China surges on with new power

Kelly Lemieux, Special to the News

Published June 9, 2006 at midnight

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While the War on Terror and its focus on the Islamic world has been the primary foreign policy concern in Washington for several years, there's another Asian power that will eventually supercede Islam's hold on the American imagination.

That power is the rising economic and military tiger that is China, once colonized by European powers and invaded by a fascist mid-20th-century Japan.

Having recovered from foreign incursions and influence due to a communist revolution in 1949, China now stands as America's greatest competitor on the global stage, its military and economic might seemingly unstoppable with the world's largest, billion-plus population to back it up.

Despite China's new prominence, many Americans know little about the country, which is why Peter Hessler's second book on the subject, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, is both timely and necessary.

His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, introduced China to stateside readers, but Oracle Bones attempts to cover more territory and reveal the conflicted soul of the nation, which is now working to chart its destiny between its ancient history and the modern commercial world.

Hessler, the Beijing bureau chief for The New Yorker and a nine-year resident of China, started out as a Peace Corps worker teaching English until he joined the foreign journalism community and began sending copy back to America on current events and the political situation of the world's only remaining communist power.

Oracle Bones starts with China's past in the Henan province. "The Shang," Hessler writes of an ancient dynastic period, "produced the earliest known writing in East Asia, inscribed into bones and shells - the oracle bones, as they are called in the West. If one defines history as written records, this part of Henan is where it all began for China."

Hessler discusses historian and writer Chen Mengjia, who studied oracle bones and wrote a monograph on their provenance and meaning. His work took place at the time of China's Cultural Revolution (around the same time as America's social upheavals in the '60s).

During this revolution, the government enacted a totalitarian purge of both the nation's outside influences and a past recently dominated by foreign intervention and humiliating subjugation. Chen's exposure to western ideas of archeology and higher learning was seen as a possible threat to the Communist Party's strict new codes, as was his exploration of China's past.

He was singled out by China's security services as a possible subversive; his name was removed from his published material, and he committed suicide, unable to withstand the pariah status he endured under the Communist Party's continuous surveillance and harassment.

China's march to the future is marked with similar instances of governmental propaganda, manipulation and intrusion. Hessler writes about a significant event that took place much later: In 1999, NATO/American forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia during air attacks designed to relieve the "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. Prior to this, a London newspaper had quoted three NATO officers accusing the Chinese of using the embassy as cover to provide intelligence to the Serbians, thus instigating the attack.

The author was in the streets as news of the bombing was filtered to the Chinese population by the party's propaganda services.

"I jogged along the side of the street," he relates, "moving past uneven lines of protestors. There must have been thousands; they held signs and Chinese flags, and after chanting the slogan 'Down With American Imperialism!' they sang the national anthem."

Hessler feared for his safety during the protests, meeting angry protestors as they demonstrated outside American fast-food franchises.

Such nationalist sentiments are common in China, further exhibited during China's bid to host the Olympic Games. While it succeeded in securing the 2008 summer games, an earlier bid was rejected by the International Olympic Committee, which prompted the state newspaper, the China Daily, to comment in an editorial that the decision was linked to the West's history of "brutal colonialist aggression and exploitation."

Hessler gets beneath the skin of such hyperbole to unveil the character of the Chinese as only an American can. Oracle Bones is a long book, beautifully delivered with a relaxed cadence that picks up the nuances of the individuals discussed.

One of the best characters is Polat, a Uigher Turk from the semi-autonomous Islamic region of Xinjiang in the far west of China, an area the central government considers a hotbed of separatist anxiety, like Taiwan and Tibet.

Polat is a money-changer and trader who immigrates illegally to the U.S. Hessler visits him, both in China and the U.S., where he meets up with him in Washington, D.C., just before 9/11. Polat tells the author his car had been broken into and that he feared telling the police because of his status as an illegal immigrant and as a Muslim.

While Oracle Bones is more a travelogue than a political commentary, it's an informative read for those interested in a nation bound to occupy more time on our 24-hour news channels as the 21st century progresses.

Kelly Lemieux is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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