At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong critical changing state | History books

IIt is difficult to imagine a country that has changed as fundamentally as China without altering its basic political system. When I first visited Beijing, three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the city's main avenues were rivers of bicycles. The few cars we passed were official cars, with senior party officials sitting stiffly in the back. On the street we were surrounded by people staring and smiling who had never seen a European before. When I wrote things down in my notebook, they craned their necks to see the strange and barbaric signs I made. If you asked the students in Tiananmen Square what they wanted, they invariably said democracy; yet almost none of them had any idea what that meant.

Deng Xiaoping, who ultimately gave the order to open fire on the protesters, was responsible for the extraordinary enrichment of ordinary Chinese people, ultimately lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. It is conventional to say that modern China is based on a compromise: you can get rich if you don't demand political change. But that makes it seem like it's an open choice. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party decided after 1989 that even the slightest relaxation in its fierce control over society could lead to a new Tiananmen, or the kind of collapse that befell the Soviet Union. There is very little ideology in the Chinese system today, as anyone who has had to go through the foundational documents of Xi Jinping Thought can attest. It's about maintaining control.

From this basic notion follows everything else. The party cannot dare to refuse any alternative source of power. Competing systems of thought, ranging from the principles of free speech and free association that guided the recent protests in Hong Kong to Islam and Christianity, must be brought under the heel of the state. Rival nationalisms, in Tibet or Xinjiang, must be completely destroyed. Far from being the result of confidence, it all comes from deep nervousness. Any relaxation of control could bring down the entire structure of Chinese communism. As late as 2008, there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese. That year, I was smuggled into an apartment where a former party leader was under house arrest. Within four years, he told me, we will have real elections and I will be a member of a real parliament.

But the coming to power of Xi Jinping put an end to these ideas. Xi rules China with determination and sometimes ferocity, but questionable policy decisions like the Covid lockdown, while China's economy is struggling, show that things can and almost certainly will change.

This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong's book. He is now a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times., But from 2008 to 2016 he worked for the paper from Beijing and was bureau chief there, writing with great insight about Xi Jinping’s years as he established himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably courageous and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now 90, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had close ties to mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou.

Wong skillfully weaves the stories of his father and uncles into a narrative of his own experiences in China, in a deeply satisfying way. Edge of Empire is valuable on both a political and personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general audiences will find fascinating. At the heart of this book is a deep awareness of the changes China has endured since the elder Wong saw the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong. Edward Wong is not in the business of looking at China's future, but despite the propaganda emanating from Beijing today, it is clear that the stability Xi Jinping has brought to China will not be the last word. Wong's finely crafted book shows us why.

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