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Beijing Confidential: A
Tale of Comrades Lost and Found
The author Jan Wong is a Canadian journalist. Her grandfather had moved to Canada some three quarters of a century ago. Canada recognised the Communist government in China soon after they took over but the US did not do so for about two decades. In this somewhat undefined situation, China was somewhat liberal in the case of Canada. As a student, when she wanted to go to Beijing University for study, the permission was readily granted. There was one other foreign student along with her. That was the period when Mao was all powerful. What he said was eagerly accepted. She was as much devoted to Mao as the rest of his followers in China. One Chinese student showed great curiosity about how things were in Canada and the US. She talked to her in detail and one day she said she also wanted to go to these countries. The author regarded it as an act of betrayal against Mao and reported the matter to her seniors. Before long, that Chinese girl who otherwise was well respected came to be treated as undependable. Very soon, she disappeared from the scene and was sent to her village as a form of punishment. The author accepted it as something logical, if not inevitable. In her own diary, she noted down the details and forgot all about it. However, with the passage of time her ideas began to undergo change. It took her quite some time to look upon Mao as some one who had misled the country. Soon, she came back to Canada and forgot about the incident and how she had done something unpardonable. One day when she was reading her diary, it all came back to her and she wanted to get in touch with her again in order to apologise. Meanwhile, her own views had undergone a complete change. She persuaded her family to accompany her for a month to Beijing. This book is the story of that one month in Beijing and how she located her own university friend and apologised to her. This is what makes the book gripping in more than one sense. What she has said about developments in China are incidental but are exceedingly vital for the common reader. For example, 60 per cent of the population of Beijing used to ride on bicycles for going to work. That percentage has now dropped to 20 per cent. Not only that, Beijing has 3 million cars. It is estimated that the number will go up by another half a million before the Olympic Games which are due in a few months. The government will ask the car drivers to keep their private vehicles at home and not take them out during the Games.`A0 She also tells us that between 1982 and 2000 A.D., about 200 million people left the countryside and moved to cities. Perhaps it was the largest migration of this kind in the history of the world. About 90 per cent Beijing residents have air-conditioned homes and one-third of the people living in Beijing have maids who come from the countryside. They come from the category of those who had shifted from the countryside to cities. There are many sidelights on the social scene. For example, more and more women are opting to stay at home. In certain places, the proportion is as high as one third. This is perhaps a reaction against the one-child policy which was imposed soon after the Chinese Communists assumed power. Quite some employees in China work for 10 hours a week on overtime basis. In 7 per cent of cases, they work more than 60 hours a week. There are so many other details that make the book fascinating to read. One thing in particular was new to me and I cannot say if many other people know about it either. When, in 1949, the People Liberation Army walked into Beijing, there was no common spoken language in China. The Chinese writing had been standardised in 221 BC. But the spoken language differed from area to area. One of the decisions that the Communists took was to prescribe a common spoken language. It is known as Mandarin and was the language that was spoken in Beijing. A large number of people understood it. Even though Mao had reservations about it because it had been the court language of Imperial China but it was the obvious thing to do. Today, every Chinese, in addition to his own local dialect, speaks and understands Mandarin. This could be done as the Communists went about the job in a determined and ruthless way. Today, they might be learning English in addition to their own language. There are pressures of globalisation and the Internet but the basic situation is as described above. I found the book so informative that I would like it to be very widely read in India. Maybe some publisher gets the right to reprint it in India.
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MOST people look upon
China as a rival and watch developments in that country with
considerable curiosity, which is mainly with reference to political
matters and not social developments. However, what kind of a country is
China and how things are shaping up are the issues that are seldom gone
into. While experts on China are confined to some of the specialised
institutes meant for that purpose, most of us remain ignorant of what is
happening there.