Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China
by John Pomfret
Henry Holt, HK$203
'Each age tries to form its own conception of the past,' historian Frederick Jackson Turner once wrote. That's the task John Pomfret, a former Beijing correspondent for The Washington Post, sets out to achieve for China's modern era.
Pomfret was a student at Nanjing University in the 1980s before being assigned by Associated Press to cover the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. After being expelled, he was sent back in 1998 by The Washington Post. Those years provided the opportunity to write a coming- of-age story of not only himself but of his classmates trying to reconcile their conceptions of China's past with the tumultuous change of its present.
Pomfret looks up four men and a woman who shared his years at Nanda - the children of China's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution - and lets them tell their own stories of denouncing their parents, destroying their cultural heritage, hiding books in damp cellars, exile to distant work camps, persecution because of class background, and striving for the only thing that mattered: survival.
From his classmates' childhoods to their lives today, Pomfret paints a grim picture of a China that hasn't reconciled its modern history. For centuries, China's intellectual tradition encouraged discussion of what it meant to be a good and virtuous person. 'Fifty-plus years of Communist censorship and political campaigns have silenced those debates, and it is still unclear whether the country has the ability to revive the tradition of asking these timeless questions.' The lack of direction and wanton opportunism left in this moral vacuum, he argues, infects the entire country and will determine whether China can keep its rapid transformation on a steady course. 'The social contract hashed out by Deng [Xiaoping] - you can get rich if you keep your mouth shut - is fraying because too few people have won their share of the bargain.'