China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation, by James Kynge

While I was doing work experience at the Daily Express, a friendly journalist gave me an invaluable piece of advice: If you want to grab your audience’s attention, start every feature with an anecdote. (As far as anecdotes go, this is a poor one.)

It’s good advice, and something James Kynge has obviously taken to heart in China Shakes The World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation. Every chapter starts with a lengthy anecdote, as if he was writing a collection of features rather than a single cohesive book.

Nine chapters take us through China’s history from ca. 1975 onwards, through the eyes of its people and those of the surrounding world. Kynge, who has covered China as a journalist since 1985, offers a hands-on experience of a rapidly changing China and the people who are caught up in the middle of it.

Among his most interesting observations is the juxtaposition of the Communist Party’s need for economic growth and its desire for control. The party’s mandate to rule is based in the main on those two items, but stronger economic growth means giving up control, whereas stronger state control means slowing the rampant economic growth China enjoys. So the Communist Party walks a high-strung tightrope, with heavy-handed control in some areas while allowing rampant growth in others.

The third mandate of the Communist Party is the concept of National Humiliation, and this bears some further explanation. In Kynge’s words,

Schoolchildren are still taught that the 109 years prior to the 1949 revolution were characterised by the treachery of a cabal of Western and Western-orientated countries - Russia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States - which attacked the old Chinese empire and seized hundreds of square miles of territory. They forced the government to sign unequal treaties, resorted to gunboat diplomacy, fought two Opium Wars with the aim of peddling drugs, burned imperial palaces, looted priceless treasures and humiliated Chinese people. All of this, in fact, is true.

The Communist government does little to attempt to forgive this history of humiliation; schoolchildren still have to memorize passages of history that describe Japanese as ‘devils’. This, of course, breeds nationalism that both legitimises the government (which was founded on this history of abuse), and creates a fevered response to any further slights. Case in point, the outrage in China over the protests during the Olympic torch relay through Western cities such as London and Paris.

This, Kynge states, is a double edged sword, because while it strengthens the mandate of the Communist Party, it finds itself in danger of losing control at every outburst. Kynge quotes a senior official saying they had no option but to allow several days of violent mobs outside the US and British embassies in 1999, after the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO forces, because they could not risk being themselves called stooges and traitors.

Kynge draws a portrait of a Chinese central government which in many ways is on the precipice. Like a man running ahead of a landslide, they are scrambling to keep up with changes and desperate to keep moving, because to stop is unthinkable. Meanwhile, China is by far the current land of opportunity. It’s the land where a man can, and has, gone from living in a tiny communal space at the back of a bicycle shed, drying his socks over a coal-burning stove, to buying the personal computer division of IBM.

While fascinating, the book is not without faults. Kynge’s lengthy anecdotes are sometimes tedious and could have easily been done without, or shortened to a more reasonable length. But his experience and personal knowledge of the topic shine through, making this an excellent read for anyone attempting to understand the driving forces behind the country’s growth and seemingly limitless expansion.

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