China Underground- Everyone’s Wasted!
China's Tawdry Underbelly
No country in the world conjures up the image of 'the masses' quite like China. News stories about China invariably contain stock footage of thousands of black-haired men and women walking on crowded city streets, as if the population were a billion-strong army marching lockstep under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party.
Foreigner conversation overheard in China reinforces this monolithic stereotype. People are fond of referring to the Chinese when making sweeping characterizations. These include gems like 'The Chinese don't listen' and 'The Chinese don't build things right'. Some of these characterizations are positive, but for the most part the Chinese exist as a large, homogeneous bloc in the eyes of most outsiders.
Zachary Mexico's book, China Underground, attempts to undermine these stereotypes by portraying fifteen-odd Chinese individuals whose lives defy convention in one way or another. These individuals include the muckraking journalist, the Uighur guitar god, the slacker in Dali, the precocious young prostitute, and several others- each in one way or another exemplifying the complexities of modern Chinese life.
These vignettes, when considered together, paint an interesting picture of the Chinese underbelly. One of Mexico's strengths is his ability to elicit candid assessments from his subjects, several of whom are initially reluctant to meet with a foreign writer.
Mexico's writing style won't win any awards, but his prose reads smoothly, if the speed in which I finished the book is any indication. He could have used a better editor, though. Mexico's assertion that the China-Vietnam skirmish in 1979 resulted from the Sino-Soviet split- an event that occurred 19 years earlier- goes against much of the scholarship I've read on the subject.
In addition, Mexico explains who the Uighur people are- several dozen pages after devoting an entire chapter to a Uighur guitarist living in Shanghai. These chapters were clearly written separately and then welded together at the end. I would have appreciated a more seamless transition between them.
China Underground also seems to focus on the type of Chinese people Western people like to imagine comprise the whole country. A clear example of this phenomenon is the overachieving student at Qinghua University. The student, whom Mexico describes as a meek girl, speaks at length over how much superior American tertiary education is to its Chinese counterpart
His other subjects likewise seem designed to elicit great sympathy from a Western audience. There's the journalist who agitates against state control of the media, the gay man stymied by China's conservative sexual mores, the restless minority angered by the government's treatment of his people.
I've no doubt that these people exist; however, they seem to reinforce rather than challenge Western stereotypes about China, as if to say that the only 'underground' that exists in the country is pro-Western, anti Party.
If anything, there are a number of so-called 'underground' people who would also have made interesting subject matter in Mexico's book. How about the large numbers of fenqing, the ultra-nationalistic young Chinese who dominate political chat rooms? Their place in Chinese culture may not warm the hearts of idealistic Western observers, but they represent a fairly significant chunk of the population. There are other figures, too, including the increasingly vocal left in China that has sounded calls for a return to a more socialistic value system.
Instead, Mexico prefers to focus on the more tawdry side of Chinese life; a great deal of his subjects seem to be carousing, drug-addicted bohemians. These tales are entertaining enough but ultimately say little more than that the Chinese like to party, too. No one who has set foot in this country for longer than a few months would find these examples the slightest bit noteworthy.
Ultimately, though, China Underground succeeds in entertainment, the sine qua non of successful literature. Readers should keep in mind that his description of underground life in China reflect the author's biases far more than an accurate representation of the actual situation.
