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Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
by James Fallows
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
James Fallows has gone through great lengths to engage with China as a reporter. He first visited in 1986 as part of the delegation to the World Esperanto Congress; this required him and his family to study Esperanto. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he traveled to the country on various reporting trips. As the Olympics began to loom in the summer of 2006, Fallows, a former editor of The U.S. News & World Report, and winner of the National Magazine Award for an article about the Iraq War, decided to move with his wife to China to see the story for himself.
Postcards is a collection of essays adapted from the articles that Fallows wrote for The Atlantic Monthly as its national correspondent during his time in Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese cities from summer 2006 to summer 2008. In every article, Fallows emphasizes the impossibility of describing a country in general, and the difficulties of capturing China in particular. "Every country varies; the challenge of China is that its internal variations are truly enormous." From the Chinese government's botching of international public relations in the months that led up to the Olympics, to Zhang Yue, an air conditioning tycoon who built an impressive but creepy factory town in Hunan province, to the Chinese reality show Win, a more cutthroat version of The Apprentice, Fallows succeeds in illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing modern China.
At the same time, Fallows is charmingly candid about his personal limitations as an observer. He admits, as reporters rarely do, the level of his Mandarin. He explains early on that, though he is trying, his Mandarin is still limited, and he mentions the interviews during which he uses an interpreter. This doesn't seem to be a setback, as Fallows has a remarkable eye for detail and a great sense of what's relevant to an American reader. In an essay titled "China Makes, the World Takes", Fallows discusses South China's manufacturing advantages, and the Westerners who have moved to China to capitalize on the opportunity. Comparing the traders who visit Shenzhen for factory purchasing trips, he writes "The Americans in the group tend to be beefier than the Shanghai-Beijing crowd, and more Midwestern-looking. Some wear company shirts or nylon jackets with their company's logo on the pocket." It's a small detail, but it creates a vivid image of a corner of manufacturing in a certain part of Shenzhen.
As he writes in the introduction, "I suspected before coming to China, and now know for sure, that no one can sensibly try to present the `real story' or the `overall picture' of this country. It is simply too big and too contradictory." In one of the last essays, entitled "After the Earthquake," Fallow wanders around rural Sichuan to explore how policies and reforms from the central government mutate on the local level. He meets a village leader who succeeded in partially shielding his village from the famine of the Great Leap Forward, meditates on relocations after dam construction, and visits a small shrine to local deities, often based on public officials. All of these experiences occur in one corner of rural Sichuan in one week. "But even this limited range," he writes, "illustrates the point I mean most to convey: which is how varied the circumstances of this vast country are."
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Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
by James Fallows
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
James Fallows has gone through great lengths to engage with China as a reporter. He first visited in 1986 as part of the delegation to the World Esperanto Congress; this required him and his family to study Esperanto. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he traveled to the country on various reporting trips. As the Olympics began to loom in the summer of 2006, Fallows, a former editor of The U.S. News & World Report, and winner of the National Magazine Award for an article about the Iraq War, decided to move with his wife to China to see the story for himself.
Postcards is a collection of essays adapted from the articles that Fallows wrote for The Atlantic Monthly as its national correspondent during his time in Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese cities from summer 2006 to summer 2008. In every article, Fallows emphasizes the impossibility of describing a country in general, and the difficulties of capturing China in particular. "Every country varies; the challenge of China is that its internal variations are truly enormous." From the Chinese government's botching of international public relations in the months that led up to the Olympics, to Zhang Yue, an air conditioning tycoon who built an impressive but creepy factory town in Hunan province, to the Chinese reality show Win, a more cutthroat version of The Apprentice, Fallows succeeds in illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing modern China.
At the same time, Fallows is charmingly candid about his personal limitations as an observer. He admits, as reporters rarely do, the level of his Mandarin. He explains early on that, though he is trying, his Mandarin is still limited, and he mentions the interviews during which he uses an interpreter. This doesn't seem to be a setback, as Fallows has a remarkable eye for detail and a great sense of what's relevant to an American reader. In an essay titled "China Makes, the World Takes", Fallows discusses South China's manufacturing advantages, and the Westerners who have moved to China to capitalize on the opportunity. Comparing the traders who visit Shenzhen for factory purchasing trips, he writes "The Americans in the group tend to be beefier than the Shanghai-Beijing crowd, and more Midwestern-looking. Some wear company shirts or nylon jackets with their company's logo on the pocket." It's a small detail, but it creates a vivid image of a corner of manufacturing in a certain part of Shenzhen.
As he writes in the introduction, "I suspected before coming to China, and now know for sure, that no one can sensibly try to present the `real story' or the `overall picture' of this country. It is simply too big and too contradictory." In one of the last essays, entitled "After the Earthquake," Fallow wanders around rural Sichuan to explore how policies and reforms from the central government mutate on the local level. He meets a village leader who succeeded in partially shielding his village from the famine of the Great Leap Forward, meditates on relocations after dam construction, and visits a small shrine to local deities, often based on public officials. All of these experiences occur in one corner of rural Sichuan in one week. "But even this limited range," he writes, "illustrates the point I mean most to convey: which is how varied the circumstances of this vast country are."
--
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
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