Peter Mattis and Mathew Brazil, one an analyst and one a former official and now an historian and consultant, are right in their introduction to this new book. Espionage from, by, and on China is necessarily a somewhat opaque world. Little has been written about it. Richard Deacon wrote one work which came out as far back as 1974. Since then, there have been others. But unsurprisingly, in a political culture that privileges controlling knowledge about even some of what one might consider its more open operations, China has proved increasingly effective at guarding the gates of the ultimate inner citadel – that of using unorthodox means, through human and signals intelligence – to work out what others are up to – the enemies outside, and within: espionage.

In a time of increasingly frenetic language and claims about the country and its government, `Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer’ (Naval Institute Press, 2019) offers some much needed calmness and reflection. All countries spy – or at least should do! There is nothing intrinsically evil about this. Ironically, as the two authors make clear, while the era of the Internet has offered some excellent opportunities for the country’s Ministry of State Security, it seems that the Marxist Leninist ideological framework within which everything needs to be interpreted and evaluated internally, rather than what they describe as `the empirical, positivist tradition that permeates Western intelligence’ (22) remains the most significant weakness. Were the Chinese institutionally to use a more flexible framework, then it’s an interesting question of whether they would become even more effective. It’s clear, though, that as the various case studies in the authors’ fourth chapter about economic espionage show, in terms of intellectual property theft they have proved pretty efficient. This too, however, is a competitive field. As with other areas of policy, when it comes to helping China and Chinese make money, the Marxism Leninism gets toned down by a much deeper pragmatism. In other areas, its operations no not so demonstrably successful. But then, to thicken the plot, the sign of a truly successful undercover operation is that no one ever knows it happened – or at least till long after!

At a time in which, in the US, Australia, and indeed in Europe, an almost McCarthy era hysteria is appearing about what Chinese agents and institutions are up to, this book offers an important ingredient of caution and focus. It locates Chinese modern intelligence in the historical narrative of the revolutionary party during its years from 1927 under attack and underground. The case of Gu Shunzhang comes up many times. The chief intelligence operator alongside Zhou Enlai from 1929, his detention (bizarrely while masquerading as a magician while returning from an undercover operation in Wuhan) in 1931 by the KMT resulted in his making the choice to defect. The alternative was to die under torture. His treachery resulted in a devastating onslaught on his former fellow Communist activists. Only luck and the tip off from someone else meant that some of the Communists, including Zhou, escaped. Gu nearly finished the Party. If he had, the history of the country may have been very different. As it was, it just about survived. But this moment of almost existential threat, on top of the 1927 Chiang Kai-shek inspired April purge, left deep marks on the Party, and on Mao, its ascending leader. For Zhou, it was almost as though his failure to see the potential for weakness in his colleague was something that was laid on him for the rest of his life. It was one of the things that Mao `had on him’ and which were deployed over the decades ahead – even when he stood beside the Chairman from 1949 as his key right hand man when they were in power.

Not that the CCP were any patsies. Their response was to find Gu’s wife, and murder her, and ten of his family members – executions ordered by Zhou. After 1943 and the Salvation Campaign, those that worked in the world of espionage had to be wary of the very paranoia that the Party was asking them to service didn’t come to devour them in its turn. Pan Hannian  (潘汉年) and his unplanned meeting with the collaborator Wang Jingwei in 1943 during the war, something he fatally didn’t tell his superiors about, meant that despite the effectiveness of the work he was leading into infiltrating the KMT, when he confessed his error twelve years later, his report, when submitted to Mao, got the chillingly brief `此人从此不可信用” – ‘this man can never be trusted’ – inscribed on it. That was as good as s death sentence. Pan spent the rest of his life till 1977 in jail.

This book is full of excellent and useful detail, and presented in a way that avoids getting lurid or sensationalist. It is slightly impeded by the fact that from the second chapter it is largely an alphabetical listing of figures, sometimes institutions and companies, and then entries on their role, history, etc. This means that the narrative structure after the first introductory chapter disappears, and it becomes more akin to a reference book. Of course, as the title says, this is a primer – but it is a pity that there wasn’t an attempt to do thematic chapters with more of an attempt to interlink, and analytically describe the various different figures and the events they were involved in in a more organic way. At the very least that would have avoided some of the repetition that inevitably results from choosing the current format.

On top of this, the final chapter, at a mere ten pages, about current Chinese espionage, is disappointing. This was the opportunity to perhaps offer some more concrete information for people travelling to China today – things that are widely and publicly known now. The use, for instance, of clean laptops and mobiles, or the fact that, as the recent case of Dickson Yeo of Singapore made clear, Linked In has often been used as a way for people to be sounded out before being recruited. Nor does it go into more detail, of which there is plenty, about cases like that of the British aide caught in a blackmail case during a visit by Gordon Brown to Shanghai in 2008. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/2437340/Downing-Street-aide-in-Chinese-honeytrap-sting.html. Maybe that is for another fuller account the authors might be working on. Forewarned is forearmed, up to a point. And so this book fulfils at least part – and an important part – of helping to create a more informed awareness and debate about an important area. One thing is for sure. While it might not be the world’s oldest profession, spying must have been closely in second place. And in a world of dwindling certainties, this shadowy area is not likely to disappear. This book helps to manage the risk, even if that risk will never disappear.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is one of the great figures of European intellectual history. His contribution to knowledge ran from mathematics, to calculus, to natural science, and philosophy. For a person associated with the invention of the calculator, the impact of his own work was incalculable. It matters therefore that he wrote often, and at length, about China. This is all the more remarkable because of the very limited contact between the Qing China that existed at the time he lived (with pleasing neatness he was born almost at the dawn of the Qing’s foundation, which had been from 1642 to 1644) and the dearth of material that had been translated from Chinese into European languages. The great bridge over which knowledge of this remote civilisation passed to Leibniz was the work of the Jesuit missionaries, among whom Matteo Ricci from a century before was one of the most eminent. The later figures of Nicholas Longobardi and Antoine de Sainte-Marie, in their zealous mission to disprove fundamental tenets of Confucianism and the Chinese world view they had been exposed to during their time in the Qing empire had also, to some extent, offered translations of key passages from the great Confucian texts – the `Analects’, `The Great Learning’ and the `Five Classics’. In these Leibniz learned of the strange parallels between the hexagram system in the ancient work of divination, the `I Ching’ (`yijing’, 易经) and the binary number system he himself had devised.

The Jesuits had mostly approached engagement with China as part of a mission to convert the Chinese. Matteo Ricci’s work was pervaded by the task of finding parallels between the Chinese world view and Christian Catholic faith. Along the way, he developed that bifurcated, complex view that anyone dealing with the reality of the Chinese world, its cultures, societies, histories and philosophies would recognise even down to today. Half deeply impressed, admiring and embracing of Confucianism, he maintained a strong antagonism towards Buddhism. His Jesuit successors to some extent solved this tension by taking sides: they created a position of moral ascendancy, where the Chinese world and mindset were presented as challenges, problems, that somehow offered themselves to vast projects of reformation and conversion.

Leibniz matters, and matters massively, if for no other reason that the declaration he makes in his `Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese’ from towards the end of his life (the book was issued in the year of his death, 1716).  Here he writes:

`I said at the outset that I did not want to examine to what extent the manner of worship of the Chinese could be condemned or justified, and that I only wanted to investigate their doctrines.’ (Leibniz, `Writings on China’, trans and edited by Daniel J Cook and Henry Rosemont Jr, Open Court, LaSalle and Illinois, 1994, 123).

These words should be put in gold on the doors of any institute or entity, and be adopted as a universal creed, by anyone dealing with contemporary China. They were stated by one of the great enlightenment figures, in the full spirit of enlightenment values – commitment to intellectual openness, dispassionate enquiry, and a belief that, in the words of the modern philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is `a truth that is independent of our beliefs’ (Nagel, `The View from Nowhere’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, 186). This is as true about China as about any other subject or issue: there is, despite the froth and chaos of contemporary debate a `truth independent of our beliefs.’ The Leibniz attitude is the most likely way to find that.

Through his enquiry into the ideas and philosophy of China that Leibniz engaged with, in this and other works produced earlier in his career, he stood aside from the clear aim of the Jesuits whose works he was mining for material in not being motivated by a desire to make some massive evaluative point in favour of Christianity and its universal applicability. Not that this did not sometimes figure in his work. But more often it is frequently disrupted by problems, dis-junctures, and puzzles – moments when he is brought up short by appreciation of the the richness and validity of what he is finding the Chinese words he is examining, albeit at second or third hand. His long discussion of the notion of `Li’ 理 – something he equates to the concept of God, and which figures on the Warring States philosophers as a principle underlying everything, and in which everything unfolds and makes sense – is symptomatic of this. While Leibniz’s reference point is Judaic-Christian monotheism, he also unpacks the ways in which he finds the Chinese notion similar, and dissimilar, with the latter being particularly important. Leibniz certainly allows, and accepts, the dissimilarity, without wanting to embark on some grand campaign of intellectual and cultural assimilation. There are further discussions of the ideas of the `taiji’ 太极 – supreme of ultimate), the `dao’ 道 – (path or way) and the principles of `yin’ and `yang’ (阴阳). Leibniz may not have had access to much of the great corpus of Chinese classical thinking, but even in the slender amount he did find, he managed to discover a lot.

Leibniz is a great model and inspiration today on many levels. Firstly, he engaged with ideas from the largely unknown and unexplored traditions of the Chinese world with a genuine openness and curiosity. Despite this openness, his work bears no trace of fear or defensiveness. His world view was one of deep confidence and intellectual integrity – he attempted to see the Chinese world view accurately, and on its own terms. He made no shallow moral judgements, nor imposed any easy normative frameworks where his intellectual location was somehow presented as superior to what he was examining. He was open minded enough to place his own work, particularly binary numbers, against what he found in the Chinese corpus and see parallels and commonalities there, things that indicated a deeper, shared, human root. Leibniz was, after all, a great humanist.

We need the spirit or Leibniz today. That is why reading the work of someone who had never set foot in the country from over three hundred years ago is still important and refreshing. Somehow, between that time and the present, the constant desire to either save or damn China entered into the equation. We seem to be living deep in that stage. The German philosopher shows that there is a way between these two extremes. And it serves us all to find that one quick, and start to truly live up to the values that he was such a significant figure in creating, rather than simply degrading and betraying them through fear, division and blame.

The Cultural Revolution has been, and continues to be, intensely studied outside China. Within the country, particularly in recent decades, things are more sensitive. But even if repressed, it is still part of the life stories of most people over the age of 65 – which means a good number of the political elite running the country today. We know much about how the events from 1966 unfolded in urban centres like Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou through the excellent work of, amongst others, Andrew Walder. Song Yongyi runs a tremendous internet resource on the era with thousands of documents (https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/109609). Even in more remote parts of the country, we have some good material, much of it from Chinese writers themselves who were witnesses originally and then went on to study it. The remarkable `The Killing Wind’ by Tan Hecheng about the horrifying events in Daoxian, Hunan province in 1967 springs to mind here.

On the three main so-called autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, the situation is somewhat patchier. The first region has been addressed most fully by the work of Qi Zhi, (啓之，内蒙文革实录，Hong Kong, 2010). The second and third however are areas where much is suspected, and little really known.

One of the many remarkable things about Beijing-based Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser’s book, `Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution’, now handsomely translated into English by Susan T Chen and furnished with an excellent introduction by Robert Barnett (Potomac Books, Nebraska 2020- ) is the ways in which, through the collection of her father’s photographs from the period, we see the act of revolution as it was undertaken at this time. Mao Zedong was right: revolution was not a dinner party. This book shows people in the midst of violence, verbal and physical. They are depicted being struggled against, forced to bow their heads while being marched through streets with the various paraphernalia of the era hung around their necks and bodies, and in some cases taken from trials to execution. Not a dinner party indeed!

Those who have been to Lhasa, where most of these images were shot, will be familiar with some of the locations. The area in front of the revered Jokhang Temple, for instance, or the square underneath the Potala Palace. They are places of largely placid sightseeing and tourism today, though heavily securitised. Tsering Woeser’s father was an official photographer for the People’s Liberation Army in the 1960s, meaning that he was allowed access to the events which unfolded from August 1966 when the Cultural Revolution hit China’s provinces after being announced in May in Beijing. He did this work for the following two years, before being relocated with his family to neighbouring Sichuan province. The fact that his daughter was able to keep his collection of negatives, and that she is also in a position to supply such detailed notes and explanations, means that there is nothing remotely like this archive for the other autonomous regions.

The act of revolution in this period involved the singling out of specific individuals who were associated with the `Three Great Masters’ of the old Tibetan society – members of the former government, monasteries and aristocratic classes. The campaign to eliminate the claimed influence of these was folded into the national `Smash the Four Olds’ that was waged elsewhere in Mao’s China.  The ways in which the national and local dynamics related to each other, particularly in how actions like Struggle Sessions and political campaigns to `root out’ evil influences, were adapted to local circumstances, is captured both in the images, with their haunting power, and the texts. They are only moments in a dynamic process, frozen for one moment, but this does not detract from their great symbolic power. Around them, we can construct a little of what this whole experience of revolution at this time and its aftermath must have been like. We can also understand the traces it leaves to this day.

It would be easy to start imposing strong moral parameters to this story to make sense of it – the victimised Tibetans and the evil Han colonisers is one that springs to mind. But this book is a corrective to this. As Barnett explains in the introduce, and as Woeser and the photos reinforces, the vast majority of those persecuting, not just those being persecuted, were Tibetans. Many of the activists were classified as `emancipated serfs.’ Some came from the underclass – beggars, thieves, those on the fringes of the traditional society that had prevailed in the region till the fleeing of the Dalai Lama in 1959. The question of motivations is not an easy one to unpick. For some, as elsewhere in China, it was a case of settling scores with people they felt had done them done. For others, it was more about keeping themselves safe in an era when everyone was under suspicion. Even the most powerful Communist Party appointed leader of the region in 1966, Zhang Guohua, and his deputy Ren Rong, ended up getting consumed by the events, removed to elsewhere or side-lined. In the aftermath, yesterday’s victims, sometimes, became the new masters, co-opted by the Party State in the reform era after 1978 to be members of the notional governance structure of Tibet as it emerged from the trauma of this time. In most of the images, at least from the era of its greatest intensity over 1966 to 1967, the thing that is striking is the ways that people of Han ethnicity – either as soldiers, or party members – when they are visible at all, are more often than not on the edges, and figure as onlookers. Only once or twice do they seem to take an active, leading role.

One of the most powerful and important aspects of this book, which was originally issued in Taipei, Taiwan in Chinese in 2006, is the ways in which it expels anonymity. Often, except for absolutely key figures, images from the Cultural Revolution elsewhere in the country have people in them who carry no names, and about which nothing seems to be known. Who were they, what had they done before getting involved, why were they there, and, most importantly, what happened to them afterwards? The work of Li Zhengsheng, who only recently died in the US, typifies this. While the publication of his collection of images from the north east of China at the same time as Woeser’s sometimes indicate who the figure is being struggled against or attacked, for those engaged in doing this there is largely silence. Woeser’s approach to her father’s work is different. She conveys a vast amount of information about even figures that are in the background of some of the photos. She is able to track what happened to them – how some of them spent much of the rest of their lives reverting to Tibetan religious practices in an act of repentance, and how others remained unapologetic, and even enjoyed success. For some, the updates fade away, with only `they died sometime in the 1990s’ finishing off the descriptions of them. But all of this does help give depth and human context to scenes which can all too often seem distant because of their almost nightmarish quality.

In the end, though, dwelling on the stories that we see through the book of those who took the brunt of this cataclysmic event – Ba Jin called it a `spiritual holocaust’ – is where the real comprehension of what it might mean, and how it should be remembered and understood today happens. Images of the figure of Shatraba Decho with a huge paper notice stuck to her front in Tibetan denouncing her crimes for instance. Or the horrible fate of Tsadi Tseten Dorje whose aristocratic background meant he was singled out for particularly nasty treatment, with a concoction of barley and thorns forced down his throat at one meeting, and a dunce’s cap placed on his head. Maybe of all the images, that of the bewildered expression of the elderly Pelshi Po-la, standing being humiliated in public, looking straight at the camera, is the most haunting (117). These four images raise the kind of questions about complicity, accountability, the role of an observer like the photographer, and in what ways their act of recording is crucially necessary, but also profoundly painful. It might be my own over-delicate liberal sentiments, from another place, and another time over fifty years in the future, but there is a sense in which his look captures the sense of shame, incomprehension, and accusation not just for those actively persecuting him that day, but we, as readers, sitting comfortably observing decades later. The Cultural Revolution was China’s; the human tragedy of it however, as this book so forcefully shows, relates to us all.

Places mattered to T S Eliot. For each of his `Four Quartets’, a specific, named place figures as their title, and plays a considerable role in their content and orientating their meaning. Going to these places has become a major part of my reading, reception and understanding of the poems. Somehow, the experience of having visited East Coker, where Eliot is buried, and Little Gidding, where he went while a visiting fellow at Magdalene College in early 1940s, did change the way I viewed these works, even though I have been familiar with them for many years. The `Dry Salvages’ is less accessible – of the coast of New England. `Burnt Norton’ was the outstanding location in Britain I hadn’t got to. So in a visit to the Cotswolds I thought I would track it down.

This whole exercise proved to be a journey somewhat different to how I had expected. To me, up until a day or so ago, the first of the `Four Quartets’ has always been somewhere I have associated with a neat, well-tended garden – the garden with the pool that figures in its first section, where there are roses, lotus leaves, a sort of still, isolated peacefulness. Around this, Eliot’s meditation on time and memory weaves itself calmly. The lines are too well known to need requoting. But they often go through my mind when I go into gardens, particularly if they are highly decorative, and almost empty, and pervaded by peacefulness and serenity. These places figure to me as ones that typify a sort of mythical Englishness of the kind that it seems Eliot refers to a lot, not directly, but in the way he adopted the character and assumed habits of someone very English, despite himself being American.

In my imagination, Burnt Norton was going to be an archetypically well mannered, gorgeous Cotswold place – walled gardens, roses in many colours, well-tended grass, the sound of running water, gentle, into a pond with water lilies on its surface, and birds gently singing in the background. Precisely the kind of place, in fact, I had found the day before, in the Abbey grounds next to the main church in Malmesbury – carp in pools, nicely cut grass, the competing smells of flowers nestled kindly against each other. A place to tend and heal ones mental scars, and wind time down to nothing. And indeed the online searches for Burnt Norton, the manor house and its estate near to Chipping Camden, showed a place not unlike that – but from this point, everything unravelled.

First off, the visit with Emily Hail, the woman he had a long term, somewhat tortuously intense but probably Platonic relationship during a walk in 1934 when she was staying at Chipping Camden and he came to visit, was when the estate was run down, the house deserted, and they were trespassers into a forgotten and derelict location. The pool he looked into, the gate he went through, the plants he saw – which figure in the poem – were not neat. They had long since fallen into neglect. No doubt weeds prevailed. The gate would have been rusty. The pool water dirty and clogged with plants. The place would not have been remotely domesticated or aesthetic. It would have been impressively evocative, of former glories and departed wealth.

Secondly, though Eliot did not know this, the place had been the site of tragedy – of the main house, built by the owner a century and a half before for his lover which had then burned down, and of tales of other family tragedies, even of people being drowned in the pool Eliot looked down into . Norton House bore the name `Burnt’ because of this. There was a reason why it had fallen into disuse. There were heavy, deep memory traces here.

Thirdly, today, despite the fact that there must be many other people that come here, it is not remotely an easy place to find. I had three goes. It is not visible from the road – indeed, it is not clearly visible as far as I can find anywhere. A wall of trees on the escarpment close it in. This is odd for a building that, even in its reduced state, was meant to be looked at or at least looked out from. There is something deeply unsettling, but also moving, about dealing with somewhere that so clearly does not want the world to come in. Nothing as crude as `Private – Do Not Enter’ signs. But winding private roads that make you feel uneasy and wary as you travel along them, waiting for someone to crop up and start ordering you to clear off. This didn’t happen. But the house made its inaccessibility clear, and did it well enough that the most I got to see was the side buildings. It has, in recent years, been renovated. Its gardens are now no longer in such a sad state. But I certainly failed to get sight of them.

What I did get though was a far better understanding of what Eliot was writing about – memories that sit, static, but which when they are reawakened can come alive in the present, unsettling, accusing, and troubling; a garden long forgotten where intruders seem to find things that speak to them of what once was, in the present, into the future, coming part of their lives, reawakening their own sense of places in themselves which were neglected, secluded, forgotten, troubled by turbulent memories. And this notion of a secret love that wanted to remain secret – which was very much the case with Eliot and Hail. Only recently have her collection of letters been released, years after the death of both of them.

Eliot is a ghostly, disturbing figure when you come to Burnt Norton – sort of looking out from within the trees at you, doing all he can to evade and conceal. The poem `Burnt Norton’ is a far more disturbing one now I have come to the place that inspired it. No doubt if I had had easy access to the nicely refurbished and tended gardens that apparently exist behind the lines of trees that guard them the experience wouldn’t have been so unsettling. But I am glad that it was this way. Burnt Norton, the place, clearly didn’t want me to get into it. `Burnt Norton’, the poem, has, however, opened up like never before. That really is the reason why one makes journeys like this. They always reveal something. They always leave remnants, after you have gone.

In the beginning, what was there? The title gives it a sort of neatness – a place, called China, which is the ancestor of the place bearing the same name today. And because of the brevity a title has to have, it’s understandable that this excellent, succinct overview of such a complex subject conveys this sense of orderly neatness and singularity. `Early China’, as opposed to `Middle China’ and then `Today’s China,’ as simple and seamless as ABC. Only, from the first chapter onwards, peering into the deep history, Li shows what unity finally came was hard won, took a long time, and was of places and about things that have left only traces today, and which sometimes fragmented and fell apart again. The challenge is not to pick the current claims to unity apart. It is more often than not, to find much evidence of unity in the first place!

Understanding origins in this case helps for many reasons. One of the most obvious is to explain the way that leaders of the entity called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which exists in the geographical space Li writes of in this book (published by Cambridge University Press in 2014) have spoken in recent decades of that `5000 years of civilised history’ and why this means so much to them. This antiquity is clearly something of which they are immensely proud. And yet this book talks of over large parts of this time scale not of unity, but of diversity, disunity. If the task is to find unity here, then where can it be found?

In the ancient part there was a multi-region model for the Neolithic era on the great Central Plains, where archaeological digs show distinctive cultures and sub-cultures, from Yangshao, to Dawenkou, Hongshan, down to Shixia and Fengbitou, spreading across the whole eastern coast of the current PRC. Somehow, over immense periods of time, from farming, to settlement, to the creation of tribes from bands, and then states from chiefdoms, one gets the Xia from 4000 years ago– a period recognised now, but which remains contested and shadowy. Maybe the strongest candidate for a centre of the Xia is Erlitou, sprinkled around central China in today’s Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and Hunan. But as Li says, the earliest recorded mentioned of there ever being a Xia was in the Easter Zhou, a millennium after this era had ended. `The Shang oracle-bone inscriptions say nothing about a Xia Dynasty the Shang had conquered,’ he says (51). All we know is that these bones, some of them, refer to a period from 1600BCE to its fall, on 1046BCE, conquered by the Western Zhou, when the Shang itself existed. Where it had come from, and what it had replaced, are things it remains silent on.

The period following Shang, the Zhou `occupies a special position in the cultural and political history of China’, Li writes (112). Stretching from 1046 down to 221BCE, while its brief successor, the Qin, under the formidable First Emperor, is attributed with being the creator of an entity of any political unity from which modern China is descended, in many ways the Zhou contains the thinkers, cultural and social influences, and the philosophical ideas, and embodies the narrative of a Chinese nation and cultural unity that prevail to this day. In the Eastern Zhou, split between the poetically named Spring and Autumn Period and that of the Warring States, ideas as powerful as those that originated from ancient Athens around the same time were created. The idea of a High God from the Shang was transformed into something different – `God lost his omnipresent power over both human and natural worlds, a power that was taken over by heaven’ (144), Li states. This heaven, now capitalised, `represented the ultimate universal order.’ If there was a great divergence between China and the Western world (long before these places knew of each other), then this was it – the reinforcement and commitment to Theodicy in the societies that occupied the Middle East, and the philosophical expression of a all-powerful God in Plato’s work, and the disappearance of this notion in the Zhou. While Aristotle and those around him were pondering the nature of the world, and its metaphysical basis, Confucius, Mencius, Mozi and Han Fei, spread over several centuries, were constantly thinking about the nature of human action. For them, ethics was the key.

Li’s description of the destruction of the Zhou by the Qin in only nine years as `one of the most dramatic epics in human history’ (243) is not mere hyperbole. The annexation by what had been a minority state which existed at this time of all the others that had slowly grown up in the Chinese territory was an extraordinary achievement. The Qin remains so compelling because of its utterly remarkable archaeological legacy – the immense burial ground near Xian in Lishan, some 40Km East of Xiangyan near Xi’an. The warriors unearthed since 1974 are only part of this site – the main tomb remains unopened, till the time when the technology exists that will not damage what might be there. This gives it a physical drama and immediacy which is immensely appealing to the imagination. The succeeding Han dynasty, in particular through the works of its great historian Sima Qian, did not write kindly of the Qin first emperor. Even Li has to admit the social structure created under him meant that he had such vast powers he constantly lived in secret locations to protect himself. He `purposely distanced himself from all humans who were basically his slaves’ (250). Alas autocracy and vast power differences between the ruler and those ruled has deep roots in this culture. The Qin, despite these deep criticisms, in many ways lives on through his impact on power structures to this day.

All the time, new artefacts, new oracle bones with explanations of the predictions inscribed on them, new burial mounds and even texts are coming to light in digs occurring across China. The one thing one can safely conclude in standing back from Li’s concise overview is how immensely rich, diverse and complex this history is. Anyone who does want to wrestle with the origins of the China that exists today (and to be honest, without at least trying to do this, it is hard to see how one can really make much sense of the contemporary place, where appeals to history are so frequent, and a sense of that history so strong) should look at this book. It would be a good antidote to some of the extraordinary cultural and moral superiority one often gets coming from some of the squadron of new critics and judges on what China is now. It always offered a different view of the world. This wonderful piece of scholarship shows how, and why, that is the case, and why knowing of these origins matters.

I’ve always been a bit bemused by the enormous, and more often than not malevolent, influence attributed to Vladimir Putin and Russia. The controversy about Russian influence on the 2016 UK EU membership referendum, and then on the outcome of the US election the same year, seemed a bit overblown. How could bots and social media and gross disinformation, misinformation, outright lies, call it what you will, influence people so much? Hadn’t the targets of all this – the voters in democratic countries – been educated in critical thinking, assessing evidence, engaging with plural view points? How could something as crude as a propaganda campaign via Twitter and Facebook penetrate things so much and fool so many people?
Nor could I really understand why Russia supposedly invested so much in this when its own economy was pretty small (eleventh in the world according to https://www.investopedia.com/insights/worlds-top-economies/, but barely 5 per cent of the US number, and 9 per cent of China’s), and consistently being hit by sanctions because of its claimed adventures abroad – the string of mysterious murders for instance, ending with the Salisbury poisonings in 2018. Didn’t it have better things to do with its money? Why didn’t it just do what China did and pump up its economic might? Had it learned nothing from the collapse of the USSR in 1991, when most analysis put a good part of that down to over-commitments to military spend over other more productive areas of growth supporting activity.
What I lacked was (drumroll) a narrative framework to make sense of this weird behaviour. It couldn’t all be because of Putin. His demonization in the West seemed way too straightforward. Surely it was about something he represented. But what? Reading FT journalist and long-time Russia watcher Catherine Belton’s compelling `Putin’s People’ (William Collins, London, 2020) has finally enlightened me. I am sorry for being so slow. For her, it’s very complex, but in the end also very straightforward. If China today is a political party masquerading as a country, then Russia is like a mafia group pretending to be a nation. It has used its weakness as its strength, deploying reckless moves like it has nothing to lose because, in essence, it does have nothing to lose. Putin, as she explains with clinical detail, is symbolic of a group of KGB operatives who may never have bought into Marxism Leninism while the USSR was around, but certainly drank the addictive drug of uber-nationalism. For them the Yeltsin era was a dark night of the soul. Putin, in power since 2000, was the corrective, restoring to influence around him a bunch of shadowy figures (they are listed in the book) who can now legitimise their continuation of the dark arts as governors rather than undercover agents. They might never be as strong as the West was, and still (just about) is. But they can certainly do their best to make it as weak as them. That seems to be the logic of their strategy.
Government as KGB-operator sort of accounts for the investment in psychological operations, and the patient way in which Russia, through business people, and sleeper agents, has slowly spread a network across Europe, the US and the wider world. Its greatest assets have been in two areas – naïve conviction in Washington and elsewhere early on that Western liberal values would prevail in a country that is culturally and historically so deeply linked to Europe; and the enormous, unaccountable amounts of money from gas and energy that have allowed the Russian network that Belton so admirably describes to reach deep into banking, commercial, and finally political networks outside the country. The UK, dismayingly, figures large here – London operating as a major centre for Russian money, and for flows of wealth that have managed to gush into the pockets of a wide range of people. It would be pointless to try to precis Belton’s account of this – that occurs in the eleventh chapter, `Londongrad’, from page 344. But while we hear some British politicians, particularly in the currently ruling Conservative Party, rail against the malign influence of China, in fact this is small beer compared to the largesse that Moscow business people managed to deploy over the previous decade and a half – much of it to members of their own Party! Maybe what we are seeing is a case of once bitten, twice shy – but boy, were we bitten – and by people who ended up literally getting away with murder.
Which bring me to the case of China. So are Xi and Putin different? Should we look at the Russian psychological warfare games and their many successes over the last few years and see that as a template for what China intends to do? The bad news is that China has figured in the very justifiable paranoia of British, American and European political elites now, with the expectation that it will be a new Russia. The claims about it buying influence and seeking political networks has spread in Australia, the UK, and will almost certainly intensify. Already, over COVID19 the phrase `Chinese disinformation’ is starting to gain traction. But before getting too excited by this, let’s dwell on the good news. China is clearly, for cultural and other reasons, nowhere near as good as the Russians at this. We know that because we are already aware of its attempts. Russia was already deep inside us before we had an inkling what was happening. China is barely coming up the road towards us and we are already howling in warning! The brute fact is that if the Russian political system with its psychological mendacity and intelligence had the money China does now, we would be sunk. It would be the same if China with its vast resources had the same kind of ability to read and get under the skin of Western governments and elites the way Russia has. At the moment, we have to thank our lucky stars that the one that is good at reading the West and disrupting it is limited by its small economy, and the one with the massive economy is too culturally and political different, and inexperienced, to do the dark work particularly well. At least till now!
This is no praise for Russia. As Belton makes clear, it is holding a tiger by the tail, almost parasitical on a Europe/US world it dislikes but defines itself against. With China, things are very different. Xi is not like Putin, and now with Belton’s book I know why. He was not from an intelligence background. Wisely, the Communist Party of China has been led largely by professional cadres in recent years. The intelligences services serve them – they never become their masters. Ditto the military. Spies becoming leaders is rarely a good look, even when they say they’ve retired! And while the KGB faction has clearly annexed the whole business and state machinery in Russia, in China the Party has annexed everything – with a far broader, more complex and more penetrating hold over society. Xi has constructed loyalty to the nation through the Party. Despite all the guff about Xi factions, and various other groupings, the Party faction is the one that matters – and it is a powerful one, because, by default, everyone is a member of it! Different context, and a different meaning I know, but in Russia, if you work for the KGB network you win, and if not, you lose. In China, Party member or not, if you stand by the Party even outside of it it’s always win win!

Matthew Polly in `Bruce Lee: A Life’ (Simon and Schuster, London and New York, 2018) says that the actor and martial arts master was the first figure who truly brought the culture and thinking of the Chinese world into the lives of Americans, Europeans and others. I can testify that this is true. In the early 1970s, when I was just coming to consciousness generally, Bruce Lee was there – on the television, in magazines, in cartoons. At the same time, however, he was also, tragically, already gone. He had died, I knew, in Hong Kong in late 1973. I had thought this was through some terrible accident during one of the epic fights in one of this films. Of course, that wasn’t the case. But the myth was reaching me, even without looking for it, in provincial Kent around the period immediately after his death.

Polly is a martial arts enthusiast, and he writes lovingly about the unique form of combat that Lee created, and the foundations of this on a philosophical view – use of inactivity and control, like, as Lee himself famously said, water – moulding itself, giving way where it has to, but accumulating massive reserves of strength till finally, it can overthrow whatever stands in its way.

Lee died at the age of 32. The complex circumstances of his death are examined in some detail in this book. The problem was his being with his mistress at the time, rather than with his American wife Linda, and the somewhat confused attempts by her, and others, to try to conceal this. Claims that he had suffered a kind of drugs overdose were soon undermined by the fact that the drug he did use, cannabis, was not one that could be overdosed on, and the fact that in any case his symptoms were closer to suffering from heat stroke. This is the reason that Polly settles on. No doubt though, the conspiracy theorists will continue with their own fancies.

Lee was truly an icon, and if today we look at the critical need to educate and create understanding about the Chinese world and its deep, rich culture and thinking as it becomes increasingly significant in our lives, then without what he achieved in his short life we would be in an even worse position than we already are. He made Asia familiar to vast numbers of people who knew little, or nothing of it, before his work. He also overcame tremendous prejudice, showing in his slender but immensely influential oeuvre of film works that a person of Chinese heritage could be the equal, and in many ways, the superior, of others who came into conflict with them. Lee was courageously insistent in his films, when he had the ability to do so later in his career, that he would always be portrayed as the winner – and that the old stereotypes of oriental femininity, weakness, and lack of confidence would be put to rest.

Not that he carried an easy identity in Hong Kong. Hong Kong identity has been done to death by theorists, sociologists, and anthropologists, so it is amusing that Polly manages through the story of Lee to say more about the curious edginess and vulnerability of the city’s feeling about itself than most of this work put together. It was, as Polly explains, almost like a refugee camp for much of its early colonial history, with a British leadership who were largely remote and unengaged with the social and cultural life of the place, focussed as they were on maintaining the commercial prowess of the port and the finance centre they were building there. This makes the new-found zealous desire, almost a quarter of a century after the end of the colonial period by some in Britain to defend freedoms in Hong Kong they themselves never promoted except towards the very end, even more curious. What is clear in this account is that before Lee, Hong Kong was often stuck in defining itself by what it was not – in particular, not Mainland China, nor Britain. Caught like the filling in a sandwich between these two great forces, Lee’s hybridity captured well the city’s complexity – a person of Han Chinese ethnicity, yet whose great grandfather had been Dutch-Jewish, and who had spent most of his life in the US.

This placelessness that Lee had coming from his family background and his own life path meant the media during this life in the city, after an initial period of adulation, were keen to pick him apart – his aggression, his assertiveness, and, bizarrely, even his ability to grow a thick beard, as he did briefly in the 1970s. All of this was taken as proof that he was not quite the real thing. Lee himself however articulate admirably a desire for unity – for a global spirit on oneness, and for being tolerant of others. His uneasy place in the local consciousness meant that it was not until the 2000s that a statue of him was properly unveiled in the city. Before then, his mark there had been as good as invisible. It is odd there is not a proper Bruce Lee museum, commemorating his achievements, or more made of him in the city’s branding of itself. He is, as Polly states, one of the modern world’s great cultural icons, even now – and one of the very, very few one could place beside the very different alternative – the face of Mao Zedong.

(An excerpt from the Introduction to  Kerry Brown, `Chinese Life: A Tale of Five Cities’, published by China Publishing Corporation, Beijing, 2020. This is an attempt to simply describe the experiences and atmosphere of the five places in China that I came to most understand and enjoy). 

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I was born in Kent in the south eastern part of the UK, in the late 1960s. Kent is famous as a place rich in history, a crossing point between the coast and the ports of Dover and Folkestone, and the northern parts of the island, via, from Roman times two thousand years ago, the city of London, which was established then. Kent is small, and existed as its own kingdom till the eight century. It was then amalgamated into larger kingdoms. Its identity, though, has always been strong. And it has perhaps of all the British areas the richest literary history. Chaucer, the earliest English language poet, often came here; Dickens, one of Britain’s greatest novelists, spent much of his childhood here, and lived in the western part of the country as an adult. Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond 007 spy novels, had a house here, and wrote some of this thrillers while staying here. The poet T S Eliot sat in a beach hut in Margate and pondered his future after a mental breakdown, writing parts of his seminal poem `The Wasteland’ here. H G Wells lived in Folkestone, on the southern coast, and the great director Derek Jarman owned a house and small but extraordinary garden in Dungeness. Perhaps most extraordinary of all was the Polish-Ukrainian born sailor Joseph Conrad, who made the villages around Canterbury his home in the latter part of his life. It was here, writing in his third language, that he produced `The Heart of Darkness’, one of the greatest of twentieth century novellas, and which he set on a ship moored near the port own of Gravesend. Kent was even the home of the war time leader, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Winston Churchill.
I was educated at schools in Kent, in the state system – first at a primary school and then a grammar school. And through them, I gained a position at Cambridge University, and read philosophy and then English literature. My interests were, throughout this time, within the western tradition. Greek philosophy, English thinkers like Locke and Hobbes, and Europeans like Wittgenstein and Kant – these were the staples of this kind of education. English empiricism, with continental idealism regarded as an exotic counter-tradition. This was a world which began and ended with the Western cannon, and where ability to read and think in French or German was regarded as unusual, and acquaintance with Russian language and literature `oriental’.
Later on I became acquainted with arguments by figures like Edward Said, the American Palestinian writer, about the tradition of Europe to be self-absorbed, and to confine everything outside of this cultural sphere to that vast area called `The Orient’. As a school boy, and at university, these places were not only unknown, but unknowable. My earliest memory of anything Chinese was the face of Mao Zedong on television in September 1976 announcing his death. A decade later, I acquired a large history of Chinese civilisation, and tried to read it. But it seemed to refer to a timeline and a narrative of history that I found impossible to relate to the European ones I was familiar with. There, lists of the reigns of kings and queens and different emperors and states gave me a backbone by which to have a handle on the progression of history. But Chinese imperial dynasties were complex, and went back deep into the past. Names were so unfamiliar, and it seemed to refer to a sense of history, and a story, wholly different to that of Europe, and one where, apart from occasional contact during the Yuan era and the modern period, were parallel with each other but not remotely interconnected.
In my school library, the only books relating to China were an Everyman edition of Confucius’s `Analects’. But a reading of that when I was about 15 was bewildering. No metaphysics, and no straightforward argument like I could find in the almost contemporaneous `Republic’ of Plato, the book seemed to be a collection of cryptic utterances. On television, China was a subject only sporadically glimpsed at – some documentaries, and occasional mentions of the reforms under Deng Xiaoping then underway in the news. But apart from this, China was remote – behind its famous Great Wall, an object I was told (wholly incorrectly, as everyone knows now) which was visible from the moon.

People of Chinese ethnicity in the UK were largely at that time those who had either come to the UK as migrants, or who were the children, or descendants, of earlier arrivals, largely from Hong Kong or Guangdong. There were Chinatowns in London and cities like Manchester, and Chinese restaurants – but again, these were exotic places, and the food that they offered, I found out later, heavily adapted to British tastes. For all of that, they were some of the few places where you could see Chinese characters – mysterious swirling figures utterly unlike the Roman alphabet – or Chinese art, on scrolls or watercolour pictures, and with a style completely different from most western art I was familiar with. There were very few students of Chinese or Asian ethnic heritage in any of the schools I went to. Indeed, the first person of my age I actually talked to in any depth was a student at Cambridge from Singapore. The simple fact was that in the 1980s and even the 1990s, Chinese tourists and students in the UK hardly existed.

The first encounter I ever had with Chinese writing was reading the `Cantos’ by the American poet, Ezra Pound. Pound, through an early twentieth century scholar of Asian cultures Fenolla, had become acquainted with some Tang and Song poetry in translation, and, without fully understanding the meaning of the characters used, had incorporated them into later sections of his epic poem. They sat on the page, between the other lines he had written in English, or Italian, French or Latin, mysterious, stark, and almost disconnected from the text around them. Pound did include transliterations, in the old Wade Giles system, in his text to explain the characters he used – and he also devoted a whole section of a poetic account of the rise and fall of some of the Chinese dynasties. But the effect, in this poem, rendered in this way, was to reinforced the sense of China and Chinese language, history and culture, being radically different – so different as to be almost unknowable.
Making Chinese knowable, and accessible, happened to me personally by accident, rather than intention. I was not a good linguist – my French was passable after two months spent in Paris at the age of 18, and I was, and still can, read it relatively well. My German after two years was almost non-existent, and attempts to self-study Latin got nowhere. If I had presented myself to a university in 1986 when I went to study as a potential student of Mandarin Chinese I would never have been accepted. Chinese was consigned to the `most difficult’ category of languages. That meant only those with proven skills in learning languages could get on formal courses to study it. Oriental studies at Cambridge was a mysterious, very niche area – I met one student in my whole time there on this course. It seemed highly technical, and almost invisible. And the message I got was that a subject like this was for only the most hardcore, serious minded scholars. China and Chinese studies were for the elite of the elites, people with a deep vocation – it often seemed almost like an exclusive religious cult.

One of the books I had been most impressed by around the mid-1980s was `Auto Da Fe’ by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1981, Elias Canetti. The central figure in that, Peter Klein, epitomised the stereotype of a sinologist. Based in Vienna before and during the takeover by the Nazi party, Klein lived a life of severe self-discipline, and pure devotion to his scholarship. The book starts with a dialogue between he and a young boy in which he explains the meaning of a Chinese character. But as the story develops, his life complicates and darkens. He enters into a disastrous marriage with the only person he has had any regular contact with over the previous few years, his house keeper. She proves to be a grasping, greedy and brutal person. The other figure who appears in his life is a sinister dwarf, and his whole story escalates out of control, resulting in his final demise and the ruination of his orderly, controlled life.

`Auto da Fe’ is a work of wonderful originality and strange power. Often written in an almost semi-hallucinatory way, the choice of career for the fictional Klein is puzzling. Why of all things did Canetti decide on him being a Sinologist, rather than a classicist, or a scientist, or expert in literature. Part of the reason must be because this area above all overs confers a degree of otherness on him, and grants him a kind of mystique. The same might be said of the use of Chinese characters in Pound’s work. Neither had any deep understanding of Chinese language or, for that matter, any lived experience of China. The one poet from the West that did live in the country for any length of time over this period, William Empson, produced works which, tellingly, were devoid of any extensive mentions of the country he spent over a decade in in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps familiarity to him cured him of any temptation to `exoticize’ China. Even so, despite being a hugely accomplished intellectual, he did not study or learn much Chinese while he was there.

Klein was a poor role model for a career that I was one day to end up pursuing. Until the end of my university career, therefore, the best you could say was that the British educational system I had been through, excellent and comprehensive in so many ways, had given me only the most patchy, and superficial knowledge of the culture, history and language of a fifth of humanity. In some ways, it was worse than this. I had also been exposed to hardly anything about Asia more generally. That grew to seem increasingly anomalous as I grew older, and is one of the puzzles that I often think about the cure to today. How was it possible to be highly educated, and yet not educated in some key areas at all. C P Snow, a scientist and academic, had complained in the 1960s about the problem of the `two cultures’ – that of the world’s of natural science and physics or biology, and that of literature and the humanities. His critique had been in its term savagely criticised by the critic F R Leavis in the early 1970s. For Leavis there was only one culture, and different modalities of it – which science, humanities and other thought forms were parts of. But I could say that my educational upbringing had made me aware of a similar kind of `two cultures’ – ones which seemed almost segregated from each other, those of the West, and of the East. How could this great divide be remedied? That is the key theme of the stories in this book.

*

Up until 1978, one could argue that there were many reasons why China, in particular, was less known about. In the age before instantaneous electronic communication, and airplane travel, for one very practical reason – physical distance – China and the UK were very remote and often inaccessible to each other. Then there was the issue of cool political links between the two up to the 1970s, when there wasn’t even a full embassy in each others’ capitals – only legations. All of that was removed by the rapprochement between the US and China in 1972, which meant the UK was able to upgrade its relations with the People’s Republic. Finally, there was largely a lack of real commercial engagement. China was a developing country, a small economy, and one that was, till the 1980s, largely dependent on primary industries and agriculture. It simply didn’t have the kind of logistic and people to people links with the outside world that meant it was present in people’s lives in ways which, for instance, the US or Australia were. Added to all of this were language problems. The UK and China did not speak the same language. And very few people from either place could communicate with each other.

All of that has, in the second decade of the twenty first century, changed. There are 110,000 Chinese students in the UK in 2018. China is an investor and trader with the UK, and the rest of Europe, and the world, in ways which were not the case before 1978. 120 million Chinese tourists travelled abroad in 2017. Chinese signage is now on shop fronts, greeting people at airports, appearing on adverts on their mobile phones. You no longer, if you live in the west, need to search China out once you develop an interest in the country and its cultures and history; it will, no doubt, come and find you. And yet I suspect that children and young people can still go through the educational system in the US, Europe or elsewhere and come out with as patchy, and incomplete a knowledge as I did three decades ago.

It was a sheer accident that I eventually came to invest the time and effort into understanding China, and to learning its language. There was nothing planned about it. A teacher at university had spent time in Suzhou and recommended going to China to look – but I did nothing about this till I worked in Japan in 1990 for a year, and took the opportunity to fly the short journey from Osaka to Shanghai and Beijing in May 1991, during the famous Japanese Golden Week. Being a tourist in Beijing at this time with not a word of Mandarin was tough. The hotel I stayed at, City Hotel (now no longer) was near Sanlitun and the Worker’s Stadium. I was too afraid to use the underground, even though only two lines existed at the time, and could only go to restaurants where the menu was in English. Everyday, I walked the two miles or more, often in very hot weather, to the Friendship Store, and then on to the Beijing Hotel. I made one attempt to see the Great Wall, by going to what was then a small train station in the south of the city and showing the ticket seller a sign for `Wall’ (qiang). Needless to say, she had no idea what I was trying to ask for. On this occasion, at least, I never got to see the great sight.
I did at least by this time know some written Chinese. I had been studying `kanji’, the loan characters from Chinese in the Japanese language, in Nagahama, Japan, and had managed to memorise about 500. Many of those, however, were in traditional, rather than simplified form, meaning probably about half were recognizable when I tried to interpret menus and other signs in Beijing. The seven days there was a challenging experience. But it also created a kind of bond. The place seemed both very different, and yet very familiar, in ways which were wholly unexpected. The idea of China being `unknowable’ and profoundly mysterious and beyond comprehension started to be seriously challenged. This was a place full of humans like the one I had come from, trying to live their lives, and going about their business in ways very similar that of my home town. A six month stay in Melbourne, Australia, after I left Japan in 1991 reinforced the idea that China and the Chinese language were things I could and should be more knowledgeable about.

Despite its distance, Melbourne was a good place to try to at least get a start on learning Chinese. It had, for one thing, an excellent book shop with learning material in the Chinatown in the heart of the city. And China seemed far more present here than it did back in London. There were more Chinese restaurants, more people of Chinese ethnicity, and, most important of all, some non-ethnically Chinese who had mastered Putonghua – and therefore made it clear to me that this was something one could do even if it wasn’t an inherent part of one’s cultural and family background. The greatest inspiration came from a person I was lodging with at the time – Andrew Beale, a native Australian, but someone who had mastered the language of China to fluency, and who taught it at a secondary school. Days and weeks speaking to him about his life and experiences in China had a huge influence. I am glad to say he is still a good friend to this day, almost thirty years later.

Making China knowable was important. Everyday, I would try to memorise a few more Chinese characters. I was working in a Duty Free shop specifically catering for Japanese tourists, of whom there were plenty at this time. They tended to come in large groups, entering and leaving the shop, and making large, unbusy gaps in between. I would stroll around the shop, with a pad in my hand, convincing the manager I was occupied doing inventory and stock checks, but actually writing down all the characters I knew. Usually I got to about seven or eight hundred. I even kept a primitive diary in Chinese. I tried to learn Chinese at night, and during the journey in and out of the city centre on the tram. The problem was, however, that while I could work out the grammar well enough (and we overjoyed by how much more familiar it seemed than gender-infested German or declension drenched Latin) even coming out with the simplest spoken sentence often proved impossible.

Back in the UK, I found that there was only one practical, year long post graduate diploma course in Mandarin Chinese. It was here that I hit the issue of how specialised and exclusive studying Chinese was in the British system again. Leeds and the School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS) both did masters courses, but with very limited language learning. The response to most of the places I spoke to was that I either learned Chinese privately (which was extremely expensive) or did a whole new undergraduate degree, taking up four years. Only a place called Thames Valley University, which before this went under the name Ealing Polytechnic before these were upgraded, had something affordable, and practical. Even then, without a bursary from the Great Britain China Centre I would have found it hard to embark on a degree.

My memory of learning Chinese in earnest therefore is not of living in Beijing, or Shanghai, or some of the places mentioned in this book. It is instead of sitting in a small bedsit in West London, near to Acton Town tube, over 1993 and into 1994, and learning passages, reading Chinese novels and news papers with a dictionary by my side, and having conversation exchange partnerships with about half a dozen people, sometimes putting in ten hours of study a day. For eight months I did this, trying almost to create a little world of China around me in a city thousands of miles from the country I was becoming so interested in. If I bought books, they were about China. It I went to films, they were the few then being shown which were in Chinese. I tried to eat each day in Chinese restaurants, and get whatever knowledge I could about China. Even when I went to Second Hand Bookshops I trawled through the bookshelves trying to find anything relevant – some of it over a century old.

This could almost be called my second education. I started to know that there were figures like Cao Xueqin, author of the great Qing dynasty novel `Dream of the Red Mansion’ and historic figures like Sima Qian, the Grand Historian from the Han Dynasty. I came to appreciate that Confucius was one of a large number of other thinkers around the Warring States time, four centuries before the time of Christ – people like Mencius and Han Fei and Mo Zi. For the first time I learned of Lu Xun, the greatest of the early twentieth century Chinese writers, and of events like the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and the anti-Japanese war from 1937. I read Edgar Snow’s `Red Star Over China’, the first account in English of the rise of Communism in China and then his subsequent visits to the country in the 1960s. I learned about oracle bones, the First Emperor, the Tang Dynasty, and the voyages of admiral Zheng He in the early 15th century. It seemed an extraordinary thing that this world, which was there all the time, had never appeared to me. But then, like most other people in the West, I hadn’t been inclined to look, and had been given the impression that even were I to seek, what I would find would prove to difficult to understand.

Carl Jung, the psychologist, and one of the western intellectuals figures of the twentieth century most interested in Asian religion, philosophy and belief systems, had categorised humans as `symbol loving species’. I guess one could add to that that humans are, through symbols, lovers of stories. One of the great challenges of engaging with China was to try to create my own understanding of the China story I needed to construct, and what my own China story would be. Chinese history was long and impossibly complex. But it was also, at first inspection, full of contradictions – a country which was new and old; one that seemed diverse and yet uniform; a place where there was no unifying framework supplied by adherence to a common belief system, as had, eventually, happened in the West from the fourth century onwards through adoption of Christianity. There was this China of what looked like industrialised cities and the other place which seemed to have jungles and pandas still living in the wild there. This place was not an easy one to fit into any pre-conceived box. It seemed to evade easy assumptions and frameworks. And Chinese people, after all, during the early period of learning about the country, were not that present even in a major centre like London.

The only remedy for that was to actually go and live in China. So I applied to work for an organisation partly funded by British government aid money at the time, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). That was the reason why I spent two years in the Inner Mongolia region of China from 1994, where, to all intents and purposes, I finally manged to speak and read Chinese with some fluency – and, after a fashion (as the first chapter will show) write it.
*
The `unknowability’ of China, and the need to move beyond that and make both a China story, but one which is honest, truthful and, above all, manageable, is the main theme of this book. The personal account I have given above at least offers some context for why someone who had never had any link whatsoever with China came, from their mid-20s, to increasingly focus on the ideas, histories, literatures and people of this geography. Since 1994, I have worked as a diplomat, business person, consultant, and then finally academic in, with and on China. I have been to every single province and autonomous region, lived in the country for over five and a half years, and visited more than a hundred. From 2006, I have written twenty books on China lectured about the politics, economics and history of China in over 35 countries in four continents. I have lived over three years in Australia, working as an academic dealing with China, and back in the UK. Over that period, I have been interviewed by every major news outlet, from CNN to BBC to Sky to ABC and Al Jazeera

, along with what was once China Central Television (CCTV) and is now China Global Television Network (CGTN). I have written on China for the New York Times, the Telegraph, the British Independent and Guardian, the South China Morning Post, China Daily, and about every other major European language news paper or internet journal. If anyone would have told me even in 1989 that I would have a career like this, I would have regarded them as crazy. At most, I thought I would specialise in English literature. And until 1989, I wanted to simply stay in Cambridge and continue my career there. If I had a dream, it was an English one, not a Chinese one. This book is primarily, therefore, a story of how that England Dream became the China Dream for me.

Before anything else, I have to say that entering and then living this `second life’ has, whatever its challenges, been a source of great joy. And if anyone reading this who is in the same position I was thirty years ago is encouraged to make China and its rich culture and literature knowable the same way that I did, then that would be reward enough for writing it. Sharing the pleasure of knowing about China, and coming to know China better and deeper, is the principle meaning of my professional, and much of my personal life, now. Seeing that there was another realm, a different world with a different view of life and destiny, was immensely liberating. And while there were periods over the era of this encounter in my life when things were very challenging – when it seemed extremely tough to fit in in China, and hard to make sense of many of the things I was experiencing and seeing – that has all been immeasurably outweighed by the returns of investing in understanding the country and getting to know some of its people better. China being knowable for someone who started off even till quite late in their life knowing woefully little about the place is my main theme. And showing the many different strands of that knowability, and the ways in which it can be shared and understood by almost everyone else who devotes some time and effort to it is hugely important.

The way I have chosen to convey this however is distinctive. A simple autobiographical account would have been tempting, but in the end too limited and subjective. It would be one narrative amongst all the others of those who weave in and out of the life of China, or who belong to the current country’s great and vast national story. My aim is to aim for something which might be a little more useful, and give some ideas or tips about just how those unfamiliar or new to China might make what they see and experience there part of this mission to make all aspects of the country `knowable’ without losing the integrity of its `otherness’ and difference. This is not a popular idea in the era post-Said, where Orientalism and creating `otherness’ is regarded as discriminatory and limiting. Despite that, I will try to show in this book that there is a point beyond this one can see the familiar and the unfamiliar in one organic, balanced, embracing vision, and hold them with their uniqueness while also seeing what connects. The great work of divination from the earliest dynasties of China, the I Ching, talks of everything being connected. Striving to understand and appreciate those points of connectivity , but also to see clearly where margins, boundaries and division lines are is important.
In fact, this lay behind the work of someone I did, very peripherally, know about, and physically at least see a few times, from my college days. The Cambridge college I spent three years as an undergraduate at, Gonville and Caius, was the home of Joseph Needham. He was, in the time I was there, in his mid to late 80s, a stooped, venerable looking figure who would slowly pass across the quads on his way from his rooms to college dinner some evenings. I never managed to speak to him, but was alerted to his great work, `Science and Civilisation’ and to some of his long and distinguished experience of China from the 1940s. I had, too, at least one thing in common with him – he had clearly come to study and understanding of China relatively late in his career, after an early period where he had been a biochemist. Needham had worked at the British Legation in Chongqing as a Science and Technology attaché in the latter part of the Sino Japanese War era, when the nationalists moved to this south western city then in Sichuan province to make it their national capital. It was there that he had been alerted to the rich history of scientific thinking in China, dating back to the pre-Qin era, and to the eras in which China had historically been an innovative and inventing powerhouse. This inspired the rest of his life – resulting in the many volumes of his great work, some authored by him, some by other experts, which continues t this day. A few years after I graduated in 1989, he died, aged 95, in 1995. One of his obituaries noted that he was the greatest European scholar since Erasmus, of the early renaissance period.
Needham had answered one of the enquiries about what had drawn him to China so deeply by the statement that engagement with the country and its intellectual history and the values underpinning this had been an exposure to something wholly different from that of the western tradition. It offered an alternative, another way of looking at reality. When I deployed this line at a talk in Shanghai some time in the mid-2000s, someone in the audience rightly pointed out that this was `orientalist’. But even so, it seemed to me an idea I was reluctant to give up. China didn’t exist on another planet, for sure. But it had a coherent set of social practices, a narrative of its histories, and a whole attitude towards the world which certainly differed from the tradition I had grown up in. How could I ignore that?

In this book, I have decided to focus on something tangible, and very physical, as a way of telling my China story, but also illustrating this issue of difference, but how differences can aid the quest to make something more defined and knowable. Place is something that always fascinated, and continues to fascinate me, in my life in England. The relationship of particular places, for instance, to the lives of writers, something I mentioned at the start of this introduction, in Kent. The memory traces, as they are called, that are left after major events in places like fields where battles occurred, or buildings where major events happened, or cities or towns which testify to the many different kinds of lives that have been lived there over the generations. Ancient places were of specific interest – fragments of old churches in the UK which went back to the earliest period when Christianity was being spread here, in the fifth and sixth century, or the faint traces of roads from the Roman period, which are often left in the landscape. Domestic buildings which, despite modernised facades facing the high streets, were clearly very ancient behind these, or woods which had iron age or other remains covered up by shrubs or trees, but still were just about visible.

Coming to a new city, right from when I was quite young, I would always try to get a map of it in my head. This was helped in Britain, and Europe, by the simple fact that almost every place, however old or new, usually had a specific pattern – a church or churches, or a cathedral, somewhere near the centre, and then perhaps a city or town or village square, with businesses, restaurants, a pub, hotels, and, spanning out from this, parks, monuments, major streets, leading to other hubs and major features. Sometimes there were very visible public buildings – government offices, or institutions, or museums. At other times there were art galleries, or newly rebuilt areas where the feel and features of the buildings were wholly different. All of this helped build up an idea of age, character, and contributed to the sense of place.

One of the great challenges in exploring places in China, as this book will illustrate, is that the lay out and geography, and the meaning of particular places, along with the best way to interpret these, is very different. Contemporary China, the place I have been visiting and familiar with over the last quarter of a century, is a place that has undergone and continues to undergo immense physical transformation. Cities can change in the space of a few years, so they are often almost unrecognisable from the first time one visited. This only adds to the original problem – how someone from a different cultural background can start to `read’ the terrain they are physically walking in. Temples instead of churches is one of the easier issues to readapt to and be alert about. But the ways in which city space and town space is organised and managed, the functions of buildings, their style, the ways in which you can date them – all of this needs different kinds of knowledge.

For someone non-Chinese like me, navigating and coming to terms with a new place in the country is challenging. But it is absolutely necessary. One issue is the very practical one of climate – of how because of temperature, it is frequently not easy to walk far in Chinese cities, particularly in the southern more tropical areas, where being outside for only a few minutes can leave you drenched in sweat. The other is how often paths and roads in China are not easy to walk along – simply because there is so much traffic, and so much of it is different (bikes, vans, lorries). Chinese cities, unsurprisingly, are far more crowded than most western ones because the population is greater. Their signage is different, road etiquette completely unlike the UK (crossing roads in China can be famously challenging, rules of the road are different, the status of pedestrians also different). Very finally, in many Chinese cities, particularly further back in the past, when I walked around I was conspicuous, the only person with fairer hair. It was hard to simply fit into the crowd. If I stopped to look at something, I sometimes gathered a crowd of onlookers around me. In recent years, with the rise of foreign tourist numbers in China, this issue has become almost negligible.

What sense one makes of what one sees, however, is another matter. Local histories, and the ways in which places testify to events in the past, is largely conveyed through very general guidebooks, and then in Chinese language material, which is, of course, harder to access. The places I have written about in this book are mostly well studied and well known. There are other books about them, many in English. Even so, getting real intimacy with their stories is not easy. So this account is predominantly personal – and not a pretence at writing anything like an authoritative history of these places. In that sense, it offers simple a history of me understanding and growing to have feelings and impression and attitudes towards these different cities.

The places I have covered all have symbolic importance to me. Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia, was the city I went to in 1994 to work for VSO at the Inner Mongolia Medical College. Whatever I knew about China, I knew next to nothing about the climate, location, culture and history of this place. For two years, I studied Chinese there, in the main local university, while teaching post graduate doctors English. I went back many times after I departed in 1996, and saw the physical transformation of this place. But this is also about the grasslands, stretched around the city, and the difficulties of trying to understand their geography and atmosphere.

The second chapter covers my experience of the capital, Beijing, from the first visit there in 1991, to the period in which I lived there from 2000 to 2003 as a diplomat, and the times I have been since. In some senses, as the place I best know in China this chapter operates more as a palimpsest, offering up different parts of the city and different times when I visited. The best I can do is to chose some of the most meaningful places, and create a personal narrative from this.

The third chapter is of a place I have actually written a whole book about – the great city of Shanghai. This is in some ways the account of a conversion – from disliking the city because of its sheer size and energy when I first visited in 1998 as a freshly appointed diplomat still based in the UK, to spending a great deal of time in the city at the end of the next decade working on the link it had with Liverpool. It was over this period that I great to appreciate the extraordinary atmosphere of the city and the way in which it so dramatically conveys some of the contradictions, and the innovations, of modern China.

The fourth chapter is about Xian, the great Tang dynasty capital, and home most famously today of the Terracotta Warriors, a city I visited for the first time in 2000, taking a British official delegation there, and then returned to many times, becoming increasingly fascinated by the almost endless residue of former dynasties and previous Chinas in the buildings and historic artefacts left in the city.

The final chapter is on Hong Kong, only restored to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, but a place that maintains a unique atmosphere, and which has proved perhaps the most difficult to make sense of. My Hong Kong is not that of a long term expatriate there, but of someone who has enjoyed many short visits since my fist encounter in 1991. For me, therefore, Hong Kong is a special, but very Chinese city – an international Chinese city, perhaps, and one that has physically changed perhaps the least of the others in this book, but offers examples of transformation in other ways.

There is a final strand that runs through this book, and the places I have listed above. That is the business of that most mysterious thing of all – everday life. When I worked at the British Foreign Office in the late 1990s, I remember one day a colleague I was working with sighing and saying that he had `no idea what most people fill their time with.’ In fact, it is even more perplexing than that. We in our own lives, the lives we live, which we alone have complete ownership over and scrutiny of, often have little idea of where time goes, and, when gifted with the freedom and ability to deal with our time, are often overwhelmed or unable to structure it well. We keep busy, we bury ourselves in distraction, and find targets, ideas, things to chase after each day. Sometimes, too, we cede control over the majority of the waking hours we are conscious in by subscribing to the structure and discipline of whoever we work for. In London, most people commute, get on trains, sleep, read the paper, wait till they arrive at their terminus, then get onto buses, or other means of transport, and then go into the place where they work. Most of the time, these are offices, more often than not communal ones, meaning one deals with a specific circle of people each day, with the pleasures, reassurances and challenges that involves. There are meetings, lunches, appointments, times before the computer, times on the phone, times in meetings. The grammar or daily life in post-modern societies, for all the variety, is often standardised, no matter where one lives. For me, even in the times when I lived a life like this (thankfully, not very often) it was always a case of trying to create more variety, more stimulation, more engagement in the prescribed daily structure that was supplied for me. Probably many people are like this – creative about the opportunities open to them, making the structure of the day more bespoke. But there are limits. And bosses are often intolerant of too much creativity.

The structure of the day and of everyday life in a new place as the separate accounts which follow of each of the places will show, was often different. In Hohhot, I was immersed in a new cultural and social context and from day one had to find co-ordinates, familiarity and reliable routines, things that shaped my time. I had limited teaching hours – the rest was for me to fill. And as someone wholly fresh to this place, that meant challenges, creativity, a sense of being on an adventure where there was freedom to do things and shape things and a great deal of self-determination. But there was also the task of learning new social norms, new codes of etiquette, new boundaries that I had to be heedful of in order to integrate and settle in. We all know of the intolerant outsider, the person who comes, particularly from a western context, into a place like China, and expects, wants, demands things to be absolutely as they had found them back home. The constant battle to achieve what is impossible, because of course things cannot be the same, often leads to a period of fractious battle with the environment and the people in it around them, and then either reconciliation and adaptation, or, more often, dissatisfaction and departure.

In Beijing I was more of an organisation and lived a more structured life. For Xian and Shanghai, and to some extent Hong Kong, things were different. For these places, I was a visitor, never staying for more than a few days at any single time, passing through, and had limited commitments to the environment I lived in. That entailed a certain amount of privilege – not needing to grow too attached to the place, able to exercise the detachment of an observer rather than someone too implicated and owned by a place. But the range, and depth, of feelings for the second kind of relationship to a place are very different to the first. That will hopefully come across in my accounts.

Because of this interest in the basic structure of everyday life, that gives the accounts that follow a different kind of flavour. These are not travelogues. They are not seeking for the exotic and strange, and not trying to use the privilege of an outside perspective to tease some deep `message’ from each of the places, and put them into some kind of narrative of what China is, how it has to be seen, what its meaning as a country or a culture is. Instead, I have recognised the subjectivity of what I am conveying. There was me, with my set of experiences before I arrived at a particular place, the background I have described above, and the interests I had – and then there are the illuminations that happened when that life, that set of experiences and expectations, happened to then be placed in the new environments mentioned in this book. In a totally different context, the Anglo Saxon historian Nicholas Howe wrote in his book on looking at ancient sites in the UK from the period of the dark ages about how this involved negotiating two realities – the site seen, and the seer, the person looking, with their sets of knowledge and ideas. In China, for me as an individual, as will be seen, this became a constant pre-occupation, particularly as I started to know enough to critique my knowledge and understanding of what I was seeing and experiencing, and start to see it in a richer and more complex context.

The French philosopher Michel de Cereau wrote in `The Practice of Everyday Life’ a rich set of observations about what constituted this `mysterious thing’ – the business of simply going through each day, as an individual. Daily life to him is not the most common and normal thing, but something loaded with different symbols, the site, in fact the only site, where meaning is created, and where goals and stories and aims are defined. Daily life is the ultimate space, the place where life itself happens, not something humdrum and demotic and boring. One of the ideas he articulates is that of frontiers between different spaces of our daily lives – that of work, of leisure, or rest time and active time, intimate time and active time – all of these of course circumscribed by the cultures and habits and modes of behaviour of the larger environment within which a single individual with their life is inevitably embedded. In that sense, a daily life can be seen as an rendition like a soloist of a larger `text’ – the sorts of expectations, beliefs, desires and ideas which arise in any society and culture and which everyday life is an iteration of.

It is not often that one sees lives from such different cultural backgrounds properly described. A lot of material, much of it very good in terms of its honesty and complexity, is written in English, French, and other languages describing China and life in China, the life of Chinese, from the point of view of an observer. The privileged position of the authors of these kind of works is based on their linguistic distance, their specialist knowledge, and their desire to demonstrate neutrality. David Bonavia, one of the finest earliest journalists from Europe working in China after reforms started in 1978 produced, soon after his time there, an account simply called `The Chinese’. No one could contest his knowledge of the environment he lived in. He as a superlative linguist, and a fine journalist. But there is distance built into his account, something which is true of all similar endeavours produced since. It is as though someone were looking through a telescope and seeking, and finding, in an object wholly separate from them, differences, and not only differences but differences that are evidently meant to mean something, and to imply an almost irreconcilable distance.
In this account I have simply tried to cure this problem of distance by focussing on the things that would unite people, whatever the place and background they came from – the physical environment they have to exist in to be people and be in a place with its smells, sights, sounds, tastes, and the ways in which these construct narratives and meanings – and the simple temporal existence of people each day, living in time, patterning their daily habits, no matter whether they are Chinese or from elsewhere. Chinese time as I experienced it in the different places described in this book was something I lived in, as a perpetual outside, but it of course changed and forced adaptation on me. I had to observe the sort of customs of time boundaries in each place I found myself in – the times of shops opening and closing, the moments of the year when there were major festivals, the habits of people each day when they had siestas, or ate, or were watching television, and it was best to either join them or refrain from contacting them till a suitable time came up. The space which China is, and the time that it has as a place, are present as threads throughout this book, and transcend, it seems to me, the issues of culture and habit. They act as fields in which things and people can actually do the business of living. That, in essence, is my theme- the way in which I, coming from elsewhere, negotiated, adapted, and changed, the places and times of the locations in this book. A simple subject, for sure, but one that is so utterly essential, and so often ignored, as a means of describing how finally a bridge can exist between two such different worlds and traditions and cultures and histories of that of China, and of the West.

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引 言

20世纪60年代后期，我出生在英国东南部肯特郡的乡村。肯特以其丰富的历史内涵名闻遐迩，自两千多年前古罗马时代起，它一直是沿海地区及多佛港、福克斯通港，取道当时业已建成的伦敦市，去往不列颠北部地区的必经之地。肯特的面积不大（不足4000平方公里，仅比上海城区大五倍），直到第八世纪，它一直作为其自己的王国存在。后来，它被并入一些更大的王国。然而， 肯特的人文底蕴却极为厚重。在英国的所有地区中，它拥有或许是最丰富多姿的文学史。乔叟（Geoffrey Chaucer），作为十四世纪最早的英语诗人，常常到访肯特，来履行他作为政府官员的职责（诸如收税以及间谍刺探）；狄更斯（Dickens），作为英国最伟大的小说家之一，19世纪早期在此度过了他很长一段童年岁月，成年后则居住在西部乡村，直至他于1870年离开人世。创作了詹姆斯·邦德007间谍小说的伊恩·弗莱明（Ian Fleming）在肯特拥有一座乡间寓所，在此逗留期间完成了其中几部惊悚作品。1921年，诗人艾略特（T. S. Eliot）枯坐在马盖特海边的一座海滩小屋内，在经历了一场神经崩溃之后，思索着自己的未来，写下了其最有影响力的诗作《荒原》的某些片段。 举世闻名的《星际战争》一书的作者赫伯特·乔治·威尔斯（H. G. Wells）曾客居南部滨海小镇福克斯通，而伟大的电影导演德里克·贾曼（Derek Jarman）则在邓杰内斯置有一栋别墅及一座小巧但又十分别致的花园。或许，在所有这些文人墨客中，最卓尔不凡的当属出生于波兰-乌克兰的水手约瑟夫·康拉德（Joseph Conrad），在其后半生，他以坎特伯雷周边的村庄为家，在此用其第三语言创作了被誉为20世纪最伟大中篇小说之一的《黑暗之心》，他为该作品设定的背景是一艘停泊在格雷夫森德港口的船。肯特甚至还是英国战时领袖、诺贝尔文学奖得主温斯顿·丘吉尔（Winston Churchill）的家的所在地。
我在肯特的学校接受了我的中小学教育，依循的是国家公立教育体制——先是小学，之后是文法学校。藉由这些教育，我得以就读于剑桥大学，先修哲学，后习英国文学。整个这一时期，我的兴趣皆囿于西方传统之内。希腊哲学，诸如洛克（Locke）和霍布斯（Hobbes）一类的英国思想家，以及诸如维特根斯坦（Wittgenstein）和康德（Kant）一类的欧洲思想家，凡此一切，构成了此类教育的主体部分。相较于英国经验主义哲学，欧洲大陆上的唯心主义哲学则被视作一种异国他乡的反传统。我所被引导进入的这个学术天地，始于西方经典，也终于西方经典；能用法语或德语进行阅读与思考，即被视为异乎寻常，而对俄罗斯语言与文学能有一知半解，则更会被视作拥有了一种格格不入的“东方的”和“异国的”情调。
后来，我逐渐熟悉了像巴勒斯坦裔美国作家爱德华·萨义德（Edward Said）一类的人物所提出的论点，将欧洲传统描述为过于“自恋”，并批评该传统是如何将欧洲传统这一文化范畴之外的一切，全部纳入到一个庞大的研究领域，将该领域含混地、且毫无助益地统称为“东方学”。无论是在中小学，还是在大学期间，这个庞大的术语所涵盖的所有地方，对我而言既一无所知，亦一概不可知。我头脑中最早的与中国有丝毫关联的记忆，是当时中国领导人毛泽东的脸——1976年12月，电视上播放了他去世的消息。十年之后，我弄到了一本由法国学者雅克·格奈特（Jacques Gernet）所撰写的关于中国文明的大部头著作，我尽力加以研习。但我发现，该书所涉及到的时间轴以及对历史的叙述，似乎均无法与我所熟悉的欧洲的时间轴及历史叙述形成任何关联。在欧洲传统中，一长串又一长串的欧洲国家的国王和女王的统治，以及不同的皇帝与女皇，能给我提供一个架构，藉此把握历史的演进。但中国的朝代极为纷繁复杂，历史更为久远，各朝代的名称甚为陌生，而关于这些朝代的历史所涉及到的，似乎是一种全然不同于欧洲的时间感与叙事，在这种历史叙述中，中国与欧洲除了在13、14世纪的元代以及近代有所交集之外，历史事件虽彼此平行发生，但彼此间没有丝毫的关联。

在我的学校图书馆，唯一与中国相关的书籍是一套孔子《论语》的平装版。但对于一个15岁的学童来说，阅读那样一类书籍实在令人大惑不解。 我无法于其中找到任何形而上学思想，也没有任何直接明了的论据，但在柏拉图（Plato）大致同一历史时期所写的《理想国》（Republic）中，这些却应有尽有。《论语》通篇充斥着神秘晦涩的只言片语，恍如天书。电视上，中国只是一个被零星关注的题材，有一些纪录片，新闻中偶尔也会报道邓小平领导下正在进行着的改革。但除此之外，中国显得极为遥远，隐匿在它举世闻名的长城背后。关于长城，我当时得到的信息是，这一物体从月球上也清晰可见（当然，现在众所周知，这只是一种错误的传言）。

当时，英国的华裔主要有两类，一类是那些以移民身份来到英国的人，另一类是主要来自香港或广东早期移民的子女或后裔。像伦敦和曼彻斯特这样的城市，有唐人街，还有中国餐馆——不过，必须重申的是，这些场所都是充满了异国情调的场所，它们所提供的食物，据我后来发现，已作了重大调整，以迎合英国人的口味。虽然如此，在这为数不多的几个地方，我却能读到汉字——那些充满了神秘色彩的漩涡状图形，完全不同于罗马字母；我还能欣赏到中国艺术，出现在卷轴或水彩画上，与我所熟悉的大多数西方艺术风格迥然有别。在我就读过的任何一所学校里，很少有华裔或亚裔学生。事实上，我所与之深谈过的第一个与我年龄相仿的中国裔人士，是一位来自新加坡、就读于剑桥大学的学生。一个简单的事实是，在20世纪80年代甚至90年代，中国游客和中国学生在英国几乎不见踪影。

我第一次接触中国文学作品，是阅读了出自美国诗人埃兹拉·庞德（Ezra Pound）之手的《诗经》（Cantos）。庞德通过20世纪初一位亚洲文化（特别是日本文化）学者欧内斯特·芬诺列萨（Ernest Fenollosa），熟悉了一些译成英语的唐宋诗词，并且在并不完全理解所使用的汉字意义的情况下，把它们融合到他自己那部史诗般诗篇的后半部分。这些汉字出现在书页上，夹在他用英语、意大利语、法语或拉丁语写成的其它字里行间，显得神秘、生硬，几乎与它们周围的文本断无关联。庞德在他的文本和翻译中，确实采用古老的威妥玛-翟理斯 (Wade Giles) 拼音法，附上了音译，来解释他所使用的汉字。他还专门辟出一个章节，用诗歌的体裁对中国一些朝代的兴衰交替进行了叙述。但是，在这首诗中，他以这种方式来处理汉字，所追求的效果主要是为了强化这样一种意识，即中国、汉语、中国历史和中国文化，与西方的那些完全大相径庭——两者间存在着如此的天壤之别，以至于几乎是不可知的。我由此得出结论，中国极为复杂，难于知晓。

就我个人经历而言，要让汉语不仅可知，而且易懂，纯属无心插柳，而非有意为之。我不是一个出色的语言习得者。十八岁时，我在巴黎呆了两个月之后，我的法语就算勉强过关，无论是当时还是现在，阅读能力尚且不错。我学过德语，但两年后就几乎全部还给了老师，而我自学拉丁语和希腊语的尝试，也几乎一筹莫展。倘若我要在1986年去往任何一所大学攻读汉语普通话，那我就永远也不会被录取。在所有语言中，汉语被归入“最难学习”的类别。这意味着，只有那些在学习语言方面已被证明有着特别禀赋的人，才能进入正规的课程来学习它。在剑桥大学，东方研究是一个带有神秘色彩、极为小众的研究领域——我在剑桥大学的全部时间里，在这门课上唯一只遇到过一个学生！这个学科似乎专业性极强，而那些攻读它的人几乎像是隐身人似的。这一切化强了我以前所得到的信息，那就是该学科是专为那些最冥顽不化、心无旁涉、专心致志的学者而设。中国研究与汉学，只有精英中的精英堪当，他们心怀深刻的使命召唤，因而，这一学科常常显得几乎像是一种排他性的宗教崇拜。

20世纪80年代中期，《汽车大铁》一书给我留下了最为深刻的印象，它是1981年诺贝尔文学奖获得者埃利亚斯·卡内蒂（Elias Canetti）的作品。书中最核心的人物，彼得·克莱因（Peter Klein），集中体现着一个关于汉学家的刻板印象。20世纪30年代，克莱因居住在被纳粹党接管之前和接管期间的维也纳，他的生活极度自律，全身心奉献于学术。小说的开头，是他和一个小男孩的对话，在对话中他解释一个汉字的含义。但随着故事情节的展开，他的生活变得愈发复杂，日趋黯淡。在此前的几年里，他只与他家里的帮佣维持着定期的接触，两人陷入灾难性的婚姻。她被证明占有欲极强，贪得无厌、且甚为残酷。出现在他生命中的另一个人，是一个邪恶阴险的侏儒，而他的整个故事愈演愈烈，失去控制，导致他最终的死亡，他那本来序然有序、按部就班的生活也毁灭殆尽。

《汽车大铁》这部作品充满了令人叹为观止的独创性和奇特力量。作品以近乎半幻觉的方式写成，而对于虚构的主人公克莱因而言，其职业选择令人甚感困惑。为什么作者卡内蒂决定让他成为一位汉学家，而不是一个古典主义者，或者科学家，或者文学专家。部分原因肯定是因为这一领域，比之于其它所有领域，能赋予他一定程度的“另类”色彩，并赋予他一种神秘感。正如庞德在其作品中对汉字的使用那样，所要达到的效果也大抵如此。这两个人中，没有一个人深谙汉语，也正因为如此，没有一个人有过在中国生活的切身经历。在这一时期，真正在中国这个国家居住过较长一段时间的一位西方人士，当推诗人威廉·燕卜荪（William Empson）。非常能说明问题的是，他所创作的作品，鲜有连篇累牍地提及他在20世纪30年代和40年代客居了整整十来年时间的那个国家。或许，正是因为他对中国的熟悉了解，消除了他去将中国当作“异域”描述的所有诱惑。尽管如此，虽然他不失为一个造诣极高的文人，但他在那里的时候，似乎没有研究或学过多少汉语口语。

对于我日后所追求的汉学家这一职业生涯而言，克莱恩可谓是一个十分糟糕的榜样。因此，在我大学生涯行将结束之际，我对自己所经历过的英国教育体系，最好的评价充其量也就是，虽然它在诸多方面相当优秀，且范围广泛，但关于那个占了全人类五分之一人口的民族及其文化、历史和语言，英国教育所赋予给我的知识，却极为零碎、肤浅。在某些方面，情况甚至比这更糟。此外，对于亚洲的概况，我也无甚接触，知之寥寥。随着我年岁渐高，那种情况变得愈发不正常，时至今日，这也是我颇费思忖的人生困惑之一，力图予以弥补。一个受到过良好教育的人，为何在某些关键性的领域竟然一无所知呢？查尔斯·佩尔西·斯诺（C. P. Snow），一位科学家和学者，在20世纪60年代曾对“两种文化”问题满腹牢骚，一种是由自然科学界及物理学或生物学界所构成的文化，另一种是由文学和人文科学界所构成的文化。他的这番论述却在20世纪70年代遭到了批评家弗兰克·雷蒙德·利维斯（F. R. Leavis）言辞激烈的冷嘲热讽。在利维斯看来，世界上仅有一种文化，以及这种文化的不同表现形态，所谓科学、人文学科及其它思想形式，均是这种文化的不同组成部分。 然而，我所能说的是，我在教育方面的成长经历使我意识到了一种类似的“两种文化”情形，这两种文化被一堵藩篱几乎彼此隔绝，这两种文化便是东方文化与西方文化。这一巨大的鸿沟究竟如何才能得以弥合，这便是本书所要叙述的一个个故事的主旨所在。
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直到1978年，中国何以相较于其它国家尤其不为外部世界所认知，关于这一点人们可以给出多种多样的原因。在一个既缺乏即时电子通信亦无大规模便捷航空旅行的时代，出于一个极为实际的原因，即物理距离，使中国与英国相隔遥远，常令人难以抵达对方国度。 除此之外，还存在着两国间冷若冰霜的政治关系，这种关系一直持续到20世纪70年代，在两国的首都甚至还没能设立一座完整的大使馆，只有几座公使馆。随着中国与美国在1972年建交，所有这些障碍均不复存在，这意味着英国得以升级它与人民共和国的关系，就在当年赋予公使馆以大使馆的地位。最后，在很大程度上，中英两国缺乏真正意义上的商业往来。中国只是一个发展中国家，经济体量弱小，这一经济一直到20世纪80年代都大量依赖诸多初级产业及农业。它根本不拥有与外界的那种物流能力以及交往的能力，无法像美国或者澳大利亚那样，能在其它国家民众的生活中占有一席之地。在这些因素之外，还有一个就是语言问题。中英两国民众说是不是同一种语言。即使不存在上述距离遥远及缺乏直接联系这些障碍，来自中英两国的民众，虽能越过物理藩篱相聚并相联，但彼此间能够进行顺畅沟通交流的人，恐怕也寥寥无几。

进入21世纪的第二个十年期，凡此一切均已改变。2018年，有多达110,000名中国留学生在英国学习。中国已然成为英国、欧洲其它诸国以及全世界的投资国与贸易国，其规模与方式已远非1978年前的情形所能比拟。2017年，有多达1亿2千万中国民众出境旅行，该数字有望在今后以每年2千万的数量递增。中文标识出现在各种店铺的门面上，在机场热情地问候远道而来的中国客，即使在欧洲最偏僻之地，也会显示在中国人移动手机的广告中。倘若你生活在西方，一旦你对中国及其文化与历史产生兴趣，你大可不必费力去寻找中国；无疑，她会款款而来，把你逮个正着。但是，虽然事情已经发生了翻天覆地的变化，我还是担心西方的学童和年轻人依然有可能在美国、欧洲及其它地区完成其学制，但毕业之际就像三十年前的我那样，对中国的认知支离破碎，一知半解。

我最终投入时间和精力去弄懂中国并学习中文，这纯属偶然，没有任何事先的谋划。大学的一位老师曾在苏州呆过一段时间，他建议我不妨去中国看看。但我一直毫无作为，直到我于1990年去日本工作一年，利用日本著名的“黄金周”假期，在1991年5月坐飞机从大阪出发，经短途飞行到达上海，然后北上至北京。当时，作为身在北京的一位游客，一句普通话都不会说，一切实属不易。我下榻的酒店叫城市酒店（现在已不复存在），靠近三里屯和工人体育场。即使当时地铁只有两条线路，但我还是心生害怕，不敢坐地铁出行。要吃饭的话，我只敢去有英文菜谱的饭馆。每天，我步行二、三英里，常常顶着炎热的天气，来到友谊商店，然后再去往北京饭店。我曾一度尝试去游览长城，我先是来到了当时位于城南的一座小火车站，向售票员出示一片纸，上面写着一个字“Wall”（墙）。毋庸赘言，她根本弄不懂我想要询问的是什么。至少在这一次的北京之旅中，我绝无机会去欣赏那伟大的景观。

至少，到那时为止，我已掌握了一定程度的中文书面语。在日本中部的长滨市，我一直在学习日本汉字（“kanji”），即日语中从汉语借用的字词，并设法记住了约500个字。但这些字大多为繁体字而非简体字，这意味着当我在北京试图去读菜谱或街头的各种招牌标识，我大概只能认出一半的字来。 在北京度过的七天时光可谓度日如年，但这次经历也构筑起了某种纽带关系。中国这个地方以一种全然出人意料的方式，显得既大不相同，又十分熟悉。中国“无法为人所知”、极度神秘莫测以及无法让人理解，这种念头开始遭到严重的挑战。在中国这块土地上所生活着的芸芸众生，与我所来自的地方相差无几，人们努力地过好属于他们的日子，每天忙忙碌碌地操持着各自的事务，与我家乡的情形甚为相似。自我1991年离开日本后，我在澳大利亚的墨尔本逗留了六个月的时间，这段经历再度强化了我的想法，即对于中国以及中文，我有能力并且也应该去增加对它们的了解。

尽管墨尔本与中国相距遥远，但它仍不失为一个不错的场所，至少为我试图学习中文创造了一个良好的开端。一方面，位于市中心地带的唐人街有一家很棒的书店，里面有很多中文学习材料 。在这里，中国给人的存在感要远胜于在伦敦给人的那种感觉。这里有更多的中餐馆，更多的中国裔人口，最为重要的是，还有一定数量的非中国裔人士，他们掌握了“普通话”。因此，我意识到，一种语言虽然不一定是某个人文化与家庭背景中固有的一部分，但将它学好无疑是一件既可望亦可及的事情。对我而言，最大的励志源泉来自我当时与其合租公寓的那个人，此人名为安德鲁·比尔（Andrew Beale），一位土生土长的澳大利亚人，但他很好地掌握了汉语，水平达到娴熟流利的地步，在当地的一所中学担任汉语老师。我十分欣慰地说，时至今日，几乎经过了三十年的光阴荏苒，他依然是我的一个挚友。

要使得中国能为人所知，这一点至关重要。每天，我都努力背诵熟记几个汉字。我当时就职于一家专门接待日本游客的免税商店，那几年中，日本游客人数众多，门庭若市。他们往往以庞大旅行团的方式成群结队蜂拥而至，一批又一批地到来，然后又离去，上一个团与下一个团之间会留下一段较长的、不算忙碌的空隙时间。这期间，我会踱步在店内来回走动，手里拿着一本拍纸簿，让经理以为我在忙着清点或检查货品，但实际上我是在默写我背下的汉字。总体而言，我的词汇量达到了七、八百个之多，还甚至用中文写下粗糙的日记。我试图在晚间学习汉语，并在乘电车到市中心上下班的途中也不失时机地学上一点。但问题是，虽然我能很好地弄懂汉语的语法（我甚为欣喜地发现，与充斥着阴性阳性变化的德语和充斥着词尾变化的拉丁语相比，汉语是何等的似曾相识），但要我口头说出哪怕是最简单的中文句子，则绝无可能。

回到英国后，我发现只有一门实用的、学制为一年的汉语研究生文凭课。这里，我再度遇到了要在英国的教育体制中学习中文是多么的专、多么的偏的问题。利兹大学（Leeds University）及伦敦大学（University of London）的亚非学院（School of Oriental and Africa Studies, SOAS）均开设有硕士课程：但专门用于学习汉语的时间甚为有限。我打探过的绝大多数地方，所给出的答覆是，我要么是聘请私人家教学习汉语，这将意味着一笔极其高昂的开销，或者是去完成一个完整的新的本科学位，耗时四年之久。只有一所叫做泰晤士河谷大学（在那些原本更侧重于职业培训的机构完成办学升级之前，该校的名称为伊林理工学院） 的学校能提供相对不算昂贵、且甚为实用的汉语课程。即使在当时，如果没有大不列颠中国中心（Great Britain China Centre）所提供的奖学金，我仍然发现要从事一个学位课程的学习，那将是难之又难。

因此，我真正开始聚精会神学习汉语的记忆，与我在北京、上海或本书中多提及的几个地方的生活无甚关系。相反，在我的记忆中，是坐在伦敦西区靠近艾克顿镇地铁旁的一间逼仄的起居兼卧室两用的房间内，在1993年期间，并一直持续到1994年，手头放着一本字典，用来研读中文段落，阅读中文小说和报纸，与大约六个人结成对子进行中文口语的交流。有时，整天下来，要投入十个小时的时间学习中文。在八个月的时间中，我每天都做着此事，在离我对其如此感兴趣的国家数千英里之遥的一个城市里，竭尽全力在我的周围营造出一个有关中国的小天地。如果我光顾书店购书的话，我所购之书全部是关于中国的。如果我光顾电影院看电影的话，我所看的电影是当时放映的为数不多的几部中文电影。每天，我尽量去中餐馆吃饭，只要能帮助我增加对中国的了解，对任何知识我都如饥似渴。即使我造访二手书店时，我都会徜徉在一排排书架之间，努力寻找任何相关的书籍，其中有些书已有一个世纪的年头，内容与中国相涉。

这一经历几乎可以被称为我人生中的第二次教育。我开始知晓某些著名人物的名字，例如曹雪芹，他是杰出的清代小说《红楼梦》（又名《石头记》）的作者；还有历史人物司马迁，即几乎二千年前的汉代太史令。我也逐渐了解到，孙子是活跃于战国时期前后的诸子百家思想家之一，比西方基督诞生的时代还早了四个世纪，与孟子、韩非子、墨子等人并驾齐驱，探索人生，著书立说，勤于思考。我第一次听说了鲁迅，20世纪早期中国最伟大的作家；我还了解到了一些重大事件，像发生在1919年的五四运动，以及始于1937年的抗日战争。我阅读了埃德加·斯诺（Edgar Snow）所著的《红星照耀中国》（Red Star Over China，又称《西行漫记》），这是第一次有人用英语记述共产主义在中国的兴起，我还读到了他之后在20世纪60年代对中国的访问。我也了解到了甲骨文、始皇帝、唐朝、以及大将郑和在15世纪早期七下西洋的航海之旅。对我而言，中国这样一个自古以来就存在于东方的国度，却从来没有出现在我面前，这是极不寻常的一件事。但即使在当时，如同西方的大多数人一样，我并没有意趣去对中国窥探一番，并且，当时的环境给我的印象是，即使我真的要去作一番“寻寻觅觅”的话，我所探寻到的东西也会显得难以理解。

卡尔·荣格（Carl Jung），不仅仅是一位心理学家，更是20世纪醉心于亚洲宗教、哲学与信仰体系的西方知识分子之一，他将人类归入“热爱符号的物种”这一范畴。我猜想，在他的这一分类法之外，还应该补充一点，即人类藉由符号，演变成一个“热爱故事的物种”。要接触中国、走近中国，其中一个巨大的挑战是如何试图去构建我自己对于中国故事的理解，以及我自己所叙述的将是怎样的一种中国故事。中国历史漫长悠久，且复杂得几乎令人绝望。但这种历史第一眼看上去也充满了矛盾——这个国家既年轻又古老，既多元又统一，在这块土地上，在其整个历史的绝大部分时间中，由于民众缺乏对某个共同信仰体系的坚持，因而，没能形成一个统辖一切的架构。相反，这种架构在西方则最终得以形成，因为自第4世纪起，人们信奉了基督教。我当时所接触到的中国，呈现出截然不同的两面，有些地方看上去像是已经工业化的都市，有些地方则似乎丛林遍布，熊猫依然生存在荒郊野岭。要将中国这个国家纳入到任何一个预先设定的框架之中，实乃不易。毕竟而言，在我力图对中国形成认知的早期，中国人即使在伦敦这样一个庞大的中心城市也不是随处可见，因此不可能让我获得直接的经历与接触，以纠正我的误解。

要弥补这一缺憾，唯一的方法是实际前往中国，并在那里生活。因此，我申请就职于一家名为“英国海外志愿服务社”（Voluntary Service Overseas ,VSO）的组织，该组织当时获得英国政府援助经费中的部分资助。这就是为什么我自1994年起得以在中国的内蒙古地区度过了二年的时光，正是在那里，我终于能够基本上较为流利地用中文进行会话和阅读，并勉强地（如第一章所示）进行写作。
*
中国的“不可知性”以及如何去超越这种“不可知性”，并将这二者都转化为一个中国故事，将故事讲得坦诚，实事求是，尤其是易于驾驭，这便是本书的主旨所在。我在上面叙述了我的个人经历，它至少可以提供某种语境，藉此说明为什么像我这样一个与中国原本毫无关联的人，竟然会在二十几岁的年龄开始，越来越将注意力聚焦于这一国度的思想、历史、文化以及民众。自1994年起，我的职业角色经历了多重转换，做过外交官、商人、咨询专家，最终成为学者。我的绝大部分时间要么是在中国度过的，要么是在与中国的合作中度过的，要么是在对中国的研究中度过的。我亲身前往中国的每一个省份以及自治区，在中国总计度过了五年半的时光，对中国进行了一百多次的参访。自2006年起，我撰写了论述中国的二十多部著作，在四大洲的三十五个国家，围绕着中国的政治、经济和历史举办过演讲。我在澳大利亚居住过三年，我的工作是作为一个学者对中国展开研究，之后重返英国。这一时期，我接受过世界上每一家主要新闻媒体的采访，其中包括美国有线电视新闻网（CNN），英国广播公司（BBC），美国广播公司（ABC），以及半岛电视台(Al Jazera)，此外，还有当时的中国中央电视台（CCTV）以及现在的中国国际电视台（CGTN）。我所撰写的论述中国的稿件发表于《纽约时报》（New York Times）、《电讯报》（the Telegraph）、《英国独立报》（the British Independent）、《卫报》（Guardian）、《南华早报》（the South China Morning Post）、《中国日报》（China Daily）、以及几乎每一家用主要欧洲语言出版的新闻报纸或网络刊物上。即使在1989年，倘若有人跟我说我会拥有这样一种职业生涯，我会觉得这完全是疯人痴语。充其量，我只会认为我将以英国文学作为我的专业领域。直到1989年，我所梦寐以求的是能留在剑桥大学，在那里继续我的职业生涯。如果我真的拥有什么梦想的话，它也只是一个关乎英国而非关乎中国的梦想。因此，本书所说述的故事，总体而言是原本的英国梦如何在我身上转而化作了中国梦。

首先，我要说的是，开启并随后亲历这段“第二人生”，无论其挑战多么巨大，对我来说始终是极大的快乐源泉。如果任何一个阅读本书的读者，此刻正处于我三十年前所处的相同境地，通过阅读本书受到鼓舞，如同我所殚精竭虑做过的那样，努力使中国及其博大精深的文化与文学变得能为其所知，那么，我撰写拙作，所有的辛劳便不会付诸东流。现在，与他人分享知晓中国的快乐，能够越来越渐入佳境、更为深邃地认识中国，这已经成为我职业生涯及大部分个人生活的主要意义所在。当我看到，世界上竟然还有这样一个别的国度，一片全新的天地，带着全然不同的人生观与命运观，这对我的思想与心灵，不啻是一种巨大的解放。在我人生中与中国文化邂逅的过程中，虽然有些时候事情会变得十分具有挑战性，例如，如何融入中国社会，真是极为艰难，如何理解我所经历和目睹的许多事情，也是甚为费劲，但是，所有这些挑战都变得相形见绌，微不足道，因为投入时间与精力去读懂中国、更深地了解她的国民，其回报是巨大的。对于像我这样一个人来说，原本对中国的认知少得可怜，人生中开始有意识地去了解中国又属于起步甚晚，如何使中国可以为人所知，这便是贯穿本书的主题。将这种可知性的诸多不同方面呈现出来，并且揭示这种可知性如何能够为所有那些愿意投入时间和精力的人们所分享并理解，这一点可谓及其重要。

然而，在本书中，我希望能选择一种与众不同、别具一格的方式来传递这种可知性。虽然一种自传体的叙述相当具有诱惑力，但最终而言一部自传既十分有限，亦过于主观。在所有其它各种体裁中，这样的一部自传充其量也只是那些时而融入中国生活、时而暂别中国生活的人们记下的一段叙事，或者，是那些属于当下这个波澜壮阔、气势恢宏民族故事的人们所记下的一段叙事。此外，我所追求的目标是尽量能写出稍微更加实用的内容，提供某些想法或提示，使那些原本对中国不甚熟悉、甚至一无所知的人们，能够将他们在中国的所见所闻变做其使命的一部分，努力去读懂这个国家的方方面面，且不至于危及其“他者属性”的完整性与独特性。在后萨义德时代，当东方主义以及创造“他者属性”被视为带有歧视性、且会产生禁锢作用时，我的这一目标不太可能成为一个受人欢迎的主意。尽管如此，我在本书中还是会尽我所能来证明，我们完全可以超越上述那种视角，进而抵达一种境界，用一种有机的、平衡的和包容的视野，将熟悉与不熟悉的事物尽收眼底，既发现它们彼此的独特色彩，同时亦看清楚有哪些因素将它们彼此相连。《易经》一书，作为中国最早期几个朝代占卦预言的一部杰出著作，阐述了万物何以会息息相关。一方面力图理解并欣赏这些关联的节点，但另一方面也要清晰地看到边缘、界限及分界线在哪，这是十分重要的。

事实上，这一点恰恰隐含在某位作者的作品之中。我对这人隐约有所了解，并在我的大学时代至少亲眼看到过他几次。作为本科生，我在剑桥大学度过了三年的时光，冈维尔与凯斯学院（Gonville and Caius）便是大科学家与大学者李约瑟（Joseph Needham）的家所在之处。我在剑桥时，李约瑟已年届八十五与九十岁之间，略显驼背，但看上去令人肃然起敬，傍晚有些个时候，他会从他的房间出来，步履缓慢地穿过四周有建筑物围绕的方院，去参加学院的晚餐。我从来没能跟他说上话，但经人提醒，了解到了他的鸿篇巨著《中国的科学与文明》（Science and Civilisation，即《中国科学技术史》），也知晓了他自20世纪40年代开始的某些既漫长、又杰出的中国经历。此外，我至少还有一件事情与他不无共通之处，那就是他早先时候曾经是一位生化学家，在其职业生涯相对较晚的时候，才开始研究并了解中国。在中国抗日战争后期，李约瑟在驻重庆的英国公使馆工作，其身份为科学参赞。当时，国民政府搬迁至四川的这座西南城市，在20世纪40年代中期将它确立为全国的首都。正是在重庆，李约瑟惊闻了中国丰富的科技思想史，该思想史可一直追溯至秦朝之前，历史上中国在多个时代都是世界创新与发明强国。这一经历激励了他的后半生，最终形成了他多卷本的巨著，有些由他亲自执笔，有些则由其他专家撰写完成。时至今日，这套巨著依然影响巨大。在我1989年毕业之后，又过了数年，李约瑟于1995年与世长辞，终年95岁。关于他的一则讣告写道，他是“自文艺复兴早期的伊拉斯谟（Erasmus）以来最伟大的欧洲学者。”

究竟是什么原因使他如此深深地迷恋上了中国，针对这样一个问题，李约瑟的回答是，他能接触到中国，接触到中国的思想史及其深层次的各种价值观，这无异于接触到一个全新的事物，全然有别于他生于其中、长于其中的西方传统。这种与中国文化的接触，提供了一种新的选择途径，一种新的审视现实的方式。当我在2005年前后在上海的某场演讲中引述了这一思路时，听众中有人不无道理地指出，这种思路带有“东方主义”的色彩。但即使如此，这种想法对我而言也似乎令我无法割舍。毫无疑问，中国肯定不是存在于另一个星球，但它显然拥有全然不同的一整套社会行为，一整套关于其历史的叙事，以及一整套对于世界的态度，而这一切毫无疑问有别于我所生长于其中的那套传统。对于这一点，我焉能置若罔闻、视而不见？

在本书中，我决意聚焦于具体可感、非常实实在在的事物，作为讲述我中国故事的一种方式。此外，我还会用具体事例来说明中西方差异这一问题，但我们完全没有必要谈“异”色变，因为在追求使事物变得更为明确、更为可知的过程中，差异又能给我们带来多么有益的帮助。在我英国的生活中，一个又一个地方一直令我陶醉神往，并将永远令我着迷。例如，在本《引言》的开头，我就提到在肯特郡，某些地方就与几位作家的生平存在着千丝万缕的联系。正如人们所经常说的那样，凡有重大事件发生过的地方，就会遗留下记忆的痕迹，如爆发过战争的战场，经历过重大事件的建筑物，以及世世代代见证了芸芸众生们多姿多彩生活的城镇。古老的地方尤其令人流连忘返，例如英国的某些古老教堂的遗址，一直可以追溯到基督教在当地传播的最早时期，即公元5世纪与6世纪；再比如，还有一些掩映在旷野风景中的浅浅的道路痕迹，可追溯至古罗马时期。有些家庭住宅，虽然其外立面进行了现代化改造，面对着车水马龙的大街，但在所有现代化的外表之下，显然古韵尤存。此外，还有一些丛林，那里，铁器时代及其它时代的遗迹被灌木或树丛所覆盖，但依然可以让人一睹其昔日的容颜。

自我相当年轻的时候起，我就形成了一个习惯，每每来到一个新城市，我都会在头脑中首先形成该城市的一个地图。这使我在英国、在欧洲都十分受用，原因很简单，因为每一个地方，无论新旧，普遍而言都拥有一个具体的模式，即在靠近中心地带的某处，会有一座或几座教堂，或是一座大教堂，之后可能会有一处市广场，或镇广场。或村广场，有商铺、餐馆、酒吧、酒店旅舍；再从这里往外延伸出去，会有公园、纪念碑、主马路，通往其它的交通枢纽与大型地标设施。有时，还会有一些十分醒目的公共建筑，如政府办公楼，或各大机构，以及博物馆。在某他一些时候，则会有一些艺术画廊，或一些新近改造重建的区域，旧建筑的感觉与特征已面目全非。所有这一切，都有助于构建起关于某个地方的时代与特征的概念，并强化其地域感。

正如本书所示，在探索中国各个地方的过程中，其中一个重要的挑战在于，其空间布局与地理特征，以及某些特定地方的含义，外加如何以最恰当的方法来弄懂所有这一切，这些都与我在英国与欧洲的经历太不一样。当代中国，这个我在最近的四分之一世纪中不断故地重游且已然变得十分熟稔的地方，已经经历并仍将经历翻天覆地的物质变化。一个个城市一年一变样，三年大变样，因此与第一次造访的时候相比，常常会显得几乎无法辨认。这徒使原来的问题变得愈发棘手难弄——当某个地方本身如此日新月异时，来自不同文化背景的一位访客又能如何开始读懂他所实际漫步其上的那片土地呢？在中国，庙宇而非教堂是较为容易的一个问题，让人作出重新的调整适应，每到一处，总会让人惦记在心上。但至于城镇空间是如何组织与管理的，建筑物的功能，它们的样式与风格，以及你如何才能断定它们的年代，凡此一切都需要一套又一套全新的知识。

对于一个像我这样的非中国人而言，每到中国的一个新地方，如何游刃有余地徜徉其中，能够梳理出一个大致的所以然来，这实属不易，但做到这一点又是绝对不可或缺的。其中一个非常实际的问题便是气候——由于气温的缘故，在中国城市里要走远路往往是很不容易的，尤其是在南方更带有热带气候的地区，在室外稍微呆上一会便会令你大汗淋漓，全身湿透。另一点是中国的大街小巷往往是多么的不易行走或散步，究其原因就是因为交通如此繁忙拥挤，而很大一部分交通又是如此不同（有自行车、小货车、卡车等等）。毫不令人惊讶的是，因为人口众多，中国的城市要远比西方城市中的交通繁忙拥挤。马路上的标识大不相同，马路上通行的礼仪也完全有别于英国的那套（众所周知，在中国要穿过马路相当不易，马路的规则不一样，行人的状况也不一样）。最后，在中国许多城市，尤其是在过去更早的一些时候，当我四处走动时，我会显得十分引人注目，是唯一一个长着浅黄色头发的人。这使我与周围的人群显得格格不入。如果我停下脚步来想把某样东西看出个究竟，有时就会有一群好奇的看客瞬间聚集在我的周围。近年来，随着外国游客在中国的数量节节攀升，这样的问题已经变得微不足道了。

然而，如何把你的所见所闻梳理出个所以然来，则是另一回事。当地的历史，以及各处地方如何见证着昔日发生的事件，这些内容很大程度上都是藉由甚为笼统的旅行指南一类的书籍传递出来的，而且又是中文材料，肯定令人望而却步。我在本书中所描述的几个地方，一方面著名度极高，另一方面已被研究得甚为透彻。有许多其它的书籍论述这些地方，很多是用英语写的。但即便如此，要与它们的故事形成真正亲密的接触与了解，又谈何容易!因此，本书中的叙述主要都是些个人的所见所闻，所思所想，绝不敢不揣愚陋去对这些地方撰写某种权威的历史或记述。从这一层意义上讲，它只是一段关于我自己的历史，讲述我如何对这些不同的城市形成我的理解，并且逐渐对它们产生感情、印象及态度。本书所讲述的是这些地方如何对我构成意义的历史。
我在本书所叙述的这些城市，对我而言都具有重要的象征意义。位于内蒙古的呼和浩特，是我在1994年前往工作的城市，当时，我代表英国海外志愿服务社（VSO），就职于内蒙古医学院。无论我对中国已经获得了怎样的了解，我对这座城市的气候、地理位置、文化及历史几乎一无所知。在两年的时间中，我一边给医学院的研究生教英语，一边在当地的一所主要大学补习中文。在我1996年离开那里之后，我多次重返故地， 目睹了这一地方的物理变迁。但是，这段经历也与环绕着城市向外延绵不绝的草原息息相关，因此，这段经历当然也包括如何努力去理解大草原的地理特征及那里的风土人情。

本书第二章所涵盖的是我在首都北京的经历，起始点是我在1991年的首次到访，一直到我在2000年至2003年作为外交官在那里生活的那段时光，以及自那以后我一次次的故地重游。在某种意义上，北京作为我在中国了解最深的一个地方，本章更多地构成了一个重写本，向读者所呈现的是北京城的不同地方以及我多次对北京的重访。我尽自己之所能，选取某些最有意义的地点，并从中构建起一段个人叙事来。

第三章所描述的那座城市，我其实已经撰写了整整一本书，这便是上海，一座伟大的城市。某种程度上，本章所叙述的是一场类似于宗教皈依般的心路历程的转变——1998年，我作为一个新被任命、依然驻扎在英国的外交官，首次到访上海，该城市规模之庞大，熙熙攘攘之程度，不免令我心生厌倦。但在接下来的那个十年期后期，我在这个城市花费大量的时间，致力于上海与利物浦两城的城际关系。正是在此期间，我越来越喜欢上了这座城市那非同寻常的厚重氛围，以及它如何以如此富有戏剧性的方式传递出现代中国的某些矛盾与创新。

第四章讲的是西安，即伟大的唐朝的都城，也是今天最闻名遐迩的兵马俑的所在地。我第一次到访该城市是在2000年，带一个英国官方代表团参访该市，之后我还曾多次重返故地，一发不可收地迷上了历史上一个个朝代几乎连绵不断的古迹，以及透过这个城市所留下的建筑物以及富有历史价值的人工制品所呈现的历代中国的风貌。本章所力图处理的主题是，当一个局外人来到西安时，如何才能将其带有如此复杂性和差异性的浩瀚历史变得可知；还有，西安的物理布局，再加上散落在风景中的一处处古迹，它们既具有史诗般的壮美，又显得支离破碎，凡此一切，都有助于对西安历史的认知。

本书最后一章讲述的是香港，它只是在1997年才重回中国的主权管辖，但它一直维持着一种独特的氛围。最为一个地方，它最终证明或许是最难以理解的。我的香港故事不属于一个长期的海外旅居者的故事，而是一个在1991年与其第一次邂逅之后对其进行过数次短暂参访的匆匆过客的故事。因此，对我来说，香港既是一个非常特别的又是一个中国风情浓郁的地方，或许可以用“一座国际化的中国城市”来形容。它可能是本书中所讲述的所有城市中在物理形态上变化最微的一座城市，但它又提供了诸多以其它方式发生着变化的实例。此外，作为一个英国人，我对香港有着一份特殊的情感。

有一条主线始终贯穿于本书，贯穿于我上述列出的所有五座城市，那就是如何去理解所有事物中最神秘莫测之物——百姓的寻常生活。上个世纪90年代后期，当我还在英国外交部工作的时候，我记得曾经有一天一位同事长叹一声，感慨地说他“真不知道大多数人是如何打发时光的”。事实上，事情要比这来得甚至更令人困惑费解。我们活在每个人自己的人生中，我们每个人所过的生活，我们自个都对其拥有彻底的所有权，并可以随时对其进行审察检视，然而，我们往往浑然不知时间究竟去了哪儿。我们虽然被赋予了自由与能力去处置我们的时间，却往往被千头万绪的事情弄得不知所措，或者说根本就无法将时间规划好。我们整天忙忙碌碌，我们将自己淹没在各种无谓的消遣之中，每天去寻找所要追逐的目标、想法或事物。有时，我们也会让渡对我们所意识到的绝大部分醒着的时间的控制权，转而屈服于我们所为其工作的那些人的日程和纪律。在伦敦，大多数人都属于通勤族，他们挤上火车，或一路昏睡，或阅读报纸，或空呆着等待，直到抵达终点，然后换乘汽车或其它交通工具，之后到达工作场所。大多数时候，这些工作场所均为办公室，往往是公共性质的，这意味着每个人每天与某个特定圈子的人打交道，期间涉及到各种愉快、应诺，以及挑战。会有一些会议、午餐、约会，有些时间耗费在电脑前，有些时间耗费在打电话上，有些时间则耗费在开会上。后现代社会的日常生活，虽然不乏其多样性与丰富性，其深层次的规则往往是十分标准化的，无论我们生活在何处。就我而言，即使在我过着这种生活的日子里（谢天谢地，还不算太过频繁），我总是竭尽全力地在为我所提供的那种按部就班、循规蹈矩的日常框架中，创造更多的丰富性，更多的新鲜刺激，以及更多的参与和投入。或许，很多人都属于这样的情形——富有创意地利用各种呈现在他们面前的机会，使得整天的所作所为更具私人定制的特质。然而，即使在这里，也有着种种局限。在如何规划一个人一天中的所作所为这一领域，做老板的往往是无法容忍太多的个人创意的。

正如我每到一地对所到之处所作的一篇篇自成一体的描述所显示的那样，我每天的生活内容以及我日常生活的结构，往往是大不相同的。在呼和浩特，我沉浸在一种全新的文化社会语境之中，从第一天起就必须去找到参考的坐标、熟悉的景象、以及可靠的例行惯事，以便能够对我的时间做出筹划。我每天只有有限的几个小时的教学时间，余下的时光需要由我来填充。作为这个地方新来乍到的一位素人，这意味着挑战、创造性以及一丝冒险感。这里，你有充分的自由去做你感兴趣的事情，去对所要做的事情作出规划，所有这一切需要巨大的自我决断力。但我还面临着另一个任务，那就是去学习新的社交规范，新的礼仪以及我必须要留神的新的交际，以便能融入到当地社会，成为其中的一份子。我们都知道有这样一种无法入乡随俗的外来者，尤其是那些来自西方国家的人士，在踏入像中国这样一个地方时，他们所期待、所需要和所要求的事物，必须和他们在国内所遇见的事物一模一样。由于两地的事物必然不可能相同，因此，这场旷日持久的、旨在实现不可能实现之目标的战斗，往往会演变成向他们周围的环境及其中的人们发起的一场焦躁易怒的战斗，其结果是，要么妥协和解，入乡随俗；要么大失所望，饮恨离别。

在北京，我是为某个机构而工作，因此我所过的生活较为井然有序。对于西安和上海而言，以及某种程度上对于香港而言，情况就大不相同。对于这些地方来说，我只是一位访客，任何单一一次到访从不会呆上很多的日子，仅仅是来也匆匆，去也匆匆，与我生活于其中的环境仅有有限的接触，我对它的身心投入也甚为有限。这可以给我带来一定程度的特权——我没有必要与这个地方产生过度的情感眷恋，这样。我就能发挥一个观察者的不偏不倚，客观冷静，而不是与某个地方牵涉太深，被这一地方所占有。在某个人与某一地的关系上，对于第二种关系的各种情感，其范围与深度均迥然有别于第一种关系。关于这一点，我希望将在我后面的叙述中有所涉及。

由于我对日常生活的基本结构兴趣浓厚，这给我接下来所要作出的叙述赋予了一种不同的韵味。这些叙述绝非游记类文字，它们不是为了异国情调或为了猎奇，也不是想利用局外人的视域这一特权，来嘲弄每一个地方所透露出来的某种深层“信息”，更不是对这些地方作某种客观的叙事，以说明当下的中国是什么样子的，它应该如何被外界看待，以及它作为一个国家或作为一种文化，其意义是什么。恰恰相反，我已坦承，我所欲传递给读者的内容带有我的主观色彩。书中的主角就是我，在我到达一个特定地方之前，我带着自己那一整套的经历，以及我在上面所描述的背景，再加上我所拥有的各种兴趣。接下来所发生的便是那种豁然开朗式的颖悟，之所以会如此，因为那样的一种人生，那样的一整套经历与期望，非常巧合地被置于本书所提及的那些全新环境之中。在一个完全不同的语境中，盎格鲁撒克逊历史学家尼古拉·豪威（Nichola Howe）撰写了一本书，讲述如何去欣赏英国自中世纪以来所留下来的古代遗址。书中写道，任何一次观赏都涉及到两个现实之间的交融，一个是被欣赏的遗址，另一个是携带者一整套知识与思想的观赏者本人。“比德的世界”（Bede’s World）是一座现代博物馆，用以纪念英国自第八世纪以来最早的本土史学家的研究工作。在游览这座博物馆时，豪威写道，他必须将两个不同的时代加以平衡，并惊叹道，“这样一处地方竟然能将英国历史相隔1200年之久的两个截然不同的瞬间悬置起来——一个是农业村庄，另一个是工业景观。” 正如读者们所将读到的那样，在中国，对于作为个体的我而言，这已变成一项长期的、聚精会神的事务，尤其是当我开始获得了对中国充分的认知，足以能够让我就所见所闻形成的知识与理解进行剖析，并开始将我的所见所闻置于一个更为丰富和复杂的语境中来予以审视。

法国哲学家米歇尔·德·塞罗（Michel de Cereau）在《日常生活的实践》（The Practice of Everyday Life）一书中，作出了极为丰富的一系列观察，以说明是什么构成了这个“神秘之物”——作为一个个体，一个人究竟应该如何度过每一天。对他而言，日常生活不是最普通和平常之物，而是负载着不同的象征符号，构成了一个场域，事实上是唯一的一个场域，意义在这里得以被创造出来，各种目标、故事及目的得以被界定。日常生活成为终极的空间，成为生活本身得以发生的场所，而不是某种平凡、通俗或乏味的东西。他所表述的一个观点是，在我们日常生活中存在着不同的空间，即工作、闲暇，休息时间与活动时间，亲密时间与活动时间，在这些不同的空间之间，存在着疆界——所有这些空间无疑受到一个更大的环境的文化、习惯及行为模式的制约，因为任何一个单一的个体，只要生活于其中，便无可避免地被囿于这一环境之中。从这层意义上说，日常生活可以被视作仿佛是一位独奏者对某个更大的“文本”所作的诠释，这个“文本”泛指形形色色的期望、信念、欲望与理想，它们源于任何一个社会与文化，而日常生活便是对所有这一切的旦复旦兮的循环交替。

要让一个人恰当地从不同的文化背景来看待生活，这不是能经常发生的事情。关于中国、在中国的生活以及中国人的生活，已经有很多人士从观察者的视角撰写了大量的材料，有英语的，有法语的，还有其它语言的，就诚实性与复杂性而言，其中的大部分材料均属上乘之作。这些类型的著作，其作者们一个得天独厚的优势在于其语言上的距离感，其专家知识，以及他们对于采取中立立场的渴求。戴维·博纳维亚（David Bonavia）是中国在1978年开始实施改革开放之后最早的、也是最出色优秀的欧洲新闻记者之一，他在中国逗留了一段时间之后，便撰写了一部叙述，书名就叫《中国人》（The Chinese）。 没有人能质疑他所呈现的关于他生活于其中的那个环境的知识。他是一个非凡的语言学家，也是一个出色的记者。但他的叙述中存在着一种间隔，而这种间隔普遍存在于自那以后所有类似的著述之中。情况仿佛是，有人透过一架望远镜寻寻觅觅，在一个与他们全然无关的对象身上找到了种种差异，不仅仅是一般性的差异，而且还有某些带有显著意义的差异，但无论如何，这些著述都会暗示某种几乎无可调和的间隔距离。

在本书的叙述中，我恰恰就要试图纠正这一间隔距离问题，将焦点汇聚于能将人们连接起来的事物，无论他们来自哪个地方，也不管他们的背景如何。这里所谓的地方，是指那样一个物理空间环境，人们只有生存于其中，才能成为活生生的个体，在其所处的场所，人们鼻之所嗅，眼之所视，耳之所闻、舌之所品，无不弥漫着人间烟火与真情实感。所有这一切交织在一起，构成了叙事与意义。而所谓背景，是指人们每天纯粹的时间存在，人们生存于时间之中，无论他们是中国人还是来自别处的人，都会为自己的日常习惯构建起某种模式。我在本书所描述的在不同地方所经历的中国岁月，是我作为一个永久性的局外人所亲身生活于其中的真实之物，但它肯定发生过变化，并逼迫我作出必要的适应。每到一处，我必须观察该地关于时间界限的种种惯例，例如商店何时开张何时打烊，一年中会在哪些时候举行重大节庆，当人们午睡、吃饭或看电视时，他们每天的习惯是什么；最适宜的做法，要么是成为他们中的一份子，采纳这些习惯，要么尽量不去接触或联系当地的民众，直到一个合适的时间出现。中国作为一个国家所代表的空间，以及它作为一个地方所拥有的时间，构成了两条线索，始终贯穿于本书，并且对我而言，似乎超越了文化与习惯这两个问题。它们构成了两个场域，人和事得以在其中实际展开生活这一事务。总而言之，这便是我的主题，即来自异国他乡的我，如何针对本书所涉及的五个地方的时空环境作出应对、适应以及改变。毫无疑问，这是一个十分简单的题材，但它又是如此的至关重要，且又如此频繁地被人所忽略。但是，唯有面对这样的一个题材，我们才能作出描述，揭示出我们如何才能在中国与西方如此大相径庭的两个世界、两种传统、两种文化、乃至两种历史之间，最终架设起一座沟通的桥梁。

（凯瑞。布朗，五城记，中国出版集团，北京，2020）

A lot of people – myself included – speak and write and talk about contemporary Chinese political and intellectual life. One of the particularities of this has always been that getting to hear voices direct, because of the political environment within the People’s Republic, has never been straightforward. Some figures are labelled quickly as being `government friendly.’ Others have to speak in that peculiar register characterised by ambiguity and concealment -`Hanyi’ (含义）as it is called in Chinese. Those who do speak clearly and unambiguously are always aware that if what they say strays from officially permitted boundaries, they are running real risks of punishment – losing their jobs, being detained, and, in the worst cases, sent to prison for many years.

Since 2012, under current leader Xi Jinping, this situation has significantly deteriorated. The subtitle of this excellent and very timely collection of essays by key figures writing now is `public intellectual debate from contemporary China.’ But as the editors Timothy Cheek, David Ownby and Joshua A Fogel make clear in `Voices from the Chinese Century‘ (Columbia University Press, New York 2020)  a series of Party edicts in Xi’s period have made the permissible space for full debate more and more narrow. From the vantage point of 2020, the late 2000s under Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao seem almost liberal – something they certainly didn’t feel at the time.

This collection is a great place to start considering some of the reasons why China has ended up in the situation it is in – and where it might be heading in the future. One of the most compelling pieces is by Liu Qing (刘擎), a professor of political science at East China Normal University, which starts the whole collection. Liu’s defence of what could be called `liberalism with Chinese characteristics’ seems anachronistic today in view of the decidedly illiberal trend Xi seems to have taken. But his acknowledgement of what he calls the `complex historical process’ by which modern China has been produced needs urgent attention. These deep historic structures were not swept away by the 1949 revolution. Issues like the tension between family and the larger society, the self and the context in which it existed and had meaning, and the question of Confucian hierarchy and the new Communist egalitarian order may have been managed by repression in the Maoist era. But as Mao himself lugubriously admitted late in his life, in interviews to Edgar Snow, he was not able to transform much the deep layers of cultural commitment that lie at the heart of what it means, even today, to be Chinese. `Traditional ethical sentiments and their transcendent spirit have not vanished in present day China,’ Liu writes, `but instead exist either overtly or implicitly and manifest powerful influences’ (63).  Strangely the challenge for liberalism is the same as for Communism – how to deal with the anomalies that arise from these deep, and embedded historical structures, which are often an impediment to modernity, but which are so central to Chinese identity. The question is in what ways the two forces, which aim for reform, are able to be combined. Xi’s China implies not much.

Other essays that follow this are less deliberative and calmly argued. Businessman Rong Jian (荣剑), who had been an aspiring academic till the upheaval of 1989,  is much more coruscating in his criticism. `In the past century’, he asks,`has China actually produced its own thought?’ (77)  Chinese liberalism, the kind that Liu referred to above, derived all of its resources from the West, according to Rong. Mao’s revolution, he goes on to claim, was a `revolution bereft of thought’ (87). This sense of intellectual deficit is one that has often appeared in the language of Chinese intellectuals. It is underlined by the fact that the voices in this book are informed about figures like de Tocqueville, Hegel and Adam Smiths in ways it would be hard to see a similar group in the West bothering to know much if anything about Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, or Hu Shi.  Even so, perhaps the counter argument to Rong is that going on so incessantly about the paucity of Chinese intellectual resources just reinforces the very problem it is meant to address. It is not a good thing that the outside world knows so little about key figures in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural life, and as much an admission of their own limitations and complacency as any fault in China itself.  If the West had had more, and perhaps (dare it be said) better Joseph Needhams, maybe our situation today of knowledge imbalances and the antagonism that grows from this would not be so bad.

There are many other attractive parts of this rich, well translated and well presented collection to admire. Excellent and stimulating discussions of Mao Zedong, Kang Youwei, and Confucianism. But two in particular have representative value. The first, by Wang Shaoguang (王绍光), formerly based in Hong Kong, and now mostly in Beijing. Wang has been an influential academic for many years within China. It is easy from the essay rendered here to see why. He takes no hostages, managing, just about, to control a hardcore polemical tone that must owe something to his political training in the Cultural Revolution. American democracy in particular gets a fairly fierce beating. China, instead, is offered as the model for the future – representational, with wise and caring cadres going down to the grassroots to listen to opinions which they then use to inform their decision making, rather than representative democracy from the West which is corrupted by money, vested interest and a multitude of other distortions.  Wang’s description of the mass line, promoted in Xi’s China, is helpful. It gives what I think is the most succinct and lucid outline of what contemporary leaders in the country think the heart of their work is. But my own experience of these `consultations’ which Wang refers to makes me far less idealistic than he. Yes, Chinese leaders at various levels do go down to the grassroots, and arrange learning sessions. Some of these work well. But a lot are stage managed, and it is hard to really see anyone daring to sit in situations like these and raise difficult or contentious issues, without running the risk of pulling opprobrium and  trouble on their head.  Wang’s spirited defence, therefore, is great in theory. In practice, though, it really needs way more justification than the highly combative, albeit spirited one it gets here.

None of this however can possible prepare for the grand finale of the book – Jiang Qing (将庆) and his dialogue with a former female student about the ways in which Confucianism far from being a burden to Chinese women over the millennia is actually their salvation. David Ownby in his short introduction to `Only Confucians Can Make a Place for Modern Women’ can clearly barely conceal his mixture of amusement and contempt at some of the ideas that Jiang comes out with. Jiang himself has been amongst the most fanciful thinkers of modern China – one so extreme that even the government has not bothered much to silence his musings on Confucian democracy (where a third chamber would be composed of descendants of the sage). But Jiang’s declarations of how women need to be secure in their family and home, and how their European and American sisters are burdened by terrible modernist horrors like needing to work and pursue their own careers is not only out of history – at times, it sounds like Jiang is out of his mind! So too is his reference to some figures he calls his `friends’ who then get hilariously indiscreet and harsh criticisms for their lack of moral, Confucian behaviour.

This is a truly excellent collection, and one that introduces some important and little know voices to a wider English speaking audience. There are younger thinkers coming on line. But they operate without even some of the space that these from a slightly older generation have been able to enjoy in their careers till now.  Those that visit China, and have engaged with the place, know how deeply stimulating the atmosphere there is, despite the reputation for being coercive and controlled. This book shows there are no easy answers, and no easy parameters, to understanding the political social and other kinds of problems the country now faces. That must be why it has no conclusion: at the moment, no conclusion is possible to the situation it testifies to and reports.