Dick Dell: China, Firsthand
Our Chicago connection, Dick Dell, is a longtime editor for World Book and, before that, Doubleday and Encyclopedia Britannica. His work has often taken him to China, most recently to Beijing for the launch of a Chinese edition of World Book, which he had helped to bring about.
In a discussion this week of China’s recent assertiveness and Sino-American friction – triggered by articles on the subject in this week’s Economist — Dick’s comments struck us as worth repeating, so we’ve excerpted a few, as follows:
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The Economist article is a thoughtful, informative, and balanced assessment of the current state of affairs between China and the U.S. When we lived in London, I at first complained about the British newspapers because they carried so little (I thought) of news of the U.S. But the more I read them the more I realized that their international coverage, of which the U.S. was a part, was vastly superior to any American newspaper except perhaps the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Our support of the Taiwanese government is a holdover from the cold war when we kept China out of the UN for nearly 30 years, all the time pretending that Chiang Kai Shek’s Fascist government represented China. Our China policy was formed by people like DeWitt Wallace of the Reader’s Digest, and Henry Luce of Time, both of whose parents were Christian missionaries in China and formed those two publishers’ attitudes. It was a policy that can’t be seen as anything other than daft.
What the conservatives in this country don’t admit, or won’t see, is that China is changing by the hour from the dark days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The present government is obviously moving rapidly toward a capitalist economy, although ruled by a single party. And you can see the beginning of growing demands for more freedom of thought on the part of young, modern Chinese.
Incidentally, one of the female editors I dealt with — and one of the most intelligent, capable, impressive people I’ve ever known — told me that to go to the top of her profession in publishing she would have to join the Party. I asked her if she would do that, and she said she hadn’t made up her mind. I asked her how many people belong to the party. She and her husband told me that only 1 percent of the population belongs.
That blew my mind. I thought the Party would recruit everyone. No! Only 1 percent of the population rules the other 99 percent. You know that is going to change with time and the growing modernization of much of society and certainly the economy. Radio, TV, American movies, and the internet are changing attitudes in China rapidly, but conservatives in this country can’t see these realities through the blindfolds of their own narrow prejudices.
Actually, the country is growing closer and closer to us through the broadening communication in all media. I was in China an average of twice a year from 1994 until 2008, and I can tell you the changes just in those years were simply breathtaking. From streets clogged with bicycles, beaten up trucks and buses, to sparkling new vehicles crowding the streets and offices filled with the latest high tech equipment in modern and beautiful high rise buildings.
I was able to see a great deal of that country and visit many cities, mostly on publishing business, but at times as a tourist, and I loved it all. I found the Chinese people friendly, charming, and very humorous. So I carry my own prejudices in this affair.
After all, I am the honorary grandfather of two Chinese toddlers, daughter and son of two of the editors I worked with.
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This is breathtakingly irrelevant to your comments on Çhiang Kai-Shek, but his wife was also a piece of work. Hollywood had a great, fawning welcoming celebration for her in 1943 — 30,000 people in the Hollywood Bowl and a big production narrated by John Houston. But her real achievement was to live in three centuries — from 1897 to 2003. (A Wellesley grad, by the way)
Comment by Al — February 19, 2010 @ 9:36 pm