It was a week after the Tiananmen Square protests (June 4, 1989) that Jeanne-Marie Gescher landed in Beijing. Her flight was empty. At the small airport, anxious people were waiting to fly away from the ‘troubled’ country. Gescher was returning to China after two years and this time she had decided to move to this country. And she has been there since, for close to three decades.
Gescher first came to China in 1987 to teach at Peking University. The airport then, she remembers, was tiny, there was only one road in and out, flanked with willow trees and traversed by pony carts and few cars. She has been eyewitness to China’s rapid growth to one of the two powerful States in the world. Yet China continues to be seen as a mystery even after decades of an open door. How does China work, what does it want, why does it want it, and what does its rise to global power mean for the rest of the world? Gescher tires to answer these questions and more in her latest work Becoming China: The Story Behind The State .
“This book is actually began as a quarter of one book addressing the four issues that I think are critical to the challenges that face decision-makers in the world today. These issues are Order, Knowledge, Being Human and the Wild World. I thought the best way to illustrate their importance would be to look at them through the stories of individual countries. I chose China for Order, India for Knowledge, South Africa for Being Human and Brazil for Wild World,” says Gescher , sipping a hot coffee in between. She was on a short visit to Kochi.
Gescher knew she was stumbling into something very ambitious when she began work. “Many people told me that I would not be able to write this. But I went off and did a lot of research, and after three years, I had written two thirds of the book. During one of my research trips across the four countries, I realised that the story of India and knowledge could not be told in a quarter of a book. So, I split the book into four books and went back to my writing desk. After a further three years, I completed the first book: Becoming China.. .. It is the story of China’s pursuit of order. It is particularly the story of how and why present day China is as it is. But to understand the present we have a past story that is probably one of the least familiar in the world.”
At a little under 800 pages, Becoming China... is a ‘huge’ work on an immense country, its people, its history. Fusing myths, philosophy, archaeological finds and history, she has created a comprehensive account of a country.
“For China, the pursuit of order is the story of how human beings can live at peace with nature and in the society of others. Broadly speaking there are two competing Chinese views: the early idea of the shamans that the voices of man and nature are essential, and a later idea, the one of which cities were founded, that a single top-down mind works best. It is important, however, to realise that for almost all Chinese, any kind of order—including voices on the ground—requires everyone, rulers and people, to take responsibility for the order of the whole.”
The book has a wider purpose of thought as Gescher explains: “China’s size and complexity make it a both microcosm and an amplification of questions and events in the wider world, including the question of order. After decades of assuming that all we needed was economics, the world is beginning to understand that political and social order are not natural phenomena but challenges that need specific attention. Becoming China... is not just the story of China. It is an attempt to use that story to hold a mirror to our own assumptions, values, ideas about what is means to be human and what it means to be a State. ”
Heavily researched from a wide range of sources, and in the latter chapters drawing on Gescher’s own experience, the book is written as a story. “ The reason for writing history as a story is because truth is always more than facts.”
Divided into three main books corresponding to a beginning (The Ancient Past), middle (Twentieth Century Ideas) and a last part which given that the story is still continuing, is entitled What Came Next. This last part takes the reader from 1989 to the Spring of 2017, through the stories of the Party, the people and the intellectuals. The conclusion (also titled Becoming China... ) brings the entire book together unwrapping the mechanics of the State and its order today.
What about China’s tryst with Communism? “China’s tryst with Communism also began in the mythological era seen in the story of an early farmer ruler, Shennong, who ploughed the fields with his people even as he tamed the rivers to keep them safe. We see that idea again in man called Mozi, during the original time of the Hundred Schools of Thought in the early period of what is now known as the time of the Warring States (480-221 BC). We see it again through various dynasties right up to the Communist Revolution in the early 1920s. Of course, the tryst was triggered by Moscow’s Comintern which worked with Chinese intellectuals to set up the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s. The Party was distinctive for its Leninist structure and for the influence of Marx but the ideas about equality went back to China’s earliest times.”
Originally trained as a barrister Gescher established one of the earliest foreign advisory firms in China. She has worked with global business and investors, with governments and multilateral agencies. She has been honorary legal advisor to successive British Ambassadors to the People’s Republic of China from 1989 to 2015; she was twice elected chair of the British Chamber of Commerce of China.
Before moving to China Gescher, at age 23, was legal advisor to ‘a tiny UN agency’ called International Fund for Agricultural development (IFAD). “I had a wonderful boss in Rome, who sent me to Bangladesh to work with an economist who had used what he had earned to invest in a social solution to an economic problem - a bank that would lend money to the truly poor. The man was Muhammed Yunus and his project was Grameen Bank. That changed my life and heavily influenced my own purpose.”
Reading Gescher’s book one cannot help but see that history is repeating itself in China. “Writing many of the chapters felt like writing the present—and indeed that is one of the values of history, enabling to see not only that it repeats itself, but why and how it does that.” The country has always looked to establish and sustain an orderly society. China was probably the first country to systematically count its people through a census, introduce an internal passport system, a powerful bureaucracy, surveillance systems...all to establish uniform order.
Gescher believes that the world today is entering an era of greater tension, one with remarkable similarities to China’s Warring States period there is a shift towards a more extreme political order. “Clearly the world is shifting. Ideas that seemed settled are now open to raging uncertainty and hitherto unstructured debate, particularly the idea of order.”
What do the Chinese people think about the order of their state today? “China is going through another period of deep change, which is bringing many challenges. The West is also going through this change. To many Chinese, the change in the West is far more worrying because it appears to be so unpredictable and seems to be grounded in the opposite of the Chinese idea that both leaders and people should assume responsibility for the order for all. I think for many people in China, as for many people around the world, the focus is on living a peaceful life, a job, a home, a family, sending your children to school. There are clearly still a lot of abuses within the Chinese order. But many Chinese look at the violence around and see that the question of order is not so straightforward in the West and that the Party’s arguments that these order are flawed may have a point.”
Gescher does not state what is right or wrong but she is clear that as China’s impact on the world becomes more important, it is time that the West remembered the Indian fable of the six blind men and the elephant—and finally got to grips with understanding China.”
