Abstract
This is not your conventional yearbook. It is a more lively tale of China in short stories. The parent of the Yearbook is the highly engaged website of the Australian National University’s Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW), The China Story (http://www.thechinastory.org/). This website is unique, certainly in the Western world. It seeks to reflect and understand the Sinic world for the English-speaking world, from the inside, presenting the forces, personalities and ideas at work in China when attempting to understand any major aspect of its socio-political or cultural reality. Scholarly in conception and drive, it also intends to have public policy relevance and value for the engaged public. Hence, the website has, for example, a section titled ‘Thinking China’, which profiles public intellectuals in the Sinophone world who are involved with ideas, debates and concerns about China’s present and future, otherwise unknown to the non-Chinese-speaking world. But there is a lot more, from official China to elegant essays on history or culture, contemporary speeches and debates, a section called ‘The Australia-China Story’, a vast and growing archive of Chinese material maintained jointly by the CIW and its Chinese partner Danwei, and a delightful and insightful section re-surfacing foreigners’ essays and observations on China from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Yearbook itself, authored by 20 Sinologist members or associates of the CIW, reprises prominent strands from The China Story from late 2012 to August 2013, with reflective and analytical essays, ‘Forums’ around particular themes, Information Windows (in pdf version) which explain current jargon or provide summary briefings, for example, on the Diaoyü/Senakaku Islands dispute, as well as presents a list of people and personalities, a chronology and a link to the CIW–Danwei archive.
The opening essay, ‘Engineering Chinese Civilisation’, by the CIW’s Director Professor Geremie Barmé, illustrates nicely the Centre’s approach. The essay explains what is essentially a basic political idea of the current Chinese leadership concerning civil, civilising and civilised expressed in the term wenming (
) and gives the reader the contextual and historical story of where this is coming from and what it means for contemporary Chinese politics. It would be at home in a conventional academic journal, but you could give it to a politician struggling to comprehend what the Chinese mean by their sometimes difficult to unpackage political terminology, and at the end of it she/he could actually know something about Chinese politics and the way Chinese leaders think and why they think that way. Barmé is the most accomplished and graceful prose stylist of the contributors (and he has two others pieces besides his opening essay). But there is comparable accessibility and lucidity in the other essays, which cover foreign policy, the economy, rising inequality, corruption, gender, the rule of law, the internet, politics and language, and a compelling and unsettling piece on Chinese cities by urban geographer Carolyn Cartier.
In between, the short surveys, reflections, analyses, information windows and the many photos in the pdf version round out the China Story of that year, in the way any well-told story is enriched by anecdote and illustration. And irresistible are the pieces extracted from China’s print and online media and research institutes which proclaim the ‘top ten’ this, that or the other. As the Yearbook’s editors point out, Chinese political and ideological campaigns have often been packaged into mnemonics or numerical slogans. But now it is not just political and ideological campaigns. The Yearbook’s extracts include: The Top Ten Reasons for Falling from Power, The Top Ten Social Issues, The Top Ten Intellectual Trends, Party Policies from One to Ten, The Top 20 People, The Most Horrid People of 2012, The Ten Biggest Sex and Gender Stories, The Top Ten Laws and Regulations of 2012, The Top Ten Protestors, The Top Ten Words and Phrases, The Top Ten Science and Technology News Events, The Top Most Popular Microbloggers, Top Internet Memes and The Top Ten Films in China—all or most with a straight face, and many with annotations and explanations. Some come across as very funny. Every one helps elucidate part of the Story.
Then you get an explicatory essay on the Chinese view of the world order under the concept of ‘all under Heaven’ (
) by former diplomat Richard Rigby, or translated excerpts from The Ugly Chinaman (
) by the late Taiwan writer Bo Yang, or clusters of short articles under such headings as ‘Tiny Times for Women’, ‘Land, Law and Protest’ or ‘Borderlands and Cutting Edges’. These vignettes, indeed the whole Yearbook, give the reader some sense of how it feels to be in China and be Chinese, what Chinese are actually thinking about, day to day, and what is important to them.
In company with colleagues in Australia and around the world, I am often frustrated by the difficulty of getting the political classes in our countries, and the ‘engaged public’ as the CIW calls them, to actually read about China, and more, read themselves into an informed state of that country. You could do much worse than sit them down in front of this Yearbook. And I would venture to guess that after a first taste, they might want to become serious about it.