ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I discovered Five Books at Twitter and have been keeping an eye on it ever since as a useful guide to book recommendations on non-fiction subjects.  (Fiction, not so much.)  Their website describes what they do as…

… a library of knowledge, curating book recommendations on any topic. Experts recommend the five best books in their subject. 

So when their China expert recommends Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China, you know it must be pretty good to have been chosen from amongst hundreds to be one of the five.  By ‘good’, I mean ‘authoritative’ because I can only judge whether the book is interesting or well-written.  I have no expertise to judge whether it gives an accurate picture of China or not.

The Shortest History of China is a remarkable feat.  In only about 250 pages, it covers China’s ancient beginnings to the present day, beginning the history of our powerful neighbour with one of its creation stories:

Far, far back in time, a popular Chinese creation story tells us, primal chaos congealed into an egg, in which the complementary cosmic energies of Yin and Yang thickened around a hairy, horned giant called Pángû. Eighteen thousand years passed.  Pangu hatched fully formed, holding an axe, with which he hacked apart the Yin 陰 and Yang 陽.  The Yin became the earth beneath his feet, and the Yang, the sky.  As he grew taller, he pushed the two further and further apart. After Pangu died, his flesh turned to soil, his sweat to rain and his breath to wind.  His blood flowed as rivers and seas. His eyes became the sun and the moon.  From his hair sprung plants and trees, and the fleas in his fur became animals and people.  (p.10).

Beginning in this way signals that the book is a cultural history, much more than just a timeline of dynasties and a catalogue of events.

When I was at school, we learned about the ancient civilisations of the Middle East: the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans.  These days, the Year 7 Australian Curriculum (V8.4) mandates a general overview of the ancient world (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, China and the Maya) and students then learn in detail about one Mediterranean civilisation: Egypt or Greece or Rome, and one Asian civilisation: India or China. My guess is that there are many students who find Jaivin’s history very useful indeed.

Amongst other deficiencies in my education was that the role and contributions of women in history were paid scant attention in any of it. But Jaivin has unearthed all kinds of interesting women, from the Empress Dowager Cixi who was a contemporary of Queen Victoria and joint regent with the uncle of a boy emperor called Tongzhi, to Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) who worked on the Manhattan Project in 1944.

#Digression: at this point in writing this review I went off to have my Covid booster and spent the rest of the day dozing on the sofa instead of capturing my thoughts while they were fresh in my mind. So apologies to Linda Jaivin if I have failed to encapsulate her very fine book as well as I might otherwise have done.

The most useful aspect of Jaivin’s history is the way that it explains China’s sense of humiliation by foreign powers.  It seems to me that throughout the dynastic changes with their internal machinations and their pattern of collapsing due to corruption, China had a long, long history of minding its own business while Europe minded its own. That was followed by European expansionism and colonialisation which caught the Chinese unprepared when they weren’t willing to open up to trade.  Japan saw this coming and modernised, and China didn’t, which led to the atrocity known as the Rape of Nanking in 1937.  This Japanese invasion of China was the start of WW2, in which China fought with the Allies*.

(And now, notwithstanding Japanese war crimes within living memory — for which they have never been held accountable — we are allies with them!)

To add to China’s humiliation, the postwar assumption of power by a communist government entrenched isolation imposed by the west.  There was no Marshall Plan to help them with postwar reconstruction, just as there wasn’t in the USSR. The Chinese were on their own, with all the problems of rapid modernisation exacerbated by the disastrous leadership of Mao Tse-tung a.k.a. Mao Zedong.

As this 2015 CNN article makes clear, China’s role in WW2 is now largely forgotten, yet imagine what kind of world it would be, had the Chinese not contained Japan in Asia.  And how is it that the deaths of millions seems not to count at all in Western narratives about WW2? The chart from the same article (at right) is actually deceptive, because the article’s author Rana Mitter (Professor of Modern Chinese Politics and History at the University of Oxford) states that some 14 million Chinese died and up to 100 million became refugees during the eight years of the conflict with Japan from 1937 to 1945.

While Jaivin does not skate over repression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), she provides context that we rarely see amid relentless anti-Chinese propaganda in the mainstream media.  The example of Falungong is interesting.

Across the mainland, a fad arose for qìgōng 气功, an ancient form of healing and exercise involving the cultivation of qi.  Some qigong masters, expounding Daoist-influenced philosophies, developed large, cultish followings. Such were the origins of many a rebellion in dynastic times.  In the mid-1990s, the CCP placed all qigong groups under supervision.

One group resisted.  Led by the self-proclaimed healer Li Hóngzhi (b.1951) the Falúngōng combined Buddhist and Daoist notions of compassion with racialist ideas, homophobia and the conviction that extraterrestrials were hollowing out humanity spiritually for nefarious purposes. (p.229)

When the CCP denounced Falungong as ‘feudal superstition’ there were huge protests.  The movement had grown to 70 million believers, compared to 63 members of the CCP.  The shocked leadership deemed this the most serious political incident since 1989 and banned the group.

Falungong has since accused the CCP of serious human rights abuses, including the harvesting of organs from their imprisoned members.  The sect promotes its cause abroad through US-based media outlets including the rightwing Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty Television and the travelling extravaganza Shen Yun, which combines quasi-traditional cultural performances with anti-Communist agit-prop. (p.229)

I was puzzled by this because somehow I had come to believe that there were no rational reasons for China to repress and oppress this movement, which, so far as I could tell, was a harmless exercise regime a bit like Tai Chi. So I read the Wikipedia article about Falun Gong which calls it a new religious movement.  Though the movement’s use of Trumpist media and its nonsensical anti-evolutionary stance becomes clear in the second paragraph, you have to read a lot of benign descriptions of its practices before you come to Li Hongzhi’s despicable teachings about homosexuality and ‘race-mixing’, and his risible belief that aliens are among us here on earth.  But knowing how on any given day WP can be manipulated by its adherents and its opponents, I still wasn’t quite convinced until I read this article tucked away on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics department.  Written by a former adherent of Falun Gong, it’s titled ‘The ABC is right that Falun Gong teachings are dangerous.’ He wrote it in response to criticism of the ABC for this report. Which is interesting because my main source of news until recently was the ABC.  Where did I get this impression that Falun Gong was a bunch off eccentrics unreasonably being persecuted by China?

With the current demonisation of China amid calls for preparation for war with them, it seems to me that we ought to be much better informed about our powerful neighbour,  Jaivin’s history is a good start.

*You can read my review of The Men of the Burma Road (1942), Chiang Yee’s account of heroic peasants building a road to facilitate the WW2 movement of allied arms after Japan held all the Chinese ports, here.

Other titles in this Shortest History series include:

• The World, by David Baker
• Greece, by James Heneage
• India, by John Zubrzycki (on my wishlist)
• The Soviet Union, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (on my TBR)
• Democracy, by John Keane
• War, by Gwynne Dyer
• England, by James Hawes, and
• Europe, by John Hirst

Author: Linda Jaivin
Title: The Shortest History of China
Series: Shortest History
Publisher: Black Inc, 2021
ISBN: 9781760641122, pbk., 278 pages including the index
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings, $24.99