An interesting piece from Al Jazeera raising the very pertinent question of what China would look like if Mao and the Communists had lost. Regular readers of this blog will know my personal opinion – that a KMT-led China would have been a better place and looked far more like today’s Taiwan, Japan or South Korea. Chiang would have been less rigid despite a rocky start in the 1950s but would have had more aid and been open to more ideas and been less ideologically rigid.
The KMT was certainly better at dealing with a free press, international relations and organising things like banking and finance. Chiang ran Taiwan as a one-party state for a long time but that doesn’t mean he would have done the same in mainland China – his Taiwan regime was a reaction to the PRC not the perfect model he aspired to.
The KMT system was far from perfect but had better tools to promote democracy, private enterprise and restrain corruption than the secretive and clannish communist party. Anyway, it’s a debate that’ll run and run as one of the great “what ifs” of history. Al Jazeera pulls in a few heavyweight notable quotables to offer their opinions. Click here.
The weather’s changing in Shanghai after the long, hot summer. As ever at the start of October it’s rainy and getting cool. Time then to order some winter clothes and heavy jackets. The ABC Tailor, the tailor for “New China”, is offering ready made suits for $20 and up – just up Nanking Road by the Post Office. These deals can’t last forever – they started in 1928!
Lord Macartney would be most confused. The 60th anniversary of the PRC has brought forth an unprecedented gushing of love for 60 years of Communist Party rule from our good friends in the hyper-capitalist world of globalised free trading. Every foreign company worth its salt has stumped-up for an ad in local or English language media, effectively congratulating the Communist Party of China on clinging onto power for 60 years. As they mostly congratulate them on 60 years of the PRC, we presumably also assume they are expressing their good wishes for such achievements as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as well as letting them do some business for the last 30 years or so.
Here’s that bastion of socialist state power McDonald’s contribution – a free postcard for all customers celebrating 60 years of the PRC:
Of course, ethically-lite corporations like McDonald’s will thank anyone who’ll let them do business (they’d be sending Christmas cards to Kim Jong-il if he’d let them open a branch in Pyongyang). But, thus was it ever, regardless of regime, ruler or system. Here’s Quaker Oats in 1928 wishing the Nationalist Government a happy birthday.
Am I the only person who thinks that travel writing, particularly the American version, has become hopelessly infected with endless concerns about the writer’s safety and their own puritanism. I’m sure it wasn’t always like that – Orwell got drunk in Paris and shot at in Spain and didn’t complain. I recently re-read Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart on their Turkestan trip and they ate what was put in front of them and enjoyed a drop or two. I also reread Hemingway and Gellhorn in China during the war and he drank, whored and gently arsed around splendidly while she never shirked anything (though didn’t like dirty loos much I admit). Even later generations don’t seem to bother too much – Colin Thubron largely just gets on with it and has a tooth out when it needs to go rather than waiting till he finds a qualified American orthodontist or whatever they call them.
But (unlike Graham Greene opposite) a lot travel writing I’m coming across now is so puritanical it’s almost impossible to like the author. The most recent example of this holier than thou school was a two-part trip across Siberia Ian Frazier wrote up for the New Yorker (August 3 and 10/17 editions – cover above). Now I’ve been across Siberia a couple of times, once partly on the train and partly by car and once more on the train. It’s OK. Of course there’s mad Russians and lots of scenery that looks like the scenery hours ago but at least on my trips I wasn’t with Ian Frazier thank God – imagine being stuck for weeks with a cross between a particularly ardent health and safety official and the Plymouth Brethren! Amazing the New Yorker would give over two issues to this sort of self-centred writing.
Frazier goes to great lengths whinging on about the lack of seatbelts, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, women are curious but he assures us he’s married (since when did that make much difference?) and nothing happens – he prefers to read while his Russian companions head of into town for vodka and a party with the girls. All in all his poor Russian companions (who it seems smoked, drank, liked girls and couldn’t be bothered with seatbelts…asnd had to do all the driving it seems) must have been tempted to just shoot him and dump him in a ditch – indeed reading between the lines I get the impression he was a royal pain in the arse to the two Russians he persuaded to tag along. He meets nobody really, apparently nothing more than a glancing conversation with any Siberian (despite claiming to be able to speak some Russian) because the way you would meet people – sharing a smoke, having a drink, at a party rather than reading a book in camp are all off limits to him. The whole thing seems a bit pointless – to travel across the whole of Russia and meet or interact nobody! What was the point?
Is this the future of travel writing? Americans concerned about their own personal safety, tee-totalling their way around the world hating the fact that people still smoke and loudly proclaiming that, no, they did not just eyeball the tall blonde Russian girl who walked past and no, they don’t want to meet or party with anyone and would rather have a read back at camp on their own.
What a world! Pardon me while I retreat back into the 1930s in future posts if all I’m going to get now is overly serious writers concerned about seatbelts.
Some of you older types like me might remember when they used to sell cigarettes in round tins (JPS certainly still were in 1970s Britain). For some reason it seemed a bit classier than a regular pack and schoolkids like me collected the tins to put God knows what in. Classic Shanghai fag makers Nanyang Brothers, who’s building still stands just about over near Yangpu district (some sort of flop house motel and grungy restaurant now), believed in tins it seems, at least for their Golden Dragon brand that linked the modern phenomenon of flying (this was 1928) with smoking. The ad also shows that “Chinglish” is nothing new either – ‘going quality’??
Another in the occasional ‘deviation’ postings which I notice usually seem to plug a book and usually something historically set and either a spy or a crime novel. No difference this time then but I was amazingly impressed by Joseph Kanon’s Alibi, which is a few years old but somehow slipped under my radar (so thanks to a friend for recommending it). A ‘deviation’ posting as it’s nothing to do with China but is a wonderful and atmospheric evocation of post war Venice (1946 to be precise), so atmospheric and evocative you can almost smell the canals (which I know on some days may not be a good thing!).
Often novels that have strong and evocative locations and periods don’t quite match up in the plot department but Kanon’s tale of the subtle, and often not so subtle, ways people in Venice tried to forget their role in the war, collaboration with the Nazis and the extermination of the Jews is well told. Nothing dramatic in a sense, just the old arguement that all that is behind us, best to move on. Not everyone agrees but the story is so subtle in terms of the slights and insults that the nastiness of some of the characters is all the stronger.
But, unsurprisingly, Venice is the star and, lets face it, you’d really have to tell a hell of a story or create an amazing character to upstage Venice. A great read.
The build out of the extra-settlement areas of the Great Western Road area or Huxi (or the Badlands) just beyond the Shanghai settlements was in full force in the 1920s. It was a desirable area and the Asia Realty Company was one of the leading developers. Here they advertise their new residences of a style typical in the Western Roads area and Frenchtown. And very nice they are too and a few have even escaped the rapacious communist bulldozer. Columbia Circle is still pretty intact up on the old Columbia Road (Panyu Road) around the junction with Amherst Avenue (Xinhua Road).
A small note – you can see that the rather annoying tendency to refer to the ground floor in Shanghai as the first floor now is not traditional as these plans include a proper ground floor.
Just a quick plug for David Peace (as if he needs it these days!!). I was a fan of Peace through GB84, The Damn United and the Red Riding Quartet (which I’m told is now a great TV series too) but also like his Tokyo Trilogy, of which the second installment, Occupied City, just seems to have made it to Asia’s bookshops.
Occupied City follows the first Tokyo novel, Tokyo Ground Zero, in being set in a very gritty bombed out just post-war Tokyo and dealt with the serial killer Kodaira Yoshio, who in 1946 murdered several prostitutes. Occupied City details the 1948 Teikoku Bank massacre, in which a man posing as a doctor from the occupying forces pretended to administer a dysentery vaccine to 16 bank employees, and instead poisoned them with cyanide, killing 12 instantly. Hirasawa Sadamichi was convicted of the killings but many in Japan believe he was innocent (he died on death row of natural causes in 1987). Peace does the whole relentless tension thing brilliantly as he did in the excellent Red Riding Quartet (set in Yorkshire, where he comes from, in the 1970s).
I’ll review Occupied City in some more detail in the future I hope but it’s available now. Crime faction (I know, I hate the term too) doesn’t come better than this.
An interesting piece from Al Jazeera raising the very pertinent question of what China would look like if Mao and the Communists had lost. Regular readers of this blog will know my personal opinion – that a KMT-led China would have been a better place and looked far more like today’s Taiwan, Japan or South Korea. Chiang would have been less rigid despite a rocky start in the 1950s but would have had more aid and been open to more ideas and been less ideologically rigid.
Am I the only person who thinks that travel writing, particularly the American version, has become hopelessly infected with endless concerns about the writer’s safety and their own puritanism. I’m sure it wasn’t always like that – Orwell got drunk in Paris and shot at in Spain and didn’t complain. I recently re-read Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart on their Turkestan trip and they ate what was put in front of them and enjoyed a drop or two. I also reread Hemingway and Gellhorn in China during the war and he drank, whored and gently arsed around splendidly while she never shirked anything (though didn’t like dirty loos much I admit). Even later generations don’t seem to bother too much – Colin Thubron largely just gets on with it and has a tooth out when it needs to go rather than waiting till he finds a qualified American orthodontist or whatever they call them.
But (unlike Graham Greene opposite) a lot travel writing I’m coming across now is so puritanical it’s almost impossible to like the author. The most recent example of this holier than thou school was a two-part trip across Siberia Ian Frazier wrote up for the New Yorker (August 3 and 10/17 editions – cover above). Now I’ve been across Siberia a couple of times, once partly on the train and partly by car and once more on the train. It’s OK. Of course there’s mad Russians and lots of scenery that looks like the scenery hours ago but at least on my trips I wasn’t with Ian Frazier thank God – imagine being stuck for weeks with a cross between a particularly ardent health and safety official and the Plymouth Brethren! Amazing the New Yorker would give over two issues to this sort of self-centred writing.
Frazier goes to great lengths whinging on about the lack of seatbelts, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, women are curious but he assures us he’s married (since when did that make much difference?) and nothing happens – he prefers to read while his Russian companions head of into town for vodka and a party with the girls. All in all his poor Russian companions (who it seems smoked, drank, liked girls and couldn’t be bothered with seatbelts…asnd had to do all the driving it seems) must have been tempted to just shoot him and dump him in a ditch – indeed reading between the lines I get the impression he was a royal pain in the arse to the two Russians he persuaded to tag along. He meets nobody really, apparently nothing more than a glancing conversation with any Siberian (despite claiming to be able to speak some Russian) because the way you would meet people – sharing a smoke, having a drink, at a party rather than reading a book in camp are all off limits to him. The whole thing seems a bit pointless – to travel across the whole of Russia and meet or interact nobody! What was the point?
Another in the occasional ‘deviation’ postings which I notice usually seem to plug a book and usually something historically set and either a spy or a crime novel. No difference this time then but I was amazingly impressed by Joseph Kanon’s 
Occupied City follows the first Tokyo novel,