Volume 36, Number 4 · March 16, 1989
Keeping up with the New China
By John K. Fairbank
Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform
by Orville Schell
Pantheon, 384 pp., $19.95
Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience
edited by Geremie Barmé, edited by John Minford
Hill and Wang, 491 pp., $25.00
Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China
by David Kidd
Clarkson N. Potter/A Griffin Paperback, 207 pp., $11.95
Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China
by Colin Thubron
The Atlantic Monthly Press, 307 pp., $18.95
The Chinese modernization effort of recent years is on so titanic a scale that it is hard to grasp. Can China switch from a command economy to a free market in goods, capital, people, and even ideas? If so, can Party dictatorship survive? A period of railway and city building, typical of the nineteenth century, coincides with a flowering of postindustrial electronic technology. Issues of the Renaissance and Enlightenment in the West compete with a reappraisal of China's own values. Change is headlong; China's development is stretched thin. Wang Yang-ming's unity of theory and practice, so admired since the sixteenth century, is hard to find. No wonder Deng Xiaoping's reforms confuse us as well as people in China.
Review, 4567 words
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