"James Fallows knows there are countless Chinas. He is refreshingly aware that one’s interpretations of this vast and elusive country will always change according to the angle of one’s vision and the flash of time one is observing. Over the years, in his writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Fallows has built a reputation as a shrewd observer of human foibles and political quagmires. He is also gifted with a disarming tenacity: he first obtained permission to enter China in the mid-1980s, when visas were still hard to secure, by learning Esperanto, together with his wife and children, so they could participate in the world Esperanto conference in Beijing. At the same time, Fallows has the eye for detail of an experienced journalist, capturing, for example, the spirit of China in late 2006 by noting that when he and his wife went to the local Shanghai Pizza Hut, they were turned away because they hadn’t made reservations.
Yet Fallows remains cautious about exaggerating his own powers as an observer. He tells us frankly that he has never managed to become fluent in Chinese, despite several years of determined effort, and that he tends to rely on interpreters during his interviews and to draw on his previous studies of Japanese to help him read Chinese posters and newspaper headlines. By using the word “postcards” for the title of this lively collection of a dozen reports written between the summers of 2006 and 2008 (11 of which were published in The Atlantic), he seems to be alerting readers to expect vignettes rather than extended essays. But readers shouldn’t be put off by the word, because Fallows does manage to give us panoramic views of China that are both absorbing and illuminating. If these reports are “postcards,” it is only in the Chinese sense — the three characters commonly used to translate “postcard” (ming xin pian) literally mean something more like “exposed letter card” or “open letter.” That may not quite be an exposé, but it’s certainly more than a quick note.
Yet Fallows remains cautious about exaggerating his own powers as an observer. He tells us frankly that he has never managed to become fluent in Chinese, despite several years of determined effort, and that he tends to rely on interpreters during his interviews and to draw on his previous studies of Japanese to help him read Chinese posters and newspaper headlines. By using the word “postcards” for the title of this lively collection of a dozen reports written between the summers of 2006 and 2008 (11 of which were published in The Atlantic), he seems to be alerting readers to expect vignettes rather than extended essays. But readers shouldn’t be put off by the word, because Fallows does manage to give us panoramic views of China that are both absorbing and illuminating. If these reports are “postcards,” it is only in the Chinese sense — the three characters commonly used to translate “postcard” (ming xin pian) literally mean something more like “exposed letter card” or “open letter.” That may not quite be an exposé, but it’s certainly more than a quick note.
Over the past few years, there has been a major expansion of reporting from China by Western journalists. Some have chosen to focus on the interlocking lives of specific groups of Chinese, like the students from a local school in Fuling, Sichuan, poignantly brought to life in Peter Hessler’s “River Town,” or the young women migrant workers in a factory near Hong Kong unforgettably depicted in Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls.” Fallows doesn’t seek to capture that level of group detail. Instead he chooses a wider canvas, aiming to show us how swiftly China remakes itself, how multifaceted the impact of modern technological and financial change can be. Each of his “postcards” is situational, linking lifestyle to circumstance. Thus he shows us the grandiose realm of an air-conditioning mogul in the inland city of Changsha, the eager yearnings of contestants in reality game shows and the world of China’s giant electronics factories, with their dormitories, their dining halls and the logistical wizards who integrate all the component parts. He explores the giant new gambling casinos of Macao, already surpassing those of Las Vegas in luxury and business volume, and presents the economic rationales for — and the domestic costs of — China’s immense investment in American financial markets. He describes the Chinese government’s erratic and ultimately ineffective attempts at Internet control.
In other essays, Fallows investigates the industrial muscle of the cement and coal industries (and those scientists trying to curb the waste and damage these industries have caused) as well as attempts to apply private philanthropy to bring some of the poverty-mired schools in China’s far west into the electronic era. And he elaborates on the overlapping crises — from blizzards to earthquakes — that gave such a distinctive sense of trauma to China’s 2008 Olympic year.
The difficulty with such ambitious and highly topical reporting is that however carefully the observer tries to catch something permanent that might underlie the fleeting moment, the world is always changing before his readers’ eyes. It’s unavoidable that Fallows’s book, germane to the needs of the moment though the original essays were, is doomed by chronology and structure to be unpredictably behind the times: post-earthquake but pre-Olympic, post-Internet-firewall yet pre-Obama.
Nothing in “Postcards From Tomorrow Square” could have seemed more logical than the list of the greatest and most confident players in the global gambling game in Macao as described by Fallows in September 2007: “So which side will prevail in the battle for Macao? The shady system that has been the backbone of its economy, and that local companies still rely on? Or the international standards that the Nevada Gaming Commission and the shareholders of the world are forcing on the likes of Wynn, Adelson, and MGM Mirage?” From the vantage point of 2007, compiling a list of the effective long-range and international guarantors of honesty and prosperity at those same Macao casinos would have seemed a no-brainer: the big combines that came to mind ranged from “Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch to Deutsche Bank and Citibank.” Now such a list has other echoes.
What then is of enduring interest in Fallows’s observations about China? First, he has created portraits that illuminate the fragility and hustle of the Chinese pattern of growth, its constantly shifting boundaries, reminding us that nothing of this current growth should be seen as permanent. Fallows rightly emphasizes the deeply rooted poverty and the accompanying perils and opportunities that are present in China’s bypassed far-western regions. He shows us — for China’s economic life as a whole, and in response to global patterns — that China’s strength is not just that it is cheap but that it is fast. He shows us how unclear China’s goals are, how opaque its political system remains, how messy and ineffective and arbitrary its social controls can be. At the same time, he shows the remarkable inventiveness and energy that China’s entrepreneurs can bring to global competition. Perhaps most important to Fallows (and to us), he shows that the worst thing the United States can do is to cut itself off from China’s skills and opportunities.
For Fallows, the effort that the United States should (and must) make is to open itself to the Chinese, to develop the areas where mutual cooperation is feasible and valuable, to respect China’s brainpower and do everything possible to recreate the United States in Chinese minds as a focus for research and a potential source of fruitful collaboration. The venues for this collaboration range from basic agriculture to banking, from global warming and the conservation of natural resources to the reconfiguring of Chinese views of their own future. If China has taught him one key thing, Fallows suggests, it’s that a meeting of the minds from both societies is essential to the well-being of all."
POSTCARDS FROM TOMORROW SQUARE
Reports From China
By James Fallows
262 pp. Vintage Books. Paper, $14.95
