Tse)著，Basic Books出版，建议零售价26.95美元, 256页
如今，印刷出版关于中国的书籍，比广东工厂生产iPad的速度还快。如果说在全球金融危机之前，整个世界就已沉迷于“中国崛起”，那么，当西方世界陷入一片混乱之后，这种迷醉则变得更为强烈。
人们对于美国可能已走上衰落的不归之路的感觉——现在这么想或许为时尚早——促使人们更多地把注意力放在了唯一真正能够挑战美国超级大国地位的国家（中国）身上。民意调查发现，不少美国人已经误以为中国经济规模超过了美国。很多人想知道，世界将如何适应中国的复兴——这个国家信心满满，打算夺回全球等级体系中它所认为的本应属于自己的地位。
上世纪70年代末，华志坚上了有关中国历史的第一堂课，当时，人们并不觉得这是一个重要的研究课题。他在《21世纪的中国》一书中写道：“要不要更清晰地认识全球人口第一大国的历史与现状，似乎完全由各人自己决定。”当时，中国是一个刚从文化大革命的迷雾与混乱中走出、信奉共产主义的社会，仍有着一股奇异国度的气息，它的种种荣耀已快要被人遗忘——古老的文字、消逝的王朝以及发明了火药。
如今，我们已不能再把中国当成一个新奇的国度。它拥有的百万富翁、特大城市、互联网用户、高楼大厦，以及排放的温室气体，都超过了世界上的任何国家。简而言之，中国强行闯入了我们的意识。如果我们想了解世间的万事万物，那么，就必须去了解中国。
作者指出，此书旨在“帮助有关中国的讨论走向正常化”。这是个有益的目标，而本文评述的四本书也都有志于此，只是方法各异。如果说华志坚的书是“轻松了解中国”，那么，另外三本就可分别归为：论文集、学术研究报告和商业书籍。这四本书都力求如实刻画中国，避免同类著作中常见的陈词滥调（故弄玄虚）和错误的二分法（不是威胁就是机遇）。
华志坚是美国加州大学欧文分校的历史学教授，在中国研究领域浸淫了30年之久。他用135页的篇幅，以轻快的文笔，试图理清中国历史进程，并解释中国的现状。相对于其较短的篇幅，效果还是相当不错的，这让人感觉很不一般。本书采用问答体的形式，言简意赅，略带说教意味。其中含意不言而喻：任何受过教肓的人都应当知道这些事情。例如，对于死亡人数超过同时期美国内战的太平天国起义，书中这样写道，“这可能是19世纪最重大的事件，可在西方却并非家喻户晓”。
除了列举毛泽东时代以前的经典历史事件（如朝代更替、鸦片战争），作者还大胆介绍了一些不那么有名的人物和事件。例如，他用了一个章节介绍短篇小说作家鲁迅。鲁迅的小说《狂人日记》和《阿Q正传》，是1919年反帝反军阀的五四运动时期动荡局势的缩影。
书的后半部分转而探讨当代中国，尤其着重于作者心目中美国人常见的错误观念。其中的一些奇谈妙论，成为该书最生动有趣的部分。例如，作者认为，与其借助阿道司•赫胥黎(Aldous Huxley)的《美丽新世界》(Brave New World)来理解中国，不如以乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)的《1984》作为参照。他写道：“奥威尔强调畏惧在确保人们遵纪守法方面起到的作用，而赫胥黎更侧重需求和欲望如何产生，以及如何受到克制和得到满足。”他指出，生活水平提高、大众消费主义的形成，以及民众能够接触大量媒体（前提是不越过某些政治底线），更容易让人联想起前一部小说，而不是后者。
《中国观察者》的作者包瑞嘉是著名美国学者，他用轻松睿智的笔触，讲述了自己与中国之间半个世纪的交道。这本书让我们认识到，中国在实行共产主义的头几十年里多么默默无闻，直到上世纪70年代邓小平发起改革后，中国才猛然受到世人的瞩目。
与其他研究中国的学者一样，包瑞嘉过去无法访问这个他研究了多年的国度。他只能从遥远的彼岸，解读诸如“大跃进”和“文化大革命”之类的事件。就像一位“北京窥探者”一样，他所能做的就是管中窥豹。对于自己可能犯下严重错误，他惊人地诚实。他直言不讳地写道：“我有时发现，自己对毛泽东革命的评价完全是胡扯。”有位当代学者把毛泽东与托马斯•杰斐逊(Thomas Jefferson)相提并论，包瑞嘉没有落入这样的窠臼，但他承认，他说得比较保险：“尽管毛泽东未能根除中国社会的个人主义、利己主义和精英统治，但指责他试图这么做是不明智的。”
书中充满了趣闻轶事。他第一篇有关中国的重要论文，是在他从台湾图书馆偷了一份保密文件后写成的。他受邀前往华盛顿为即将访华的老布什提供建议时，出了两次丑。先是进白宫时公文包里被查出大麻烟。第二次是他向一家报社泄露了总统打算邀请一位知名持不同政见者参加节日宴会的消息，引发了一场外交风波。
最好玩的故事之一与女演员雪莉•麦克雷恩(Shirley MacLaine)有关。在1979年的一次宴会上，雪莉就坐在邓小平身边，她和邓小平谈到，自己在访华期间遇到的一位中国科学家让她印象深刻，那位科学家告诉她，他非常感激毛泽东把他从象牙塔里赶出来，送到农村向普通老百姓学习，并种植白菜。“邓小平一直在礼貌地听着，这时直视她的眼睛，诚恳地说道，‘他在说谎。'”
本书的主角就是中国本身。借助亲身经历的故事（例如会见一些早期在天安门广场卖相片的摊贩），包瑞嘉讲述了中国近几十年来的惊人变化。“我们这一代北京窥探者，只能凭借图书馆资料、少数流亡者提供的可靠性值得怀疑的信息，以及七拼八凑、从经验出发的研究方法。现在这一代中国观察者则不一样，他们有一个精良齐备的工具库，各种方法信手拈来。”他们多少能够自由地访问中国，进行实证研究，给成千上万家中国报社和记者们打电话，从学术的观点来看，这些就是中国非凡的（即使是不完全的）开放的佐证。
思想成熟后的包瑞嘉仍会批评中国，但他也对这个国家怀有深厚的感情。这折射出熟悉中国的美国人普遍持有的一种观点：尽管两国历史不同、政治体制各异，但两国人民有着许多共同点。包瑞嘉感人地写道：“中国是我的激情和事业所系，是我自己的香格里拉与喀麦拉的合体。”
另外两本书也会让美国读者产生似曾相识的感觉：怀默霆的《社会火山》和谢祖墀的《中国战略》。《社会火山》是在实地调研的基础上写成的，着重研究中国人如何看待市场资本主义、贫富不均和分配不公。简单地说，他的调查发现，对于个人财富的积累，中国人抱有一种近乎于美国式的宽容，他们认为这主要归功于个人努力和所接受的教育。这与东欧经济体在共产主义瓦解后的情况形成鲜明对比，那里的人们对待新富阶层兴起的态度更为负面。该书反驳了以下说法：越来越多的中国人认为财富来自于腐败、而非个人努力。
调查中确实发现，存在对城乡分化的愤怒和下岗的不满。不过，在2004年（大部分调查是在这一年里进行的），“许多分析师断言，中国民众的主流心态，是对不平等日益加剧的普遍愤怒。”在现实中，“最常见的反应模式却恰恰相反，乐观得出奇。人们的心态类似于一种‘水涨船高'的观点，认为将来会有越来越多的人变得富有，而贫困人数还会进一步减少。”《社会火山》虽然说不上十分吸引人，但书中提供的系列实证研究，是包瑞嘉等早期中国观察者可望而不可及的，而且读起来不太费力。
《中国战略》是博斯管理咨询公司(Booz & Company)大中华区主席撰写的一本商业书籍。其论点是，成功的跨国企业必须把中国视为全球业务中不可或缺的部分，而不只是廉价劳动力的来源或令人垂涎的市场。书中的有些文字出现偏离，让人感到困惑。例如，书中谈到有一项调查发现，“在华经营的跨国制造业企业，只有六分之一在物流系统方面采用了延迟和细分方法。”（好奇怪！）
但即使是一位管理咨询师，也能剥下中国神秘的外衣。作者几番试图解释今日中国与唐朝（公元618-907年，当时中国也非常开放）之间的相似之处；某些山寨企业如何发展为真正的创新公司；中国四、五、六线城市所蕴藏的商机（此类城市中，人口在50万至200万之间的不少于540座）。谢祖墀显然对中国知之颇深，很多有趣的故事和观点都可以随手拈来，略为沉闷的风格只是部分减弱了本书的吸引力。
例如，他走访过一家便利店，从观察中得出结论：中国对待外来商品和影响甚至比美国更开放。“与可口可乐(Coke)、百事可乐(Pepsi)和史威士(Schweppes)等西方产品摆在一起的，有日本三得利(Suntory)、麒麟(Kirin)和Sapporo等的软饮料，还有台湾统一(Uni-President)，维他(Vitasoy)等香港品牌。除了瓶装水、可乐、啤酒外，还有茶、咖啡、酸奶，以及由大多数外国人不认识的水果制成的饮料。”中国社会早已不像上世纪60年代拒绝包瑞嘉入境时那样封闭而又多疑。事实上，这里已是一个美丽的新世界，具备华志坚列举的诸多特点。
正如华志坚在“中国的未来”一章中所写道的，我们不知道，中国奔向繁荣——这是全球近几十年最重要的进展——的脚步会在何处停下；我们无法确知，中国会不会发展为一个民主国家，或是会不会通过武力收回台湾；我们也无法知道，中国会如何解决环境破坏和地方腐败问题。但华志坚指出，我们知道，中国的经历并不像人们常说的那样“另类”。他指出，一个庞大经济体和强国的诞生，必然会伴随着种种喧嚣，在评说这些喧嚣的时候，美国人还是看看自个儿为好。
译者/杨远
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001033506
China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Oxford University Press, RRP$16.95, 192 pages
China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom, by Richard Baum, University of Washington Press, RRP$29.95, 336 pages
Myth of the Social Volcano: Perceptions of Inequality and Distributive Injustice in Contemporary China, by Martin King Whyte, Stanford University Press, RRP$27.95, 264 pages
The China Strategy: Harnessing the power of the world's fastest-growing economy, by Edward Tse, Basic Books RRP$26.95, 256 pages
Books about China are coming off the printing presses faster than Guangdong factories can churn out iPads. If the world was mesmerised by China's rise before the global financial crisis, then that fascination is all the more intense following the dislocations that have cascaded across the western world.
The feeling – premature as it might be – that the US is now in possibly terminal decline has focused attention all the more on its only serious challenger for superpower status. Polls show that many Americans already think, erroneously, that the size of China's economy has surpassed that of their own. Many wonder how the world will accommodate a resurgent China confident in its ability to regain what it sees as its ordained place in the global hierarchy.
When Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, first took a class on Chinese history in the late 1970s, it was not considered an essential topic of study. “Getting a clearer sense of the past and present of the world's most popular nation seemed purely optional,” he writes. China was then a communist society only just emerging from the fog and chaos of its Cultural Revolution. It retained the air of an exotic land of half-forgotten glories – ancient writing, faded dynasties and the invention of gunpowder.
But China can no longer be treated as exotica. It is now a country with more millionaires, more mega-cities, more internet users, more skyscrapers and a higher emission of greenhouse gases than any country on earth. In short, China has forced itself into our consciousness. It has become incumbent on us, if we presume to know anything about the world, to try to understand it.
The author says the goal of his book is to “help normalise discussions of China”. It is a worthy aim and one to which all four of the books reviewed here aspire in their diverse ways. If Wasserstrom's is a “China made simple”, the other books might be categorised as a memoir, a piece of academic research and a business book. But all four share an ambition to write about China as it is, and to avoid the clichés (inscrutable) or false dichotomies (threat or opportunity) that have dogged much literature on the subject.
Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a 30-year veteran of China studies, seeks in 135 brisk pages to chart the flow of Chinese history and to explain its present. Remarkably, given the brevity of the undertaking, he makes a decent stab at it. The book, which takes a question-and-answer format, has a clipped, slightly didactic style. The clear implication is that these are things that any educated person ought to know. For example, the Taiping uprising (1848-64), an insurrection that cost more lives than the contemporaneous American civil war, is described as “probably the most important 19th-century event whose name is not a household word in the west”.
As well as the standard episodes of pre-Mao China – the roll call of dynasties, the opium war – the author has the confidence to pick out less well-known people and events. He devotes a section, for example, to the short- story writer Lu Xun, whose works Diary of a Madman and The Real Story of Ah Q encapsulated the ferment of the 1919 anti-warlord, anti-imperialist May 4 Movement.
The latter half of the book gives way to a discussion of contemporary China, particularly what Wasserstrom regards as common US misperceptions. It contains interesting, slightly quirky, diversions that turn out to be the most stimulating parts of the book. In one section, for example, he argues that it is more helpful to think of China in terms of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than George Orwell's 1984. “Orwell emphasises the role of fear in keeping people in line, while Huxley pays more attention to how needs and desires are created, manipulated and satisfied.” Higher living standards, mass consumerism and an explosion in public access to media (so long as it does not cross certain political lines) are more reminiscent of the former novel than the latter, he says.
Richard Baum's China Watcher is an intellectual romp through one distinguished American scholar's half-century engagement with that country. His book reminds us just how unknown China was in the first decades of communism, before it came more sharply into focus after Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms in the late 1970s.
Baum, like other Chinese scholars, was not allowed to visit the country he was studying for years, forcing him to try to interpret events such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution from afar. Like a “Peking Tom”, he relied on tantalising glimpses. He is refreshingly honest about how wrong he could be. “I sometimes found myself waffling in my personal assessment of Mao's revolution,” he writes in typically confessional tone. Although he did not fall into the same trap as one contemporary scholar, who compared Mao favourably with Thomas Jefferson, he admits to hedging his bets in “suggesting that, although Mao had failed to eliminate privatism, self-interest, and elitism from Chinese society, it would be unwise to condemn him for trying”.
The book is full of engaging anecdotes. His first important paper on China came about after stealing a classified document from a Taiwanese library. When he was summoned to Washington to advise George Bush senior on a forthcoming visit to Beijing, he was disgraced not once but twice. First he was caught entering the White House with a spliff he had forgotten to remove from his briefcase; next he leaked to a newspaper the president's plans to invite a leading dissident to a gala dinner, provoking a diplomatic incident.
One of the best stories concerns the actress Shirley MacLaine, who was seated near Deng Xiaoping at a 1979 banquet. She explained to Deng how impressed she had been during a trip to China when she had met a Chinese scientist. He had told her how grateful he was to Mao for banishing him from his ivory tower and sending him to the countryside to learn about ordinary people and grow cabbages. “Deng, ever the polite listener, looked her squarely in the eye and said earnestly, ‘He was lying.'”
The book's central character is China itself. Using stories of his own engagement – such as meeting early entrepreneurs selling photographs in Tiananmen Square – Baum charts the breathtaking changes of the past decades. “Unlike the Peking Toms of my generation, who relied on library research, a handful of refugee informants of dubious reliability and improvised, seat-of-the-pants research methods, China watchers of the current generation have at their fingertips a full and sophisticated arsenal of methodology.” The fact that they can visit more or less freely, conduct empirical research and call up digital links to thousands of Chinese newspapers and journals is, from an academic's eye view, testimony to a remarkable (if incomplete) opening-up.
The mature Baum manages to remain critical of China, yet hugely affectionate towards it too. The relationship attests to a commonly held view of Americans familiar with the country that despite their nations' diverging histories and political systems, the two peoples have much in common. Baum writes touchingly: “China has been my passion, my calling, my own personal Shangri-la and Chimera rolled into one.”
That sense of familiarity to a US audience emerges to some degree from the other two books, Martin King Whyte's Myth of the Social Volcano and Edward Tse's The China Strategy. Whyte's book is based on on-the-ground research into the attitudes of Chinese people towards market capitalism, disparities of wealth and distributive injustice. In a nutshell, his study finds that Chinese people have an almost American tolerance for the accumulation of individual wealth, which they attribute largely to effort and education. That contrasts with the experience of post-communist east European economies, where attitudes to the emergence of a new rich are more negative. It also counters the perception that Chinese people are increasingly convinced that wealth is the result of corruption, not individual effort.
Whyte's study does find anger about the rural-urban divide and resentment at factory lay-offs. However, in 2004, when much of the survey was conducted, “many analysts claimed that the dominant mood in China was widespread anger caused by rising inequality,” he writes. In reality, “the most common pattern of responses was quite the contrary and surprisingly optimistic. The mood is compatible with an upbeat ‘rising tide is lifting all boats' view that more and more people would become rich in the future, while the numbers of poor would decline still further.” Whyte's book, while not exactly gripping, is a fairly painless excursion through a serious empirical study of the sort that early China watchers, such as Baum, could only dream about.
The China Strategy is a business book written by management consulting firm Booz & Company's chairman for Greater China. Its thesis is that successful multinationals must see China as a fully integrated part of their global operations, not just a source of cheap labour or a mouth-watering market. At times the prose drifts into obfuscation. We are told, for example, of a study that found “only one in six multinational manufacturers operating in China had applied postponement and segmentation methodologies to their logistic systems.” (Fancy that.)
But even a management consultant can demystify China. The author variously seeks to explain parallels between today's China and that of the Tang Dynasty (AD618-907) when the country was also extraordinarily open; the evolution of some shan zhai (or knock-off) companies into genuine innovators; and the business opportunities in China's fourth-, fifth- and sixth-tier cities, no fewer than 540 of which have populations between 500,000 and 2m. The slightly breathless style only partially detracts from the fact that Tse clearly knows China well and has a hundred interesting facts and opinions at his fingertips.
For example, he makes an excursion to a convenience store, which the author marshals as evidence that China is even more open to outside products and influences than the US. “Accompanying the western products Coke, Pepsi and Schweppes there are Japanese soft drinks made by Suntory, Kirin and Sapporo, Taiwanese flavours under the Uni-President label, and Hong Kong brands such as Vitasoy. Alongside the bottled waters, colas, and beers are teas, coffees, and soya milk drinks, plus ones made from fruits unfamiliar to most foreigners.” China is clearly a long way from the closed, paranoid society of the 1960s that denied Baum entry. Indeed, here is the brave new world of plenty that Wasserstrom identifies.
As Wasserstrom writes in a section on China's future, we don't know where China's rush for prosperity – the most important global development of recent decades – will end. We can't know for sure whether China will evolve into a democracy, or go to war to reclaim Taiwan. We can't know how it will deal with environmental destruction and endemic corruption. But what we can know, he argues, is that China's experience is not as “other” as is often made out. In assessing the ructions that are bound to accompany the birth of a huge economy and powerful nation, he advises, Americans could do worse than look at themselves.
没有评论:
发表评论