Cup of Cha
This is China

Newsweek has a double issue out all about China in 2008. Most fascinating of the bunch is definitely Melinda Liu’s piece about covering China on and off since 1979. She cloaks it as the story of her brother who was born and raised in China (she is from the US), but it is really more about her living through the stunning events of the last 30 years. She started running the Newsweek Beijing bureau in 1980, at a time when, aside from restored diplomatic relations, China was not necessarily high on Americans’ list of newsworthy countries.

As you can imagine she was working in pretty abysmal conditions in the beginning:

Back in 1980, I thought I’d plunged headlong into the journalistic Dark Ages. My office was a bat-infested eighth-floor room at the Qianmen Hotel. Whenever I finished composing a new story on the typewriter, I hopped on a bicycle and pedaled like mad to the city’s public Telegraph Building several miles away. There I retyped the copy on an antiquated telex machine before carrying the perforated paper tape across the cavernous room to a distant counter and pleading with the clerk (a state employee, of course) to do his job and send it out. To make sure it got done, I usually waited until the transmission ended. Sometimes I nodded off on a bench, listening to the chugging of the machine as it echoed through the freezing, lugubrious hall. The process took hours—and that doesn’t count reporting time.

But in the end she got the last laugh. What more amazing place is there to have covered over the last three decades than China? Even when (particularly when?) the world’s focus was on Japan and the Soviet Union, stunning changes were taking place under Liu’s watchful gaze. She chronicles reforms, 1989, the Hong Kong turnover, and the Olympics.

On of the refreshing aspects of the article is its length. The magazine has long suffered from trying to appeal to short attention-spanners, and thus has frequently published articles with great ideas, and not bothered to expand on them. Take for example another piece from the same issue about Hu Jintao’s heir apparent Xi Jinping. What could be more interesting than understanding about the man who will likely lead China for ten years? Even more so given the secrecy around China’s selection process. However, Newsweek only thought it appropriate to devote eight paragraphs to the man. Or the article on GM reviving the electric car. The devote two full pages in the hard copy, but 75% of it is a giant picture.

This makes Liu’s writing all the more remarkable. She has been a witness to some of the most amazing events since Deng took over, and is a tremendous expert on China, while many reporters proclaim to be while having only the most basic grasp of the country. Her experience in 1989, and analysis, are both amazing, and amazingly prescient:

A lot of people think Tiananmen was all about democracy. They’re wrong. Economics also had a big role. After a decade of impressive but halting economic reforms, inflation was running wild, and although farmers were making money for once, city dwellers were lagging—especially on university campuses, where labs and classrooms were as decrepit as the housing. Still, idealism was a driving force…

I saw things I could scarcely have imagined possible. Fifty soldiers holding Kalashnikovs sat on the ground, listening intently as students with megaphones lectured them about democracy and fed them Popsicles. In another neighborhood a soldier emerged from his blocked convoy to shout: “We’re soldiers of the people! We would never suppress you!” as the crowd roared its appreciation.

Her analysis about the motivation behind the demonstrations make me wonder if one couldn’t argue that the main objectives of the students have not in fact been met. If democracy was primarily a tool for economic reform and upward mobility, has that dream not been at least partially realized? Sure true freedom of the press and human rights were also supposed to be a consideration, but crushing the uprising surely led to the remarkable reforms–economic at least- of the last 20 years. Just a little food for thought.

Other interesting articles from the issue are:

• Fareed Zakaria’s The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower
• Mike Bloomberg’s A Race We Can All Win
• the afforementioned Xi Jinping article

Overall a very interesting issue. Now if only Newsweek would let its talented reporters write longer articles, maybe it would be able to become a serious magazine once again.

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Tags: 1989, Newsweek, xi jinping
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