Stewart McCure

Writer, performer, management consultant

England

An Australian living in London.  A self-employed training consultant to the global health care industry.  A producer, director and performer of improv comedy.  A trustee of an adult education charity in West London.  A writer and occaisional blogger

 

 

Gong Xi Fa Cai

February 07, 2016  /  Stewart McCure

This week we took a family holiday in Phuket, Thailand where I managed to finish my friend Jeanne-Marie Gescher's epic, lyrical, wondrous history of China, All Under Heaven: China's Dreams of Order.   I recommend this book not just to anyone interested in China, but to anyone interested in the human journey.

Jeanne-Marie's key theme is the relationship between the individual and the state.  Chinese leaders have always been conscious of the size of the task of holding together what has consistently been the world's largest population at any period in history.  From the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) onwards personal freedoms have usually been cast as secondary to the need to order and organise such so many people.  Time and again this topdown approach has led to bureaucratisation, stagnation and corruption, with the Communist Party (1949-now) no more immune than any of its predecessors.

The book takes us right up to 2014.  She uses the metaphor of a speeding train, with many classes of carriage to describe the astounding growth of modern China; those at the front accumulating unimaginable riches with diminishing levels of comfort as we move towards the rear.  The least fortunate of all, the old peasant class, the victims of environmental degradation, contaminated food and water and systemic exploitation, are not so much at the back of this train as under it.

Chinese New Year is this week and as we were leaving our 'kid-friendly' resort it was filling up with Mainland Chinese who were using the extended holiday to escape the Northern cold.  At face value they were pleasant, middle-class couples no different from my wife and me (right down to the one precious child).  Yet I couldn't help but wonder how close each was to the front of Jeanne-Marie's train.  And how many lives were blighted in order for this prosperity to be enjoyed by these few?

Of course the exact same accusation can and should be levelled at me.  How many lead poorer lives so that I can lead one of such comfort?  The book speaks to humanity, not just to China.

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tags / Global work, China, Play The Cards You're Dealt