Xin Liu’s `Moralization of China’ (World Scientific, Singapore, 2018: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10712) is a provocative book, and written in a provocative way. Readers can’t complain they have not been given a clear warning, when the very first page of the text carries a dedication:  `To the Intelligent Few.’ I wondered whether I could dare imagine falling into this cohort, and then started to worry whether it wasn’t a dastardly authorial trap. Being invited to think you are smart, and then being tripped up by an writer exposing one’s hubris and self over-estimation.

I hope it was Xin Liu being playful. But they take no hostages as the book’s argument proceeds. Social media, Maoist China, contemporary Mainland cinema – they all get targeted assessment. However one assesses the drift of the argument (and there are times when it does become a trifle hectoring) the extent of referencing and allusion is impressive. From Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, to Marx and Foucault, via Weber and a host of other luminaries, the brickbats come thick and fast. I particularly admired the author’s way of continuing the fight not just in the main text but in a series of coruscating footnotes. Great technique. I will definitely try to copy one day.

Round about halfway through the book, on page 78, Liu describes a contemporary Chinese bookshop. This in particular made me lay aside the book and ponder for a while what it is about bookshops in the People’s Republic these days that is so baffling. They are vast places. Chinese people certainly like reading. And going from the number of people in them, they like buying their books in person, not so much online (though I know business there is pretty good). Back in the old days (which for me means the mid 1990s when I was first living in China) there were the cavernous Xinhua bookshops, government run, with vast piles of political tracts, and the usually peaceful acreage devoted to Marxism Leninism and various other ideological matters. On the ground floor though were the more commercially attractive self help and business books. The crowds usually assembled there.

There were smaller bookshops too – and ones that dealt with what passed for second hand books. It was in these, in a place called Book City, that I managed to buy kilos of stencilled and poorly printed leaflets and pamphlets from the Cultural Revolution decade starting in 1966. The Winter day I did that, back in Hohhot in 2000 on a brief visit, meant that finally my doctorate was viable. I had the source material I needed. The shop owner evidently thought Christmas had come early. One other customer jubilantly declared to me while I was leading that the 500 yuan I had spent was a `con’. But in the pavement outside the shop I corrected him. `I know it’s a lot of money’, I said, `but it’s my thesis. I’d have paid ten times this to be honest.’ He looked at me uncomprehendingly, as though I had just achieved the impossible and made my actions seem even dumber.

These days Chinese bookstores are bigger, more commercial and as Xin Liu shows a place where students, migrants, parents, and others can come to while away the time. But they don’t have anything like the aura of the amazing Eslite chain in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose founder died a couple of years back. These really are places of excitement, full of contesting and contrary ideas in contesting and contrary books by authors from across the world. They have great coffee shops too!

Utopia bookshop near Tsinghua University in Beijing, long since closed down, at least had a certain edginess to it, even if it was busy pushing neo-Maoist and new leftist fare. The `San Lian’  place, linked to the eponymous publisher, issued jewels by writers like the late Yang Jiang (杨绛) and Qian Zhongshu ( 钱锺书). But these days the main offer is either the latest business guru, translations of palatable blockbusters from the West, and then, of course, walls of locally produced political fare.

How you can have such well stocked, popular and, at times, immensely diverse bookshops which at the same time clearly have `edited’ stock – with a lot of material either not available, or available in a form which omits some key issues, is, at every least, symptomatic of the boundaries, visible and invisible, that exist around you in the larger environment of China. Borges could have written something subtle, elegant and revealing about the phenomenon of bookshops in modern China. They are monuments to a certain attitude or disposition, and in a strange way typify the commitment to stability and control which is currently so embedded in the culture. That might be one reason why Xin Liu’s observation is, in my experience, so true: for all the people in Chinese bookshops these days, you sure see a lot of readers who look, for all the world, like they are sleeping.  But of course it is very obvious. They are reading through closed eyes.

The vast majority of Chinese people from the earliest times to the last few years have lived in what is classified as rural China. Their lives as they figure in literature or studies have a sort of static, almost unknowable quality.  Rural Chinese under Mao became, at least in the language of the Communists, the masters of their own affairs –    organised into production brigades and patiently feeding the slowly expanding cities as the country was reconstructed and resurrected. In the Cultural Revolution from 1966, because of the phenomenon of sent down youth, the ranks of the peasantry (in Chinese, the less loaded word 农民) were swelled by these new, sometimes hapless agents of revolution. Current president Xi Jinping fell into this category in his years in Shaanxi from 1968.

The Chinese countryside figures in contemporary imagination as a place either of over-idealisation (the simple faithful and innocent foot soldiers for Mao’s sinified Marxist grand experiment) or deep pessimism verging on horror. In their report, `Will the Boat Sink the Water: the Life of China’s Peasants,’ written and promptly banned in China in the early 2000s, and then translated and published in the West in 2007, Anhui journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi  drew an unremittingly bleak picture of the conditions in the rural areas. This was a world dominated by the struggle against poverty, unfair taxes, and larcenous, all powerful rent-seeking officials. Chinese farmers were victims. No wonder everyone was trying to leave and move to the nearest town or city.

China’s countryside is so vast, diverse and varied that reality must be more complex. And so reading the work of  Australian-based Mobo Gao serves as an excellent corrective to the tendency to regard China’s rural areas as bottomless pits of need, backwardness, and despair.  His `Gao Village Revisited: The Life of Rural People in Contemporary China’ (Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2018) (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/gao-village-revisited/9789629965785) is the sequel to a work he authored two decades ago on his home in Jiangxi province, south eastern China. Gao himself left to study in Europe in the late 1970s, and has since had academic positions there, and in his current base in Adelaide. But he has evidently maintained close contact with the place of his birth and upbringing, and it serves as a central motif of his work.

Gao has always been a wonderful and often bold contrarian. His earlier work, `The Battle for China’s Past’ written in 2008 was a counterblast against the narrative of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 being an unmitigated catastrophe for Chinese people. For him, as a rural inhabitant then, this allowed the elite, urban narrative to dominate over the less privileged one – for occupants of this other China, the decade from 1966 allowed freedom, and on many levels was liberating. He refers to this a little in the current book by talking of this era, when he was an adolescent, as one of exploration, and of permission to be allowed to attack traditional ideas and  conservative shibboleths. This is contentious, but his interpretation needs to be set alongside the many others of this era to fully appreciate its complexity, and  avoid falling into  easy, moralising frameworks.

The most important point that Gao makes in this work is that far from being a place of victimisation and passive, tragic weakness, China’s countryside in the era of Xi Jinping is one of assertion, agency and optimism. It is also, as he very eloquently argues, a place that does not fit into the usual power-dynamics. Far from being a drain on government resources, and a place where the key imperative is to get out as fast as possible,  Chinese rural dwellers are `looking after China, taking care of the Chinese government’ (p 19). The dependency is the reverse of what is usually expected. Without the hard work, optimism, and  massive energy of this part of China, the rest of the country would not work.

This is a hugely important point to consider. The other is made earlier in the book where Gao argues that `China has to be understood and interpreted on its own terms’ (p. 4). Of course, many would take issue with this, asserting the need to stand up for universal ideas of analysis and assessment. But Gao’s work  appeals to me most strongly because, for fairly self-evident reasons (this is after all the place from where he originally came, and to which he is still deeply linked)  of the strong emotional link between the observer and scholar (him) and the object of his work (his ancestral home). That gives his narrative an extra dimension, and moves it beyond the sometimes cold, and often almost inhumanely calculating social science or anthropological posture one often gets in books about China.