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FiveBooks Interviews
Editor of the website China Dialogue, Isabel Hilton says the environmental disaster in China is dramatic. Many years ago she walked across a wooden bridge at Lo Wu to leave China, and all around were paddy fields. Now there are large cities and smog – the rivers really do run black. She chooses five books on the ecological catastrophe of China’s industrialisation, its Communist history and its fragile efforts to repair the damage.
LSE’s Kent Deng says there are no grounds for Eurocentricism in explaining the world history of economic growth. Intensive growth of the modern type – ie, growth with better technology and high per capita income – was first recorded in China under the Sung (Song) Period of the 10th to 13th centuries. Then there was a similar growth in Tokugawa Japan of the 17th to 19th centuries. These were the forerunners of the British Industrial Revolution.
Xinran is a Chinese writer, broadcaster and founder of The Mother’s Bridge of Love, an organisation reaching out to adopted Chinese children all over the world. She chooses five books on Chinese history and culture and says the birth of a donkey is more likely to be celebrated in rural China than that of a baby girl. Read this interview in English or Read this interview in Chinese.
从《中国的好女人们》(The Good Women of China)、《天葬》(Sky Burial)、《见证中国》到即将出版的《中国母亲》(Chinese Mother，暂译)，薛欣然深入中国乡野，记录下那些被忽视的社会底层族群的故事，她说：”我要帮他们在历史里留下声音！”
Richard McGregor reported from Asia for 20 years - he describes the absolute horror at the destruction of Maoist times and says that the atmosphere of fear and suspicion makes China a great place to set detective fiction. He is the author of The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, which was published earlier this month by HarperCollins.
Harvard China expert and scholar, Professor Roderick MacFarquhar says the Chinese are always accusing the Japanese of not coming to terms with what they did in World War II but the Chinese themselves have not come to terms with the Cultural Revolution. The violence is not just to be put at the door of Chairman Mao, though he fired the starter’s gun; it’s to be put at the door of individual Chinese who were incredibly cruel, in many cases, to other individual Chinese. There is this great big lack of memory which they need to come to terms with.
Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, several acclaimed novels, and a memoir. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-2010. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature which is published internationally as The Literature of Australia. ‘You get this weird thing in Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia.’
Harry Wu was a 21-year-old student in Chairman Mao’s China. He was arrested as a ‘rightist counter-revolutionary’ and sentenced to life in a labour camp or laogai. It was only after Chairman Mao’s death 19 years later that Harry was released in 1979. He fled to the United States to start a new life. But he never forgot the horrors he endured and has dedicated much of his life to a campaign for greater recognition of the millions of Chinese people who suffered and died in the laogai. He claims that even today forced labour is still very much a part of the Chinese economic boom.
Bertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist living in Thailand. He has reported on Burma since the early 1980s. Bertil has written ten books and numerous articles on Asian current affairs and organised crime. Although blacklisted by the Burmese Junta in 1989, he remains one of the best-informed observers and sharpest critics on Burmese politics. Bertil tells the Browser which books to pick about Burma for a good introduction to an ethnically diverse country.
The recent unrest in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China was not unprecedented. During the 1990s there were demonstrations and riots - attacks on police stations, prisons and army bases and on Uyghurs who were deemed to be collaborators with the Chinese authorities. Severely repressive policies ended this period of turbulence in 1997 but did not address any of the underlying problems in the region. And yet resurgent nationalist violence has taken many by surprise. Michael Dillon, currently visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and author of Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Far Northwest, suggests some background reading.