During his years reporting for Taiwan for such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, Voice of America and Reuters, Ralph Jennings acquired a bad rap in certain circles. Criticism of his work veered from dismay at several facile listicles for Forbes to darker insinuations of a pro-China — or at least “Greater China” — outlook.
Riffing on the titles of the Forbes pieces, in 2016, one Taiwan-based blogger dedicated a post to the articles, titled “Five Reasons Why Ralph Jennings Is The Absolute Worst Journalist.” Harsh? Perhaps, but re-reading some of his output from that time, some of the scorn is justified.
The title of this book would likely have those same critics muttering imprecations, as Jennings takes his tried but untrusted formula long-form. He won’t mind too much: rather than grizzled China Hands, the intended audience is “the curious outsider” coming to grips with Chinese culture.
While the 50 bite-sized chapters of the book labeled tips, they rarely contain straightforward advice. Instead, each section presents observations about aspects of behavior and society in China. Most of these are thoughtfully presented for the uninitiated.
Although he stresses that these reflections apply “primarily to ethnic Han citizens of the giant nation of China,” Jennings believes that much of his analysis will be relevant to Chinese elsewhere and East Asian countries “whose cultures and history are intertwined with China.”
And, yes, plenty of this is pertinent to Taiwan: chapters on superstition, humor and avoiding the truth — to name just a few — are full of tidbits that will be familiar to long-term residents here.
In a chapter on Chinese “Fear of the Ordinary Unknown” for example, Jennings notes that received wisdom on things such as cold water causing respiratory illness is rarely challenged, while genuine but “invisible” dangers, such as structural defects in buildings pass under the radar as “most residents have never been affected, so they can’t imagine being crushed in their homes when the ground shakes.”
Observations on education as a means to enrichment rather than as an end in itself, thinking inside — rather than outside — the box, and chabuduo (差不多) attitudes toward work and life will also ring true to Taiwan-based readers. On that latter topic, Jennings surmises that “the historical habit of approximation” functions as a safety mechanism.
“Imprecision protects oneself from harsh feedback, and more importantly, preserves relationships that exactitude could ruin,” Jennings writes.
As explained in the book’s introduction, such explanations are intended to render readers “more likely to treat people in China with understanding and compassion.”
It’s an admirable goal that many of the book’s insights should help achieve. However, Jennings’ insistence on tracing the origins of these cultural phenomena to the same set of causes sometimes grates. Social and political instability, poverty, scarce resources and a lack of state support, thanks to leaders who historically didn’t bother much about the masses — these themes are invoked ad nauseam, making for repetitive reading and, occasionally, a nagging feeling that some of this is simply apologism for questionable conduct.
One example is the predilection for plagiarizing and copying in China, which — along with many other cultural tendencies, is attributed in part to the Confucian emphasis on “transmission of accepted facts.”
Quoting from William Alsford, an East Asian studies legal scholar at Harvard University, Jennings depicts copying as a “‘transformative engagement’ with the past.” The shared nature of that past makes it public domain, which — in turn — means that copying “often still conveys respect for the source, hardly an effort to cheat it …”
It’s difficult to see how Jennings can convincingly reconcile this with his discussion of ambition, achievement, materialism, and Chinese perceptions of strangers as dangerous competitors, all of which are used to justify an anything goes approach to getting ahead. Indeed, at the end of the chapter on copying, Jennings quotes intellectual property scholar Peter Yu’s view that it is now often justified by the nationalistic view that “the unauthorized reproduction of foreign works [that] would help strengthen the country.”
Meanwhile, glaringly absent from the discussion is any reference to the apparently top-down nature of cheating in China. It brings to mind a conversation with a cab driver in Nanjing who, when questioned about rampant plagiarism at universities, asked rhetorically, “What can you expect when students have such an example?” His comment came on the back of high-profile corruptions during the rule of former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
And this points to a deeper problem — one that gets back to the complaints some Taiwan-based readers had with Jennings’ journalism: A reticence to posit any connection between contemporary social values and the shoddy conduct of the ruling Chinese Communist Party at home and abroad. Almost everything is traced back to Confucius or “ancient” moral precepts and circumstances.
Where such links are made, the analysis of the CCP’s behavior is at best naive. In the chabuduo chapter, for instance, Jennings portrays the vague wording of bilateral agreements as an attempt to “soften” the other party through “upbeat language.” By wording such deals vaguely, China’s leaders — like its citizens — give themselves “wiggle room,” for situations where “one person’s fact set differs from another’s.” With its striking similarity to the “alternative facts” of former US President Donald Trump (as announced by his then adviser Kellyanne Conway), this is disturbing language.
One must wonder how much influence Jennings’ time as an editor for the CCP-controlled China Daily influenced such word choices. In the same chapter, he describes penning for a chabuduo piece for an unnamed publication, on grounds of guanxi (關係, relationships). Rather than submitting a “another scathing political piece,” Jennings filed an anodyne article.
I’ve not read much of Jennings’ reporting from China, but it’s hard to believe that “scathing” aptly describes any of his pieces — at least not where criticism of the CCP is concerned.
Worse follows, with the example of the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between Taiwan and China, which featured “feel-good phrases” designed to “establish harmony” between “the Mainland Chinese side” and its “political rival.” The deal, Jennings writes, “was scaled back” by Beijing. No mention is made of what prevented full implementation of ECFA and the associated Cross Strait Service Trade Agreement — the Sunflower movement and its massive protest against it.
Politicized phrasing is not the sole problem with the language: Repeated references to “my Beijing newspaper Q&A column,” recurring — and often clunky — terms such as “to wit” and “back to” (when the passage being revisited came just a sentence or two before), and clumsy compound sentences that transpose cause and effect hamper the reading experience.
But these are, admittedly, subjective style considerations unlikely to concern casual readers looking for pointers on Chinese culture. For such readers, this book is a decent primer; for long-time China and Taiwan watchers, it is bound to induce the odd wince.
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