The Coming Conflict with China
By Richard Bernstein and H. Ross Munro. New York: Knopf, 1997. 224 pp., $23.
Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History, and Political Structure
By John Bryan Starr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. 320 pp., $25.
Chinese Economic Reform: The Impact on Security
Edited by Gerald Segal and Richard H. Yang. London: Routledge, 1996. 215 pp., £40.
This year saw the death of Deng Xiaoping and the birth of a new and virulent anti-China lobby in the United States. Neither was unexpected, but it was the latter
that created the greater furor, and that also stands to unleash the greater deluge of political troubles.
While by no means the manifesto of the new anti-China lobby, Bernstein and Munro's The Coming Conflict with China certainly helped frame--if not inflame--the debate. With its insistent, narrowly focused argument that China is a strategic and economic threat to the United States, The Coming Conflict is not intended to be a balanced, dispassionate assessment. It is, instead, everything that George Kennan warned foreign policy analysis should not be when he decried in 1942 the already apparent rise of "emotionally pro-Soviet" and "emotionally anti-Soviet" views, views incapable of presenting "Russia dispassionately, without irrational alarm or irrational enthusiasm, with equal skepticism for Russian threats and Russian promises, and with the same cool cynicism and self-interest as which characterize the view of the Soviet leaders themselves on the outside world."
Fortunately, professional China watchers have followed Kennan's precepts; whether they can counter the Bernstein-Munro school of indictment and indignation depends on how well they press their case before the informed public. John Bryan Starr's Understanding China is a promising start.
Starr has distilled nearly two decades of his Yale China seminar into this brief but informative introduction to contemporary China. Those who want a clearheaded, multidimensional tour of China's political, economic, and social landscapes will find Starr's work to be a lucid guide. The emerging superpower that looms so ominously in The Coming Conflict is here found to be a less surefooted architect of its future.
Starr is pessimistic about China's political course; he sees it gripped by forces that would tax "the strongest and most able of governments," let alone one ruled by a party-state regime that he believes will disintegrate like its Soviet and Eastern European counterparts. His arguments for this disintegration, however, should be evaluated against Jerry Hough's recent analysis of the Soviet dissolution in Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, an analysis that also calls into question Starr's view that the Chinese military will play the dominant role in any post--party-state; the Soviet military, like the Chinese military today, was once believed to be the glue that would hold together the politically decaying center but that, of course, turned out not to be the case.
Chinese Economic Reform, Gerald Segal and Richard Yang's edited volume, offers a specialized account of the economic reforms' impact on the Chinese military. The essays are generally skeptical of ascendant China views that see increased economic power translating into an unqualified increase in military power. Ellis Joffe ably surveys the complicated nature of the People's Liberation Army's involvement in the economy, and the enormous difficulties that attend any attempt to match this involvement with increased military budgets; Paul Godwin pares away the debates about what the military budget actually is or is not for what, he notes, one analyst has called "the world's largest junkyard army"; and Segal and Yang conclude with a levelheaded summary of how the international community should and can tie "China in (and down)" so that the "nightmare" scenario of China as an authoritarian, military behemoth in 2020 does not come to pass.
William W. Finan, Jr.
The Fall of Hong Kong: China's Triumph and Britain's Betrayal
By Mark Roberti. New York: John Wiley, 1996. 346 pp., $16.95, paper.
Hong Kong, Britain's "Pearl of the Orient," has been remounted in a Chinese setting. But doubts persist in the West whether Beijing will respect the human rights of
Hong Kong's 6 million plus citizens; the Group of Seven urges China to protect Hong Kong's unique way of life, and dejected Chris Patten, the last British
governor, still fumes over China's rejection of his political reform package that Her Majesty's Government thought of introducing only toward the end of 156 years
of autocratic rule. What does the future hold for Hong Kong?
A former correspondent for Asiaweek, Mark Roberti deftly scatters dramatic gems throughout his investigative book, making The Fall of Hong Kong immensely readable and entertaining. One such gem shines when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher slips and falls on her way out of the Great Hall. An ominous sign? Or just an ungainly kowtow in the direction of Mao's mausoleum? When The Fall of Hong Kong was published in hardcover in September 1994, it received wide attention in Hong Kong, London, and Washington (see the review in the September 1995 issue of Current History). In this "revised and updated" edition, the author covers events through mid-1996.
Roberti meticulously investigates the diplomacy of the handover from 1978, when the Hong Kong and British governments first confronted the problem of the expiration of Britain's lease, to 1994, when China promulgated the Basic Law (that is, constitution) for Hong Kong. During this critical period, the legal, constitutional, educational, and economic framework for post-1997 Hong Kong was completed. Roberti breaks open what Martin Lee, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong, calls in a passionate introduction to the book "the conspiracy of silence" about how Britain caved in to pressure from Beijing to overturn in 1988 a plan for democratic elections that had been approved four years earlier by Hong Kong's Executive Council. Roberti reveals in compelling detail that on several occasions Foreign Office diplomats and the Hong Kong government knowingly deceived Parliament. On the sensitive nationality issue, Roberti delivers on the promise of the latter half of the book's subtitle. While Chinese nationals in Hong Kong, who had been called "British Dependent Territories Citizens," are still allowed to use travel documents issued by the British government, they are no longer entitled to British consular protection in Hong Kong or on the mainland.
The "Fall" in The Fall of Hong Kong is misplaced, however. Hong Kong accounts for one-third of China's foreign exchange earnings and 25 percent of China's total exports. Nearly 90 percent of Hong Kong's transit trade is related to the mainland and 60 percent of foreign investment in the mainland comes from Hong Kong. Of the world's top 100 banks, 85 have offices in Hong Kong; their local assets exceed $1 trillion. The fears about the "demise of Hong Kong" expressed in the West seem sensational because China's vital security and economic interests are best served by an autonomous Hong Kong remaining Asia's thriving hub of capitalism, notwithstanding China's tired rhetoric condemning "bourgeois liberalism."
Rafique Kathwari
Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China
By S. Bernard Thomas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 434 pp., $34.95.
Bernard Thomas has written a readable biography of the writer second only to Pearl Buck in bringing China-albeit "Red" China-to the pre-World War II American
reading public's consciousness (and who was a contributor to Current History, among other publications). What is missing is a critical grasp of the people-Mao,
Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Delano Roosevelt-and the times-the prewar political dynamics in Asia-that stands over and above Snow's own commentary, which
Thomas lucidly relates.
W. W. F.