Thursday, September 4, 2014

Review of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler

Earlier this year I reviewed Country Driving, a book about Peter Hessler's drives in the early 2000s in a rental car along the "great wall" through rural northern China and through the factory towns of southern China.

He learned Chinese in the Peace Corps in the late 1990s - right as Hong Kong was returning to the mainland. River Town was his first book, about his Peace Corps assignment teaching literature at a teachers college in Fuling, a Sichuan town of 200,000 where the Yangtze river and the Wujiang river meet.

When he was there in 1998, the nearest large city was Chongqing; less than 40 miles away as the crow flies, but only reachable by seven-hour ferry trip up the Yangtze. Now there is a road that makes it a two hour drive.

Hessler will make an excellent heir to McPhee. He went to China in 1997 to become a better writer, which gave him the advantage of being able to write about completely unexplored territory. In fact, he was so far ahead of the curve that publishers weren't interested in his manuscript: “We don’t think anybody wants to read a book about China”!

What I like about his writing is the honest observation. Before reading Country Driving, I never knew that the Chinese were threshing grain by hand, that they have clumsy propaganda slogans printed everywhere, that their government was so paranoid and so hostile to the spread of information. In short, that it is such a low-trust society. Fuling was due to be flooded by the Three Gorges dam project, but the residents "didn't have access to reliable information about important local issues, which, combined with restrictions on public protest, made it difficult for citizens to be involved in any direct capacity."

He says that the "great wall", in its bigness and its smallness (small enough to step over in many places but stretching for a thousand miles) shows "how far the Chinese can go with a bad idea".

In his teaching, he noticed the students' lack of originality:

"They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it wasn't uncommon to receive the exact same paper from two or three students. There wasn't really a sense of wrong associated with these acts - all through school they had been taught to imitate models, and copy things, and accept what they were told without question."
His students seemed basically incapable of thinking for themselves. He talks about the "challenge of understanding a country in which one hears theories of trickle-down Capitalist economics in front of the enshrined cave homes of Marxist revolutionaries."

In other words, the Chinese education system prioritizes the inculcation of Orwellian "crimestop" in its victims' thinking. All societies have the ability to embrace mass delusions that simply aren't true - we have efficient market hypothesis and warmism among others that are too dangerous to mention - but China seems worst because of the absence of unfettered channels of communication.

He does meet one man who admits to being a bit more perceptive, an English speaking teacher at his college. Hessler asks him about Uyghur unrest in Xinjiang province, and the teacher answers,
"I've heard that there are some problems there. Or actually, they said on the television that there are no problems there. But if there were no problems, why would they say so on the television? So I knew there must be something wrong. But I don't know exactly what is happening."
The Chinese government has the honesty of the USSR or the dictatorships profiled by Theodore Dalrymple.

4.5/5

5 comments:

Unknown said...

In short, that it is such a low-trust society

This is something that most investors don't appreciate. When a country like Russia and China is poor despite having a well-educated population and lots of scientific accomplishments, emerging markets investors tend to think, "these countries have a well-educated population, so they have a lot of opportunity to develop" when it really means they have low social trust that will prevent them from developing.

If Obiwan Kenobi were an economist, he would call China a wretched hive of malinvestment and villainy. A country where the political elites loot hundreds of billions of dollars while building bridges to nowhere isn't going to become a 1st world country, at least not in our lifetime.

CP said...

When I see all the Chinese looters turning up in Los Angeles, that's all I need to know that the emperor has no clothes.

John said...

Sadly much of rural America and workers with HS education have incredibly low trust levels. I see this in the homeowner association that I volunteered to help.

And yet I am convinced that even people of very modest intelligence can be trained to use rational though processes and to solve problems, if more slowly and with more difficulty that more intelligent folks, and thus become able to trust strangers.

I am convinced that America's education system sees it as its mission to flatter and entertain stupidity just like Hollywood has done so successfully and profitably. So I am afraid that we are headed in the third world direction, with teachers finding it easier to relax standards and ease students' descent into third world status.

People with high intelligence trust strangers who come to them with win-win deals because they have the capacity to understand the mutual benefits. However if one is unable to understand the deal or the mutual benefits of interaction, then suspicion and mistrust of strangers is natural.

And absent an ability to reason, trust is extended only to those you have known for many years and have never harmed or cheated you.
When intelligence is distributed randomly among an agrarian population, the smart will learn to apply the same standard of trust as those less intelligent that surround them. However, when the standardized test is used in societies like China to isolate those with high IQ in cities and managerial occupations, trust should develop quickly among equals.

However, when the communist party hierarchy holds power by controlling the flow of information and hiding information from subordinates, trust will develop laterally to those of equal station and no power to harm you, but distrust will remain profound toward those above you in the hierarchical food chain.

CP said...

Was thinking of this quote today:

"I've heard that there are some problems there. Or actually, they said on the television that there are no problems there. But if there were no problems, why would they say so on the television? So I knew there must be something wrong. But I don't know exactly what is happening."

CP said...

James, this was really a great point:

When a country like Russia and China is poor despite having a well-educated population and lots of scientific accomplishments, emerging markets investors tend to think, "these countries have a well-educated population, so they have a lot of opportunity to develop" when it really means they have low social trust that will prevent them from developing.