Journalist reveals progress, corruption in Chinese politics

I’m no stranger to five a.m., though we haven’t met in quite a while. I used to greet the early morning with an invigorating 60-minute run, but in the spring semester all that stopped, and, consequently, so did my metabolism. So with droopy eyes and a sleepy haze hovering over me like a phantasm, I rose early, not to exercise but to watch other people do it. The Olympic women’s beach volleyball match between Russia and Georgia was set for five a.m., and with the recent fighting between the two nations my interest peaked. But after watching for few minutes, my interest in this athleto-political battle waned once I heard a sportscasters reveal that Georgia’s players were actually Brazilian. Athlete renting and athletes switching countries for the higher bid is not uncommon in the Olympics, and the controversy it often arouses reveals that, despite what players and world leaders tell everyone, the purity of sport doesn’t entirely avoid the stain of politics. Incidentally, Russia beat Georgia, and their women really are Russian, though they live and train in Rome. Also slightly deflating my pre-dawn Olympic fever was the thought that the volleyball court, with its pretty sand, was likely built where private residences and businesses once stood. In 2000, government-supported developers began notifying the Chinese people of the impending demolition of their homes in order to make room for the summer games. They offered citizens a pittance of the property’s market value, if anything. When Liu Shiru, a resident of Beijing’s Suianbo Hutong neighborhood, refused to let them tear down his home, the developers offered him more money. When he refused again, police officers beat him. He now lives in a slum just outside the city. This story and many others like it reside within the pages of Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, the new book by acclaimed Washington Post correspondent Philip P. Pan. The book is simultaneously a study in human character and a revealing social history of China since the Cultural Revolution. Readers will experience the great famine through the eyes of those who lived it. Some people survived by eating grass; some ate other people. Prepare to meet the doctor who exposed the government’s cover up of the SARS epidemic. Commiserate with a Tiananmen Square survivor who dealt with his emotions by making as much money as he could in China’s emerging free-markets, a tense balancing act of authoritarian capitalism, which members of the ruling party call “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”Laredoans who read this book may hear eerie echoes from a world away. When Pan describes how government officials spend obscene amounts of the people’s money lavishing on food and drink, I couldn’t help but think of Ashley Richard’s recent piece in The Laredo Morning Times regarding our city council’s penchant for satisfying big appetites on the public dime. Pan also reveals that the rural areas of China often find themselves ruled by undereducated party cronies; some municipal leaders have no more than a secondary education. Familiar, anyone? Pan spent seven years as a foreign correspondent in a county where journalism-real journalism-can be a suicide venture. In 2004 he dressed as a peasant farmer and hid pen and paper in his socks to attend the proceedings of a municipal court case. Its incredible outcome helped pave the way for increasing freedom of speech and criticism of government. Yet while Pan exposes the darkest sides of Chinese life, he doesn’t jump on the bandwagon of those lambasting China these days. He points out that after decades of one-party rule, the overall quality of life in China is the best it has ever been, and slow but steady increase of personal freedoms and judicial reform leave room for optimism. From filmmakers to factory workers, the voice of the Chinese may never have reached a Western audience in more penetrating and uncensored form than through this remarkable omnibus of real people’s hope and pain. Out of Mao’s Shadow is now available locally at B. Dalton’s Bookseller or through various online outlets such as Amazon.