The character Kevin, Charles’s bother-in-law, is priceless – endless comedy, certainly based on a real person. Kevin is a kitchen-sitting, booze guzzling, card playing lout who likes to indulge Charles in banal conversation or locker-room talk about his sister (and Charles doesn’t seem to mind because he admits he thinks his sister is hot!). Kevin’s not a very nice person either, so he and Charles (or so Kevin thinks) seem to have a connection.

I wonder what Martin Amis thinks of this book. It was written in 1973, and Amis has since gone on to become a literary giant. Most writers wish their first couple of efforts would disappear.

I thought The Rachel Papers was a good read. I imagine twenty-somethings with good taste in literature (and a sense of humour) would find it a great one.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

The novel flashes back to Joshua then, from his childhood in Montreal to his days spent on Ibiza to the months and weeks prior to his apparent accident – and what a ride it is. Richler fans should delight in the bits about Ibiza, having fun wondering just how much of it is autobiographical. We know Richler lived on the Spanish isle, and we know he had trouble with a German named Mueller (Dr. Dr. Mueller in the novel; in Austria each doctorate deserves a title) and that he had to leave suddenly, like Joshua Shapiro did. We also see Richler’s imagination flowing and spinning from his summer home at Lake Memphremagog, featured in Barney’s Version. And we see variations on Richler’s classic characters: the blue-blooded Hornbys, “rotten to the core” and cognizant of it, Jack Trimble: a man who scraped and clawed his way to the top, ignored by Westmount’s and McGill’s elite until they needed him to make money for them; Reuben: Joshua’s ostensibly dopey but street-savvy (former boxer, Bible quoting, Labatt’s drinking) father, Joshua’s sex-starved Jewish mother, uncle Oscar: forced to drive a cab at age 69, Joshua’s brother-in-law, a 40-year old rich brat (one of the Hornbys) who we think has been horribly framed.

This book really drew me in, but then I got lost a little in the middle. The flashback sequences are not dated, but like with Richler’s subsequent Solomon Gursky Was Here it’s not so much a matter of figuring out when the time-shift is but why. However, unlike the weightier and more literary Solomon Gursky Was Here, Joshua Then And Now didn’t make me wonder if Richler knew where he was going and if his descriptive wanderings weren’t inspired by too many glasses of scotch. In Joshua, the storyline straightens out, right on cue, and you see the method in the madness. At page 200, I was thinking, ‘This might be one of his weaker ones,’ but by p. 300, I was marvelling.

What a shame Mordecai Richler is no longer with us. There is no one in Canada writing books like his nowadays, and there is one less erudite social critic to lampoon the politically correct CBC, insincere politicians, the politics of special pleading, and other Canadian silliness. Richler possessed a humour, wit, intellect, and irony that just isn’t there now – and he was a better writer than just about anyone who wins the Giller Prize these days. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

David Adams Richards is easily the most famous writer to ever emerge from my native New Brunswick. He’s penned poetry, plays, non-fiction, and – most notably – fiction, including 14 novels, the latest Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. He’s won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the esteemed Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary honour. He was supposed to speak in front of a Canadian-literature class I took in high school, but had previous commitments. In university, I read Richards’s first book, The Coming of Winter, but didn’t quite get it. When I lived in Taipei, I found a copy of his Mercy Among the Children and was drawn in deeply, transported back to my quirky and rural home province. Mercy is a good novel (it’s the one that won him the Giller), and I’ve been meaning to explore others, but there are so many books and so little time.

Richards’s stories are often set in the Miramichi, one of New Brunswick’s four main cities. Richards employs stark realism tinged with dark themes. Characters are raw and real and converse in the vernacular. There’s crime, clannishness, ostracism, hypocrisy, prejudice, and poverty. The duplicity of human society features prominently, as does ambiguity; it may be obvious who the victim is, but Richards’s heroes are harder to spot.

At the library, 30 people were seated quietly. Richards was standing off to the side, looking apprehensive or bored. There he was: a Canadian literary giant. Why wasn’t anyone talking to him?

“Excuse me. Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“Ah, no,” he said, patting his pockets, “but there’s one on the table.”

The table was laid out with his books, including his Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. I grabbed the pen, signed my own book, and presented it to him. I thought he might wince, supply an insincere ‘Thanks,’ and toss it aside the instant I took my leave, but he seemed genuinely interested.

“You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re from Saint John?”

“Yes. I read your Mercy Among the Children when I was living in Taiwan, and really enjoyed it.”

“You read it in Chinese?”

“No, in English.”

“Because that one was translated into Chinese. On the mainland, though.”

“Did it sell?”

“I have no idea, but I remember the guy who did it. He was very nice. He wrote me a couple times to ask what things were, you know, to explain words so he could translate them. I remember him asking what a marshmallow was and I had to explain the word Legion. I suppose they wouldn’t have Legions in China. Whether it was translated well or not, I don’t know. The English version is that thick (two inches), the German edition that thick (three inches), but the Chinese translation is only about that thick (one inch).” Richards shrugged. “His English wasn’t perfect, but he was really nice.”

It was nearing that time, so I sat down, and the female MC introduced Mr. Richards – at length. But while she was talking, an interesting thing occurred. The author wasn’t really listening. Rather, he was reading my book. At one point, I heard him say to himself, “This is really interesting.” When it was time to take the stand, he took my book and his book to the podium. He set my book down and patted it. He looked at me and said, earnestly, “Thank you for the book.” Then he began to read.

The reading was followed by a Q&A. My questions, the first, were generic: “In fiction, do you know where you’re going? Do you have it planned, or just a rough idea?” I imagine he’s been asked that a thousand times. I should have asked something interesting like, “Is the hypocrisy of human society something you obsess about?” or “How much of wanting to be a writer was motivated by revenge?” Many writers are idealists and feel the need to comment on corruption and perversion. And it’s my theory that, for male writers at least, revenge is a key motivator, especially when starting out.

Writers hope to show every critic, every pretentious academic, every teacher who said, ‘Sorry, you don’t have it,’ that they do have it. Writers catalogue slights and conjure them when they need motivation. Mordecai Richler admitted this. So has Paul Theroux. In The Forest for the Trees, by Betsey Lerner, a book about writing and the business of writing, written by a publishing-industry insider for aspiring writers, the author talks about what motivates other authors, and revenge is right up there with need-to-be-heard.

The revenge question was the one I should have posed, but no, I asked the most limp-wristed question imaginable.

In addition to novels, and in true New Brunswick fashion, Richards has penned books on hockey, fishing, and hunting. He recently wrote God Is, about his Catholic faith. Reportedly, this raised the collective eyebrow of the Canadian literary community, with Richards claiming he’s now something of a pariah. I’m not a Christian, so God Is is not a book for me (but neither are books like God is Not Great, though I consider Christopher Hitchens an important essayist and polemicist), but I found Richards’s reasons for writing such a book, and the related advice he gave, interesting.

“Write what you know,” he said. “Write what you want to. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t curb your opinions to fit with someone else’s, which is what a lot of writers do. At some point, someone is going to tell you you’re wrong anyway, so you may as well write what you believe.”

It was the final idea I’d never thought of before: people are going to call you down anyway, so why even begin to compromise? That’s bloody good advice. Who cares about that cacophonous clang from the peanut gallery? Write for yourself.

Writers are often outsiders, but Richards seems an outsider to other writers, a role he acknowledges and appears to revel in (see revenge). He talked about how some time after he’d won the Giller, he was kicked out of a Toronto bookstore because of his appearance, and that he frightened the receptionist at his Toronto publisher because he was dressed like a lumberjack. Along with his art-imitating-life approach to writing, this is part of the reason I like Mr. Richards. He’s an anti-intellectual intellectual.

Richards also discussed the difficulty of getting published: you approach a publisher who tells you you need an agent. An agent asks you who your publisher is. Richards then relayed a couple of anecdotes about his younger days. His debut novel, the one I read in high school, was edited by the publisher’s son, though Richards insisted all the bits the kid “gutted” be stuffed back in!

The Q&A was followed by a signing, and the book I bought was one in the Penguin Books Extraordinary Canadians series. I had read the series’ Mordecai Richler biography by M.G. Vassanji and liked it, so I thought I’d check out Richards’s book on Lord Beaverbrook, a.k.a. Max Aitkin (1879-1964), a New Brunswick newspaper baron and the first lord of Fleet Street.

When I was a kid, I played hockey at the Lord Beaverbrook Arena and when I returned to Canada I worked briefly in a building called the Beaverbrook House. I’d been meaning to read about Lord Beaverbrook and knew of Richards’s book, so why not buy a signed copy from the author himself?

Beaverbrook was a real life Duddy Kravitz (a scheming little go-getter). He started his first newspaper at the age of 13, sold bonds door to door, and moved to Montreal to work on the stock exchange. He had a stab at law in Saint John, but then moved to England where he got into politics and built a chain of newspapers. He once owned Rolls Royce. He bought his way into the House of Lords, and was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill. Churchill made him a member of the wartime cabinet and put him charge of aircraft (Spitfire) production.

Beaverbrook cut an intriguing figure: a money man riddled with contradictions. He was both decent and deceitful, an uncouth colonial and a calculating aristocrat. Though he loved Britain and her empire, it was an unrequited adoration. His publications were more tabloid than news, but his efforts in Spitfire production made him a hero. Richards’s heroes are not always easy spot.

Despite all his success, Lord Beaverbrook, was – above all – an outsider. Who better than Richards, who grew up less than two blocks from Beaverbrook, to write about him?

A few years ago, I wrote a book about travelling around East Asia called Notes from the Other China. Some people liked it, others didn’t. My first book, I’m not really happy with it and don’t recommend reading it. It’s derivative and disjointed, but it’s original, or so I thought. I was defensively touting its originality on a discussion board once when someone asked, ‘What about Pico Iyer’s Video Nights in Kathmandu?’ Another commenter chimed in, ‘Yes, I was just thinking of that one. He’s good.’

I thought, ‘Pico who?’

I bought Mr. Iyer’s The Global Soul, read half of it, and dropped it off at a second-hand bookstore thinking, ‘Life’s too short.’ I was also happy in a way. Iyer wasn’t that good. I found The Global Soul boring (brush fires in California) and fawning (the city of Toronto). ‘I can write better,’ I thought, and then, thinking there must have been something to the book that launched Iyer’s career, I bought Video Nights in Kathmandu and such illusions evaporated.

Video Nights in Kathmandu is a travel-lit classic. It’s beautifully written and realized. It’s insightful, engaging, and all those other favourable adjectives professional reviewers use to gush about a book. Iyer makes use of metaphor superbly, he uses just the right amount of comedy, he’s excellent at analysing and dissecting cultures, and he writes with genuine empathy, and it’s this last quality that taught me something about travel writing.

My go-to travel writer is Paul Theroux: opinionated, direct, fond of calling people fatsos; a cerebral and super-knowledgeable adventurer extraordinaire; a fascinating figure and fine writer who’s written about nearly every country on Earth – but an egotistical grump sure to have the last word. Most travel writers are cutting, even well-bred, Eton-educated ones like Colin Thubron and the elitist Jan Morris. Yet, Iyer isn’t cutting at all, and still manages to convey the absurdities of travel, the cultural misunderstandings, and the peculiarity that accumulates the further you wander from home.

This book was written in the 1980s, so it’s dated in a sense, but to readers with an inkling of historical awareness and appreciation this only adds a dimension. The book’s subtitle, And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, speaks to the Americanization of Asia, or at least the superficial appeal and influence of Hollywood movies and rock music. There are frequent references to Rambo and Born in the USA, but they’re acceptable, a thread that sews together the diverse bolts the writer visits: Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, The Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan.

I’ve been to most of these territories and countries, and reading about them in North America teleported me back to a quadrant of the world I lived in for over a decade. I especially liked the sections on Burma and the Philippines. I never made it to Burma; I’ve never read commentary so accurate on the Philippines.

Iyer didn’t spend all that much time in the region (though he returned, and still lives in Japan), but he compensates for a lack of knowledge with keen observation and by following what might writing’s golden rule: write about what you know. In India, Iyer ruminates on the film industry; in Japan, he sticks to baseball. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be interested in reading about the Indian film industry or Japanese baseball, but Iyer shows you they are extensions of the country and culture. He makes you want to read.

This book is a gem, and anyone wishing to head off to Asia for a spot of travel would do well to read it. More than three decades later, Iyer’s East Asia is still there.

Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World is well written, nicely packaged, and fails utterly in explaining why China is going to rule the world. But then, maybe we should it expect it to. After all, it’s not called Why China Will Rule the World, but with a title like the one it has, one can be forgiven for expecting a concrete explanation.

In this book, you’ll find academic prose, a massive select bibliography, 70 pages of notes, lovely maps and graphs, omissions of key evidence, wild speculation, unforgiveable leaps in logic, stupefying factual errors (Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy was not influenced by Mencius; it was influenced by Abraham Lincoln), and a thesis that, if you will, repeatedly repeats itself repeatedly, but offers little in the way of support.

Before we look at the tome in toto, let’s have a glance at its Taiwan section. The chapter on Taiwan gives a fairly accurate overview of China’s and Taiwan’s political history since 1949 and notes that 2009 saw a thaw in cross-strait relations. The two sides signed agreements regarding direct flights, and so on, therefore there might be ‘a resolution of disputes in the relatively near future.’

But those agreements were signed by the Nationalist Party, the organization that turned Taiwan into the Republic of China upon losing the Chinese Civil War. Never mind that China and Taiwan were only ever nominally united, and for a very short time (something Jacques fails to mention), a chief aim of the Nationalist Party is so-called reunification. Because it can’t have “reunification,” the Nationalists settle for closer ties with China. “Reunification” is impossible because the Nationalist Party’s rival, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won’t allow for it. Moreover, supporters from both parties don’t want it. Polls regularly show that something like 90 percent of Taiwanese people want nothing to do with China politically. The Taiwanese are incredibly passionate and politically motivated, and they make frequent use of their democratic right to demonstrate. Futurology is a fool’s game, but I would stake my life on the people of Taiwan turning their country on its head before capitulating to Beijing or being sold out by the Nationalists in Taipei.

Jacques says that if the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) gets re-elected and declares independence, China will likely invade Taiwan, but it’s highly unlikely the DPP will declare independence because their supporters don’t want them to. Something like 70 percent of Taiwanese people wish to keep the status quo. The Nationalists and many of their supporters would never go in for independence, either; neither would the United States. Politically, Taiwan represents a political conundrum and cross-strait relations are a knotty, complex affair. But not to Martin Jacques, who says ‘things are getter better; one day they might be resolved’ (quotation marks are mine). Such a sentiment is the type of hare-brained sloganeering you’d find on a Communist Party propaganda banner. Jacques has to say a solution is possible because if China is really going to rule the world, a prerequisite would be to gain control over the tiny, nearby, Chinese island that has underscored China’s impotence for six decades.

I mention the Taiwan section because it is representative of the rest of the book. With print, you can make obstacles and complexities disappear by not mentioning them, and you can make any scenario seem plausible. Just use the words ‘possibly,’ ‘likely,’ and ‘perhaps,’ and for variety’s sake, or to sound authoritative, say that certain events will transpire. Using the word ‘will’ makes you sound like an expert. Don’t complicate things with the word ‘because’ because that only leads to claims that people can dispute.

The thesis statement for When China Rules the World can be found on p. 15:  “It is banal, therefore, to believe that China’s influence on the world will be mainly and overwhelmingly economic: on the contrary, it’s political and cultural effects are likely to be as far-reaching. The underlying argument of the book is that China’s impact on the world will be as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater.”

But why will it be greater?

You read the book’s two parts (I: The End of the Western World, II: The Age of China) and sift through their many subsections (e.g. Beijing as The New Global Capital) only to find the flimsiest of evidence.

Naturally, the reader wonders, ‘When China rules the world, in what language will the world take its instructions?’ and Martin Jacques deals with this in the section ‘Can You Speak Mandarin?’ Here, we find the usual: Mandarin has become popular as a second language in countries like South Korea and Thailand. It still hasn’t taken off in the West, however, perhaps because of the US’s and UK’s “abiding linguistic insularity and their failure to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.” Jacques goes on to say that Mandarin “will probably in time join English as a global lingua franca and perhaps eventually surpass it.” And then: “The nascent competition between English and Mandarin for the status of global lingua franca… is fascinating… because… they could hardly be more different: one alphabetic, the other pictographic….” Only, there is virtually no competition between English and Mandarin, and the situation is not nascent. Furthermore, Chinese script is not pictographic. This gaffe, along with the fact Jacques cannot pronounce the Chinese words he attempts to slip into conversation in his promotional videos, are clear indicators he doesn’t speak Mandarin. Not that I’m calling Mr. Jacques a hypocrite. That would be a grave insult to hypocrites everywhere. Perhaps it’s just that Jacques prefers to cling to his linguistic insularity and fails to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.

I was especially curious to see what Mr. Jacques would say vis-a-vis the exportation or appeal of Chinese culture. The relevant section is a mere three pages long. As examples, Jacques holds up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese food, and what he calls the “global reach of traditional Chinese medicine.” But Chinese medicine doesn’t have a global reach. Western medicine does. Chinese doctors practise Western medicine. They read medical journals in English. They become doctors by studying textbooks printed in London, Boston, and New York. Ask a Chinese doctor about traditional Chinese medicine and they’re likely to tell you it’s quackery. Also exportable, Jacques says, is kungfu, interesting to me because during the decade I lived in Chinese society I never met a single person who studied kungfu. I never witnessed anyone wearing the uniform; never saw a single kungfu school. There are kungfu comic books and movies from Hong Kong, but they are, like Jacques’s arguments, puerile.

The author’s examples go from superficial and silly to downright absurd. While acknowledging China’s media outlets don’t compare with the BBC, the writer says the potential of the People’s Daily and CCTV (China Central Television) shouldn’t be disregarded. The People’s Daily and CCTV are propaganda outlets for the Chinese Communist Party. Martin Jacques was the editor of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Marxism Today for 14 years. Not surprisingly, that’s not mentioned in the book either.

In addition to being a Marxist, Martin Jacques is a dyed-in-the-wool Sinophile, and in the end, Sinophiles are all the same: they are knowledgeable, articulate, dedicated embellishers. About the closest the author comes to explaining his thesis is by saying China will come out on top because it is not a nation-state, but a civilization state – only there’s no such phrase as civilization state; it’s a term Jacques invented. Jacques, and other Sinophiles, would have you believe that China is exceptional, not subject to analysis applicable to the world’s other countries and cultural entities. China is different. In fact, it’s so different the English language lacks the terminology to deal with it, but luckily for us, Martin Jacques has a patent on the required lexical items, and he’ll share them for just $29.95. Sinophiles resurrect the old ethos that China is mystical, inscrutable. They would have you believe that China is nigh impossible to understand and oh-so-hard to explain – unless they are the ones explaining it.

Martin Jacque’s When China Rules the World represents a wish, an exercise in pro-China propaganda, or both. The Englishman’s argument is unsubstantiated, graph-and-chart infused, pseudo-academic tosh. The concept of China ruling the world has nothing to do with China studies and is the wrong lens through which to view that country. There are plenty of highly engaging, informative, and honest, China books out there. This isn’t one of them.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

Gee whiz. What a success story. Look at China go.

 Stuff and nonsense, say Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie in their book Red Capitalism: The Fragile Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise. After reminding the reader that China’s rise really is extraordinary, and that if not for a few key figures and events the country might have remained a monetary basket-case like it was prior to 1978, the writers reveal a series of unflattering truths through the medium of commentary embedded in case study.

China’s much-lauded model is a derailed version of the one envisioned by former vice-premier Zhu Rongji, not Deng Xiaoping. Zhu hoped to internationalize China’s economy, to create a break between it and the Party – to set it free. But the Party has too many competing special-interest groups, i.e. elite families and other cliques whose chief special interest is themselves. The face of China’s economy, its vaunted and gargantuan state-owned enterprises (SOEs), may have the veneer of Western corporations (they employ accountants, lawyers, are listed on stock exchanges at home and abroad), but are “not autonomous” and can “hardly be said to be corporations at all.” Instead, they are “completely dependent on their political patrons” (special-interest groups), never mind that the SOEs are Western creations (including the 20 or so listed in the Fortune Global 500) birthed by Wall Street. The aims of Zhu Rongji and American investment bankers have been thwarted by the state and its petty, factionalized interests with the upshot that China’s major companies are publicly listed, Fortune 500 pseudo-communist oligopolies. 

This situation makes for an atmosphere of instability, the authors argue. The Party, or rather: the dominant interest groups, can remove CEOs, order up mergers, initiate expansion into unchartered territory, or whatever they please. It’s not about what’s best for the “corporation,” it’s about what’s best for the political elites and their dependents.

In China, nothing is as it seems, and with this in mind the writers take us on tours of the banking sector, the bond markets, the stock markets, etc. The fulcrum of China’s economy is its banking system. By the year 2000, each of China’s major banks was badly managed and bankrupt. The government stepped in to recapitalize and, with the aid of Western advisors, restructure and reform. But the Party continued with its bad old ways, meaning it continued to order banks to lend to the SOEs, even though bad loans were still outstanding. Debt and losses accrued from non-performing loans are hidden, whatever it takes to keep the SOEs afloat in cash so the economy can continue to grow by eight percent per annum. Debt is removed from balance sheets, record profits and low problem-loan quotients are announced, and the boom-bust cycle begins again. While huge piles of debt are shifted from pocket to pocket, cadres lecture Westerners on the weaknesses of their financial systems.

And on and on it goes. The reader sees that the system and all its constituent parts appear fine on the outside, but are moribund and rotting on the inside. Any bona fide internal reform is trumped by a state-backed culture of myopic incompetence. The stock exchanges are state-of-the-art – and state manipulated. Institutions meant to work in tandem jockey for clout and position. The government has become addicted to debt (and burying that debt) to ensure momentum. The train can’t stop; if it does, its passengers might lynch the engineers. In 2009, rather than deal with unresolved loans from the 1990s, the banks went on a $1.4 trillion lending spree.

The subtext is that the Chinese are only fooling themselves, a perennial theme to the observant China watcher. Someone will be left holding the bag, and what a big, burdensome bag it is. According to Red Capitalism, China’s public debt (as of 2009) could be as high as 76 percent of its GDP.

As someone who’s familiar with Chinese history, culture, and society, but who only has a theoretical understanding of business and finance, I found this book engaging, but choppy. There are far too many acronyms, and a way of dealing with this issue should have been to use them sparingly or not at all. There’s a “list of abbreviations” (they are not abbreviations) on p. xiii, but not all of the acronyms are present, and, as mentioned, there are just too many of them. Here’s a sentence from p. 63. “By the end of 2006, BOC, CCB and ICBC had completed their IPOs and the AMCs shortly thereafter had finished their workouts for their NPL portfolios.” On p. 114, because there’s a chart, there are just 17 lines of text, but there are 14 acronyms. For a business report, perhaps that’s all right, but for a book, it’s unacceptable.

Another issue is consistency. We see National Champions, and then “National Champions”; Who’s Who and then Who’s Who, italicized (different and both incorrect – it should be who’s who). We see ‘every body’ when it should read ‘everybody’, and ‘a top’ when it should say ‘atop.’

The book also repeats itself – often. It requires summaries, but not repetition. Using a one-chapter-per-topic approach, the structure of a chapter should have been: introduction, main body, conclusion – like a textbook. If one must repeat, one should at least reword statements and consult a thesaurus.

Esoteric terminology is introduced and not defined. Amounts are sometimes written in dollars, sometimes in renmenbi, sometimes in both. There is little understanding of parallelism: you cannot write MOF and Ministry of Railways in the same sentence, just like you cannot write 1:23 p.m. and two-thirty in the afternoon in the same sentence.

Finally (and I hate to say it, but someone’s got to) there are too many interrogatives; sometimes they come in bunches, and it’s not always easy, or at least for a layperson like me, to know if they’re rhetorical or not.  Chapter Four, “China’s Captive Bond Market” ends with the line: “So the question again presents itself: why did China build its fixed income market?”, to which I mentally rejoindered, ‘Uh, I don’t know. Did I miss something? Are you going to deal with that in the next chapter? I was kind of hoping you would tell me.’ Never form an argument from questions, and avoid asking the reader questions,’ are fundamentals a professor would tell a first-year student.

Nevertheless, Red Capitalism is interesting and necessary. Like China itself, Westerners believe China’s economy is doing fine because that’s what’s reported and people don’t understand how it functions. Although privatized to a degree, financial entities and mechanisms are shackled to the state – and this is debilitating, not invigorating. China is sitting on a mountain-sized pile of bad debt, and, as Walter and Howie point out, it’s possible that pile will only grow during the coming years. They understand China well enough to know that problems, even mammoth ones, can fester and go unchecked for ages. Though enlightening, extracting pertinent information from this volume is, at times, tedious and in between the engaging bits one wonders where the editor was.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

That, more or less, makes for Part One, which I found engaging from a historical perspective as much as anything. It’s meant to be a socioeconomic investigation (a description, a testimony), but because it’s 75 years old, it’s become a historical document. Part One isn’t as lively or vivid as sections of Down and Out, perhaps because there’s little dialogue and it lacks that diary-of-life-in-the-gutter quality. The conditions Orwell describes are awful, but, comparatively, there is a sense of detachment in the way he communicates them.

In Part Two, Orwell gears down, going from documentary to dissertation, and though historical, this part is timeless. “The English class system has outlived its usefulness,” is the message he wants us to take from Part One, so what’s the solution? The most obvious answer is socialism, but is socialism really the medicine society needs to take?

The section about machine-worship notwithstanding (time has proven Orwell, and probably many others, wrong about the future of machines and technology), Part Two makes for provocative, passionate, and insightful analysis. Anyone who’s ever given thought to class distinction, class conflict, exploitation, the plight of the working poor, or been drawn, if only momentarily, to socialism or  its various forms (Marxism, communism, democratic socialism, etc.) ought to read this book, and carefully. Anybody who reads tracts like Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right ought to read The Road to Wigan Pier immediately afterward. They should buy them together.

In socialism, Orwell finds a few good, if loose, ideas, a lot of stupidity, and even more pretension. He lambasts its advocates, arguing they are out of touch with the proletarians they claim to venerate. Socialists are striking a blow at the bourgeoisie, yet they are the bourgeoisie. If a coal miner walked in on one of their meetings, they would feel, at the least, uncomfortable. Socialists hold that “poverty, and what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence.”

Socialism is dogma, Orwell illustrates (without saying as much), arguing that it is not a mirror image of fascism, but a perverse form of it (a “travesty” is the word he uses). Though seemingly antipodean, the ideologies have much in common. If you travel far enough toward either end of the political spectrum, you end up as a blip on the opposite side.

The attacks are scathing, and come in bunches. “We have got to admit that if Fascism is everywhere and advancing, this is largely the fault of Socialists themselves. Partly it is due to the mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on….” Moreover, Orwell says, Socialists “have never made it sufficiently clear that their essential aims are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia.” The greatest excoriation, though it’s hard to choose, might be: “Socialism calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.”

And it very nearly did win. The prophetic nature of Orwell’s ideas is part of his perennial appeal.

‘But hey,’ interjects the modern-day far-leftie. ‘Orwell is talking about a brand of socialism that no longer exists. Socialism has changed.’

It has in some regards, but elements of the variety Orwell was talking about are still apparent. Democratic socialism is still championed by people from the middle class, it’s still dogmatic, and it still reveres “great” men who believe change must come from above. Socialism is often the final destination of the alienated. It is a mind-numbing religion for the non-religious, intellectual, middle class.

They say a good book tells you what you already know (or suspect), and it’s probably for that reason I enjoyed this one so much. I live in one of Canada’s poorest cities, thoroughly blue collar. It’s hard not to look at the poor and start conjuring up ideas about social engineering. Give them an education, you think. Give them purpose. Break the cycle of generational poverty. I recently reread Marx and even voted for and joined Canada’s democratic socialist party, though I quickly wished I hadn’t. The rally I attended was dominated by “vegetarians with wilting beards” (or at least many of the local university’s bearded faculty), sixties’ activists, and “earnest ladies in sandals.” I was, quite frankly, put off by this, and by discussions in the crowd about the bright spots of the Soviet Union and a few of communism’s “great” men, the handing out of hammer-and-sickle adorned propaganda rags, etc. As Orwell writes, “the thinking person, by intellect usually left-wing but by temperament often right-wing, hovers at the gate of the Socialist fold. He is no doubt aware that he ought to be a Socialist. But he observes first the dullness of individual Socialists, then the apparent flabbiness of Socialist ideals, and veers away.”

And none too soon.

There is an intriguing aside to The Road to Wigan Pier. The book was commissioned by a publisher named Victor Gollancz, who wasn’t at all happy with Part Two and worried about the reactions of members of the Left Book Club, the organization that issued the book. Gollancz wrote a flaying, impassioned foreword, included in the modern Harcourt edition, where he attempts, lest the reader get the wrong impression, to take the edge off Orwell’s words. Gollancz apologizes to vegetarians, half-gangster commissars, and cranks, and says Orwell is “astray” and a “frightful snob.” Orwell doesn’t even define socialism, Gollancz whines; nor does he explain what he means by “liberty” and “justice.” The spirited “pretort,” if you will, ends with a figurative, if not literal, call to mobilize against the capitalistic enemy.

The observant reader sees Gollancz’s foreword for what it is: a wretched attempt at censorship and damage control, and the very sort of empty rhetoric, hare-brained we-know-best thinking, and militant jingoism Orwell so skilfully obliterates.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

I’m a big fan of Paul Theroux, at least his travel literature (the only novel of his I’ve read is Waldo, his debut, which, despite moments of hilarity, doesn’t quite come off). In the travel genre, I’ve read his The Great Railway Bazaar, The Kingdom by the Sea, The Pillars of Hercules, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

The Great Railway Bazaar is a masterpiece, the others merely very good to outstanding. Time magazine called The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992) “possibly his best,” and I wondered, as I took up the book, whether this were overstatement or requisite gushing, the deification of another American intellectual. But Happy Isles really is possibly his best – possibly. It’s certainly his most unique. Theroux has become famous for being “that travel writer who travels by train,” yet here he explores 51 Pacific islands mainly by foot and collapsible kayak. He could have rented cars (and he did, occasionally) and trudged around the more developed areas (he does, sometimes), but no, this author is prone to doing things the hard way – exploring the middles of myriad nowhere, and even setting up camp – and the reader is rewarded for it.

Happy Isles is divided into four happy parts: Meganesia (New Zealand and Australia), Melanesia (the Trobiands, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji), Polynesia (Tonga, Western Somoa, American Somoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, the Marquesas, and Easter Island), and what Theroux calls Paradise (the Hawaiian Islands). The isles are diverse, yet similar. Words have travelled thousands of kilometers, and the writer talks about how most islanders have a sense of family, of connectedness. And this is what Theroux doesn’t have; he’s just broken up with his wife, and his journey is a sort of cathartic, extended “walkabout.”

The volume is ironically named. Though there are happy inhabitants in the South Pacific islands, or at least contented ones, the writer reports on the despondent, the taunting, the slow-witted, and the downright peculiar: a man standing up to his neck in a lagoon while puffing on a cigarette; another cradling and cuddling with a large pig. The first Iraq War is on, and people in the Solomons worry about the war spreading to their islands. There are harbours of fish, yet people eat canned tuna and spam. Beaches are often used as communal toilets or dumps. Locals warn the paddler he’ll never make it to that distant island, yet he usually does in an hour; the witch winds and sinister currents people speak of never make an appearance. Villages are often threadbare – huts and what not; missionaries have convinced islanders they are sinners, and the Mormons are out recruiting souls for their planet in outer space. And even where there things are more “civilized” they are buggered. The French have politicized Tahiti beyond repair and ruined fragile ecosystems with their atomic bombs; residents of Queensland drink too much and have racist views about the “abos.” Theroux probes and ponders, questions and interrogates. He draws people out, and jots down what they say. He plays botanist, beachcomber, anthropologist, investigative journalist, humourist, historian, philosopher, and bum – and he does it all so well. Above all, he is a snoop, one with an appreciation for the outdoors, a limitless curiosity, a sharp understanding of human nature, and a gloating abhorrence for political correctness.

In addition to being his most personal book, this is arguably Theroux’s funniest. Consider this chapter intro:

In the way that tardy and negligent people are often blame-shifting and chronically mendacious, many of the Tongans I met in Nuku’alofa were unreliable, and some outright liars – or, to put it charitably, they meant very little of what they said. This could be tiresome in a hot climate. My solution was to take my boat to a part of Tonga where there were no Tongans.

In another bit, the narrator describes a tribal chief as being visible as tribal chief because he had on a less dirty shirt. There’s no racism here, for Theroux lambasts all – his description of a pompous New Zealand politician stuffing her gob with meat is deserving of a commemorative plaque. But he’s respectful and charitable when people are generous, informative, and normal. Like most sensible people, he just doesn’t suffer fools.

There are great “characters” in the “story,” and you’ll learn tonnes about the region: everything from how to get by in Pidgin English to the complex social structure of Honolulu. I’ve read Bill Bryson’s Down Under, but Theroux better conveys what Australia is like in about 50 pages. When Theroux is exploring Easter Island, Vanuatu, and the Marquesas you feel as though you’re exploring it, too. Travel literature can take you far, far away, and Paul Theroux is a superb guide.

If I have any criticism about the book it’s the usual one for Theroux: it could have been whittled down a little. Sometimes, there are sections where not much happens, though that makes for balance and mimics the experience. When travelling, it’s normal for not much to happen. Still, 528 pages could have been 475, maybe 450.

Paul Theroux remains the godfather of travel literature. There may be others who, on a technical level, write better (Jan Morris, Colin Thubron), but Theroux writes exceptionally well – the descriptive prose in this book is visceral and exquisite. As far as travel writers go (and travel writing is such a rich genre), no one has nearly as much to say.

Not only are such claims clinically illogical, they are being disseminated and backed by dyed-in-the-wool Sinophiles: mythomaniacs keen to omit unflattering facts about China to ensure it gains respect, and they gain credibility. But not all the sycophancy, shallow analysis, and hocus pocus in the universe can belie China’s lagging far behind.

China, you see, lags far behind many of its Asian neighbours. The UN’s 2010 Human Development Index (a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and living standards) lists Japan in 11^th spot, Korea in 12^th, Hong Kong in 21^st, and Singapore in 27^th. China comes in 91^st.

It’s a similar story with GDP per capita, a statistic rarely paraded by the Wow!-Look-at-China-go! contingent. According to the IMF, China is rated 94^th in that department, with $7,519. Singapore is 15^th ($43,117), Japan 16^th ($42,820), Korea 33^rd ($20,591), and Taiwan 37^th ($18,548).

China is not a developed nation.

As a developing nation, China faces a cornucopia of impediments; not just obstacles preventing it from interacting with the world in a sincere and meaningful way (outside economics), but issues, which, if not acknowledged, will only continue to encumber its citizenry. Chief among these trouble-spots are education, corruption, and pollution.

Traditional Chinese education is an antique. Exam-based and heavy on rote memorization, it stymies critical thinking and creativity. Out of 976 Nobel laureates to date, only 1 has been a resident of China: Lui Xiaobo, a human rights activist and professor awarded the 2010 Peace Prize while serving a prison term for subversion. The latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings show only 3 universities from China in the top 100. Australia, a country with less than 22 million people, has 5. A full 91 are located in the West, where nearly 1.4 million Chinese students study.

Corruption is a core component of Chinese society, woven into its very fabric. Bribes are commonplace; kick-backs and extortion normal. In the higher echelons, venality is institutionalized, and always has been. In a recent and rare glimpse into the hulking chasm that is China’s profiteering crisis, the Chinese central bank leaked a report concluding 17,000 cadres had smuggled out of the country $124 billion in illegally obtained funds between the mid-1990s and 2008. Dealing effectively with corruption requires transparency and rule of law, neither of which China has. It’s much easier to churn out anti-graft propaganda while prodding the dummy justice system to produce a few convictions. Nothing spells resolve quite like show-trials and executions.

As for pollution, China burns more coal than the US, Europe, and Japan combined. Indeed, coal-burning, along with car fumes, has helped make that country the world leader in emissions. The World Bank has calculated that 700,000 people die each year in China from breathing bad air, and has declared China to be the most polluted place on Earth, with 16 of the world’s 20 most contaminated cities. It’s believed half of all bottled water is tainted, and one third of the nation’s fresh water is unfit even for industrial use. Roughly three quarters of China’s river water is not suitable for drinking or fishing, and China’s Ministry of Health now lists cancer as the number one cause of death.

Apologists are fond of blaming China’s predicaments on its government, but the root of the problem lies in the tenets of traditional culture, not easily expressed in figures and pie-charts (or in brief opinion pieces), but responsible for psychologically shackling a vast populace to its past. Until Confucian values are replaced by Enlightenment values, and the authoritarian tradition is swapped for fundamental freedoms, China won’t possess the intelligence or means to deal with its aforementioned dilemmas or evolve into a developed nation.

When or how is China going to “rule the world?” represents the wrong question(s). The questions that ought to be asked, in the Western Socratic tradition, are: ‘What is China?’, ‘How did it get that way?’, and ‘What is it likely to become?’

To find the answers, Western people need to do a bit of studying. Propositions built around shoddy logic, sound bites, and mythomania are no substitutes for knowledge.

Though unlikely to find much support in the House (or the White House), the bill’s existence, combined with some blistering, Mitt Romney rhetoric made during a recent Republican debate (Romney said that if elected president he would immediately “issue an executive order identifying China as a currency manipulator”) had the media scrambling for pundits to put the China-currency debate in perspective.

Betty Liu of Bloomberg Television, sitting in for Charlie Rose, had two experts on, economist Nouriel Roubini and journalist and author Richard McGregor, in what proved to be an intelligent discussion on a complex issue. That is, until Ms. Liu asked Mr. Roubini, “What are the chances that in ten (or) fifteen years we will be transacting business in renminbi, versus the dollar?”

Though the query was germane to the conversation and met, relatively speaking, by cautious responses, it epitomizes the inherent problem in the China debate: non-economic factors are habitually omitted, and questions about China tend to be of the speculative, or crystal-ball, variety. These two approaches have resulted in a China-view that is principally one-dimensional and profoundly hypothetical.

Adding cultural, historical, political, sociological, and humanist perspectives to the China question is imperative. From an economist’s standpoint, it makes perfect sense to think the renminbi might one day become, if not the global currency, one of the chief global reserve currencies, as Mr. Roubini suggested, or a regional currency, the one for Asia, say, as Mr. McGregor theorized. But when viewed outside economics, such inebriated guesswork is forced to sober up in the face of simple questions. For example: why would the world adopt a monetary unit with six denominations bearing the likeness of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious despots, a man responsible for the deaths of approximately 70 million of his own people? Why would the constituents of a region as vast and diverse as Asia (48 countries; 3.9 billion people) willfully utilize the currency of a communist nation-state Reporters Without Borders lists as being 168^th out of 175 in terms of freedom of the press? Why would democracies like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, light-years ahead of China by many measures (including economic ones), use the coinage of a regime that has virtually no rule of law, no fundamental freedoms, and is so paranoid it demonizes the Dalai Lama and bans songs by Lady Gaga?

From a futurologist’s perspective, it makes perfect sense to say nearly anything at all about China. When it comes to the Middle Kingdom, especially, futurology has proven to be a fool’s game, a product of intellectual laziness. It has, for example, led to the belief that a country not classified anywhere close to a developed one is going to – any day now; literally or figuratively – rule the world.

It takes a great deal of effort to learn what China is; it takes precious little to wonder aloud what it will become. Futurology may have its place, but as it pertains to the China debate, it must be reined in. In addition to specializing in conjecture, it has brought us no closer to understanding what China is and how it got that way. Only when we understand something’s essence can we gauge its direction, and until there is a fundamental shift in the way the West views China, China will remain dangerously misunderstood.