The bamboo curtain

This inside-out account of an Indian in China is an important contribution in humanising China and making it more accessible for Indian readers, writes Venkatesan Vembu

Smoke And Mirrors:  An Experience Of China
Pallavi Aiyar
Fourth Estate/
HarperCollins
282 pages
Rs395

Seen from afar, China evokes a curious mix of schizoid, hype-induced emotions: on the one hand, there’s sneaking admiration of its undisputed economic rise, and its unparalleled success in pulling some 300 million of its citizens out of abject poverty in three dizzying decades. On the other, China’s rise triggers unbridled fears that its low-cost manufacturing prowess will steal jobs the world over (and poison the planet, while it’s at it). And for rent-a-cause bleeding-heart liberals, there’s enough about China to inspire moral outrage in the extreme, from its enforced ‘one-child policy’ to human rights abuses in Tibet to its support for authoritarian dictatorships everywhere to, well, the godless worship of money it’s unleashed in its dirty, unwashed masses...

In India, too, China-watching has in recent years become something of a national obsession. Much like a puny man feeling his biceps thrice a day to check if he’s become muscle-bound like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the pin-up poster pasted on his mirror, Indians have taken to comparing themselves with the Chinese on every little aspect of their economy and civil society. Even a discussion of Mumbai’s colonial-era plumbing problems is considered incomplete without a comparison with Shanghai’s civic amenities, so to speak.

Newspaper narratives abound about the ridiculous ease with which China can build entire cities in the time-frame that it takes a file to move on creaky, bribe-greased tracks from Point A to Point B in India’s sarkari labyrinths. Alternatively, alarmist wails go out every time a Chinese military posse makes “incursions” across the shadow lines that divide our two countries.  

Yet, for all the newspaper space expended in such swinging-between-extremes reportage, there have been few honest attempts at helping Indian readers get a real, lived-in experience of China or at portraying the human face of the country and its people, which looks beyond the superlatives. Vikram Seth did it admirably in Heaven Lake, an account of his travels through Xinjiang and Tibet in the 1970s, but today’s China bears few resemblances to the China in his narrative. 

One reason for this vacuum is the high entry barriers into China: even given recent Olympics-inspired efforts at getting Chinese people to gain fluency in foreign tongues, it’s practically impossible for a non-Chinese speaker to survive in China. Then there are the cultural dissimilarities, over everything from food to political frameworks to the influence of religious faith in everyday lives.

It is this vacuum that Pallavi Aiyar’s book fills. Aiyar travelled to China in 2002 to teach journalism at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, but the real underlying reasons for her passage were rather more personal. She spoke no Chinese then, but after a few frustrating — and extremely comical — attempts at communicating with the locals, resolved to acquire a fluency in the language. That decision opened up not just new employment opportunities for her — she went on to become the China correspondent for at least two Indian newspapers — but also the many-layered, splendorous world of Chinese culture and the chance to experience China as an ‘insider’, even living in one of Beijing’s vanishing hutongs (courtyard houses).

It is this inside-out Indian-in-China perspective that distinguishes Aiyar’s observations of China and India from other eye-in-the-sky accounts of the two countries. From within that hutong, and during her extensive travels across China over the next six years, when Sino-Indian political and trade relations took off, Aiyar looks dispassionately at every aspect of Chinese society. And “always problematising”, as her philosophy lecturer at St Stephen’s had encouraged her to, she goes on to fuse her grassroots-level observations, recalled with endearing vividness and through amusing anecdotes, with the larger theme of China’s rise, seeing things through “big Indian eyes”. And although on occasion she confesses to a certain moral ambivalence while standing in judgment on China’s admittedly poor record in permitting civil liberties and expressions of cultural plurality, her conclusions in the end are intellectually honest. 

For two ancient civilisations whose relations can be traced to pre-Buddhist times, China and India have in more recent times become somewhat estranged neighbours. Which is something of a pity; each has important lessons to learn from the other’s recent politico-socio-economic history. They are, as Aiyar says, mirror images of each other, each reflecting the other’s failures and achievements.

Aiyar’s book is a bridge across these two cultures and civilisations, and an important contribution in humanising China and making it more accessible for Indian readers fed on — and presumably fed up of - the daily dose of hyperbole and superlatives that passes for China-watching.
venky@dnaindia.net