The China Record is the middle part of what author Fei-Ling Wang calls a planned trilogy. The previous volume, The China Order, came out in 2017, and clearly supplied the key foundation for much of the argument of this subsequent work. There, Wang argued about a tradition of Qin-Han power reaching back over 2000 years in Chinese history, creating a highly autocratic, centralized state structure with unique cultural and political characteristics. The argument of this earlier book is given in brief, summary form in The China Record, being alluded to throughout the argument, presumably on the assumption that either readers will be familiar with the earlier book, or at least have an instinctive understanding of (and agreement with) this power dynamic that Wang so often alludes to.
The China Record stands pretty much as its title suggests. It is a report card, of sorts, looking at four key areas: political governance, economic record, social life, and spirit and ecology (with the subheading “Culture, Ethics and the Environment”). At the very start of the book, in a brief introduction, Wang presents what he labels his methodology and epistemology. From what appears here, that equates largely to committing to a data-led and statistical approach to understanding China since 1949, with the epistemological element being a very clear, very early announcement of deep scepticism towards whatever data the Chinese government produces and whatever achievements it trumpets.
With that out of the way, Wang embarks on his assessment. It is a rollercoaster ride. He has a fiery polemical style and a story where nuance and impartiality are expendable. In this book, the Chinese Communist Party rules everything (p. 57), it is predatory, controlling and extractive (p. 88), harking back to the legalist absolutism of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). The elite of the Party today are “authoritarian, hypocritical and self-indulgent” (p. 66). Wang coins the nifty phrase that they enjoy “world class luxury with world class inequality” (p. 66). Under this Party, China has become the “world's dumpster” (p. 115), where garbage from the outside world is sent for reprocessing (though I believe that has now largely stopped). The Party has one aim: to remain in power forever (p. 27), its style of rule a “mandate or curse” but one which is characterized by underperformance and disaster (p. 34). It governs with (another nifty phrase) “guns and propaganda” (p. 104), allowing the state to steal from people in order to “beautify the regime” (p. 137). Its officials are prone to crime and abuse.
In Wang's view, the rot set in early, almost the moment the regime was created. He clearly subscribes to the idea that before 1949 China contained the seeds of political reform and might have developed a more constitutional mode of governance. Strangely for someone who declares their commitment to empiricism and hard data, Wang himself utilises several pages of “what ifs” where he ponders what might have happened had what he clearly regards as the disaster of Communist rule been avoided.
That it has been a disaster is spelled out initially through a sledgehammer being taken to Mao Zedong. A leader who led a regime which “was responsible for killing more of its own people than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined.” Mao's Party's “bloodbaths by guns and famines are clearly among, if not exceeding, the worst mass murders and genocides in human history” (pp. 18–19). The Mao period was one of “calamity, filled with misery, regression, disasters and crises” (p. 85), which can be judged now as “objectively disastrous” (p. 51). And while Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao get briefer and slightly kinder treatment, current Party leader Xi Jinping is dismissed as “over-confident with an inferiority complex” (p. 34). He is a sort of Mao 2.
Wang concedes that the economic development of the country in recent decades has been impressive and that life for most Chinese has improved. But after a few paragraphs of this, the remorseless deconstruction of the mirage of Chinese success under the current government continues. Its system is one of “raw capitalism,” where the Party controls the fiscal system and the key parts of the economy solely for its own gain. Lamentable tales about recent incarcerations of businesspeople and others, with their assets all seized, is rendered as proof about the rottenness of the whole system. The fiscal system is characterized, Wang argues, by “chronic irrationality and irresponsibility” (p. 118). The mining sector is “blood soaked” (p. 141). Today, after years of exploitation and Party abuse, people are “watched, worried, wrathful” (p. 169), their leaders perverse and greedy (p. 183).
This is a book where almost a third of its 400-plus pages are taken up with references and the bibliography. Wang's sources for a good deal of his argument are Party documents, though these have seemingly been useful in order to furnish him with the data to deploy at various stages of his argument. For those looking for a book of great simplicity in its general argument, where everything is presented in stark black and white terms, then this should suit their purposes. But for the purposes of furnishing a deeper appreciation of the complexities and contradictions of the country's development in the last seven decades, it is hard to see what contribution this makes. It represents a particular kind of polemical condemnation where China's leaders and government are guilty of everything that can be levelled at them and the regime evil. While popular today, it is hard to see this as a reflection of the empirical reality that Wang ostensibly celebrates and says his work is based on at the start of this book. Rather, it seems as highly politicized as it claims is the target it attacks. If this were to be the prosecution delivered in some imaginary court, China's government would probably have a good case to ask for a retrial.
