Why Recommend Politicians' Stories to Ordinary Readers | Some Good Books

Over the National Day holiday we invited eight young writers to recommend the books they rate. Each has made a name in his or her own field and likes to share what they learn and think. Here is the first of them, Mu Yao.

It is book-recommending season again.

Around this time last year, QDaily asked a group of interesting people behind big accounts on Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu to recommend books to us. They included Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, who founded the WeChat official account "Shixiang", Wu Miao, who founded the WeChat official account "Leviathan", and screenwriter Shi Hang. The invitation then read: recommend a book from the past year that you think is good. It might help you in your work, or it might simply be good. Chinese or English, either is fine.

This year we have changed the format a little.

In any era, professional readers are scarce. How they judge a book recommendation or a review can guide the rest of us in what to pick up — and a book of reviews can itself be worth reading as a book, as Tony Judt's Reappraisals is.

Not all the writers we invited brood over the history of the twentieth century as heavily as Judt does, of course. They are younger, more fun, and sharp-eyed, and they are not professional writers; each carries some influence in his or her own field and likes to share what they learn and think.

We want to introduce them to you in the form of a reading list plus a long review, as a small guide to the small matter of reading.

Because their experiences differ, their picks and their reviews differ in style too, and chewing over those differences is itself a pleasure. From October 1 to October 8 we will publish one writer's list and review each day. We hope you find them useful. If you know other good professional readers, leave us a comment — you may see their piece here before long.

Let's start with Mu Yao.

Mu Yao has a PhD in mathematics, works as a software engineer, and lives in Shanghai. He is one of the creators of the China Political Compass test (Peking University Weiming edition), whose fifty questions place the respondent on "left-right" coordinates for political, economic, and social views. It is considered one of the most influential political questionnaires on the Chinese internet. Mu Yao studied and worked in the United States, and here he reads Chinese and American politics and history through his own eyes.

Book Recommendations

Kissinger's Memoirs, Vol. 1: White House Years

Author: [US] Henry Kissinger

Translators: Fang Huisheng / Zhao Zhongqiang / Wu Jigan

Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House

Publication date: July 2016

Kissinger wrote a great deal, and his memoirs of his years as Secretary of State run to three volumes: White House Years covers Nixon's first term (1969-1972), Years of Upheaval covers the second term up to his resignation over Watergate (1973-1974), and Years of Renewal covers the Ford presidency (1974-1976). Each volume runs past a million characters; put them on a shelf and they take up a whole row. The first two were published in Chinese in the 1980s for restricted internal circulation; this year Shanghai Translation Publishing House has reissued volume one, and volumes two and three should follow.

Why so long? It has to do with how Kissinger writes. His memoirs mix narrative with commentary. Each chapter turns on a single theme, and alongside his own account as a participant he sets down his observations of other world leaders, his portraits of the public mood of the day, and the second thoughts — even the confessions — he arrived at while writing. His recall of events is exhaustive and rests on a mass of documentary material, including the memoirs of his contemporaries as a check. Few politicians' memoirs come close in richness.

But that only makes it valuable as a historical source. Why recommend it to ordinary readers? Because for all its bulk it is never dull. Kissinger narrates events as vividly as a novelist; you often feel you are standing in the room. His humor, especially at his own expense, is superb and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. When he turns to tragedy — the way the Vietnam War tore at the American psyche in volume one, or the misery Nixon sank into during Watergate in volume two — he writes with real gravity. What is most valuable in the book, though, is his reading of historical events as one of the twentieth century's foremost theorists of foreign policy: sharp, and worth every word. You may disagree with his politics; you may attack the policies he drove through as Secretary of State. But even his enemies would grant that half a century on, many of his historical insights have not dated.

Chinese readers will naturally turn first to the chapters on China. But there are gems throughout. The chapters on the conflicts of the Middle East — especially the ones on shuttle diplomacy in volume two — are marvellous, and should not be missed either.

Reading Chiang Kai-shek's Diary from a Macro-History Perspective (《从大历史的角度读蒋介石日记》)

Author: Ray Huang

Publisher: Jiuzhou Publishing House

Publication date: May 2011

Most of Ray Huang's books circle one theme: that from the Ming and Qing onward, China could not adapt to the modern world because it had no capacity for management by numbers. His books on early history mostly lay out that deficiency in detail; his books on the modern period — Yellow River and Blue Mountains (《黄河青山》) and this one — ask instead how a huge country with no tradition of counting adjusted itself, and built a system of control from scratch, once it was forced into the modern world.

The book is his commentary on the diaries of the first half of Chiang Kai-shek's life, but Chiang the man is not really the subject. The picture Huang wants to draw is this: after the ruling order of traditional China collapsed from the top down in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Communists and the Nationalists took different routes to rebuild the machinery of the state out of the rubble. The Communist route was to build, through land reform, a farming system that could function in a modern society. The Nationalist route was to knead together, from the top down, a central government in the modern sense. In Huang's view each route came about by chance, yet by an accident of history the two fitted together. When the Nationalists were driven off the mainland, the Communists inherited the elite structure of control they had built — and the framework for rebuilding a modern China was complete.

Most of the book therefore explains what Chiang did to conjure an unprecedented central government out of almost nothing. Huang reminds us that much of what we take for granted today did not exist in Chiang's day and had to be invented by hand. One example: in a family letter to H. H. Kung, Chiang moves from private matters to asking Kung to buy large quantities of arms in Hong Kong for the Nationalist army, all in the tone of a relative chatting about household business. To modern eyes that is plainly unprofessional, a complete muddling of public and private. But at the time there was no professional civil service as we understand one, and no clear line between an official document and a private note. That was the setting in which Chiang scraped a central government together. It was his achievement, and it was his tragedy.

Is this a good way to look at modern Chinese history? Opinions will differ, but the book at least holds together — sometimes, as with most of Huang's books, a reader may feel it holds together a little too neatly. The pity is that Huang never saw most of Chiang's original diaries; they were not fully opened to researchers until 2009, so he often had to work from secondhand quotation. With the primary material in hand, the book would have been better still.

The Glory and the Dream

Author: [US] William Manchester

Translator: translation team of the School of Translation Studies, Sichuan International Studies University

Publisher: CITIC Press

Publication date: March 2015

The Glory and the Dream is an old book. It came out in 1975 and covers the forty years of American life from 1932 to 1972. Another forty-odd years have passed since 1972, and in that time the book has been recommended countless times for every kind of reason. Its novel structure, its lavish prose, its sweep and its fine-grained observation have kept one wave of imitators after another in awe. Whatever praise I pile up here, someone has said it before me.

I want to recommend it again anyway. In part because I think we need a book like this now more than ever. One of its striking qualities is that while it narrates the storms at the top, it gives a great deal of space to ordinary people — not the statistical kind, but individuals with flesh and blood. What they ate and wore and spent, what they loved and hated and worried about, is all there in detail. No book shows better why politics is more than the scheming of politicians and the turns of a war. In an age as ideologically polarized as ours, political storytelling tends to collapse into noise, division, and combat over one touchy issue after another. If Manchester could be brought back to write a Glory and the Dream for 1972 to 2012, what a gift that would be.

If I had to pull out one chapter, read the part on Franklin Roosevelt's death, "When the Courtyard Was Full of Lilacs" (《曾是丁香满庭时》). It is the best writing lesson there is; my own taste and my own prose were shaped by it. Reading it in translation takes nothing away — the beauty comes through regardless.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Author: [Israel] Yuval Noah Harari

Translator: Lin Junhong

Publisher: CITIC Press

Publication date: November 2014

This is not a history book in the ordinary sense. The title "A Brief History of Humankind" may mislead readers into expecting a march that starts in the mythical age of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, trims the rise and fall of dynasties down to its essentials, and arrives at the present. That is not the subject at all.

The book aims much higher. It asks not why a given people adopted a given way of running a state, but why peoples need states; not why a religion became a country's official faith in a given year, but why religion is possible at all; not what humans have achieved, but why humans and no other animal achieved it. Take one example: why did humans move from hunting to farming? You may think the answer obvious. The book argues convincingly that the shift was not the advance you imagine — that it was in fact a step backward — and that nature's path dependence made it irreversible. Harari was not the first to make this argument, but he is one of the best at explaining it.

In many ways the book recalls Guns, Germs, and Steel, that landmark of anthropology, and can fairly be called its worthy successor. It reads beautifully. You could easily go through it cover to cover in a few hours, and if you stop, it will usually be to shut the book and think, not out of boredom or fatigue. Its arguments are far from airtight — nothing in this field is — but you will finish it seeing the world differently.

Men Without Women

Author: [Japan] Haruki Murakami

Translator: Zhu Jiarong et al.

Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House

Publication date: February 2015

A recent collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. It carries that title only because each story has something to do with a man on his own; beyond that the pieces share no real thread. (Hemingway has a collection with the same title, but the style could not be more different.)

My favourite piece here is "Kino." Kino is an unremarkable salesman who comes home one day to find his wife with a colleague. He turns and leaves without a word, quits his job, rents a small place in a corner of the city, and opens a bar. The bar does well, and he believes he has put the injury behind him fairly quickly. Then things start to go strange. The cat that used to visit stops coming, and snakes appear around the bar, heads poking about. A mysterious regular tells him: leave here quickly, keep moving, don't stay anywhere.

He does as he is told, but wandering wears him down and he ends up holed up in a small inn. He begins to understand that because he would not face the painful truth, the great hollow inside him has never closed, and the snakes have worked out what a fine place it is to live. At the end of the story a rainy night wakes him with a knocking that will not stop, a sound right at his ear, leaving him nowhere to hide.

Time never seems to pass fairly. The dead weight of bloody desire, the rusted anchor-hook of regret, work to stop time running as it should. So time cannot fly straight like an arrow: the rain falls and pauses through the night, the clock hands waver in confusion, the birds stay sunk in sleep, a faceless postal clerk silently sorts postcards, his wife's lovely breasts heave up and down, and someone knocks stubbornly at the windowpane. The knocking keeps a steady rhythm, as if to draw him into a dim maze of suggestion. Knock, knock. Then knock, knock again. Don't turn your eyes away. Look straight at me. Someone is murmuring at his ear.

At the end of "Kino," Kino carefully begins to look at himself. Then he starts to cry, and the story breaks off.

This collection is nowhere near Murakami's best work. But if you know his style and like it, the book will give you a warm, easy few hours — like meeting an old friend: no surprises, perhaps, but no disappointment either.

Book Review

Hard Choices

Author: Hillary Rodham Clinton

Publisher:

Simon & Schuster

Publication date: June 2014

Reading Notes: Hard Choices

By Mu Yao

I.

Just after Hillary left the State Department, I read a comment in the press that ran roughly like this: yes, she was a successful Secretary of State, with broad public support at home and a good press abroad. But was she a great one? Does she belong with the best in modern American history — Marshall, Acheson, Kissinger?

Kissinger's memoirs happen to be among my favourite books, and setting Hillary beside him makes an interesting exercise. Both are widely counted among the finest diplomats of their time. Both built enormous political capital as Secretary of State, to the point that they polled better than the presidents they served. Both worked in an international climate that did not favour the United States, with a powerful rival rising fast whose ideology was squarely opposed to America's and whose threat reached into every corner of the world. Both inherited an unpopular war and had to weigh the situation and keep that war going in order to end it with some dignity. Both treated global strategy as a single interlocking chessboard — not the usual way of thinking in Washington; Kissinger complained endlessly about how poorly the American bureaucracy fitted his ideas and how little it liked them — and both extended America's reach carefully, rebalancing from a position of weakness in order to keep the initiative in world affairs. Both were savaged by domestic opponents from the start of their careers to the end. Both came through it.

But one difference between them is fundamental: Kissinger did not want to run for president, and was not eligible to. Hillary did.

That makes the two memoirs entirely different things to read. Kissinger's are the reflections of a philosopher in retirement: lively asides, sharp criticism, painful self-examination, and the detachment of a man who was both player and spectator. Reading them feels like a long talk with an old sage. That is why I love them.

Hillary's memoir is six hundred-odd pages of campaign literature. Not shallow — there is plenty of serious discussion of the state of the world in it — but calculated line by line to make sure nothing in it can hurt her politically. The result is so flat it reads like a school textbook and puts you to sleep. There are exceptions, such as the chapters on the lawyer Chen and on the Benghazi attack, but only because those events are dramatic enough that any telling carries tension. Apart from those, the book offers almost no pleasure. The near-unanimous bad reviews on Amazon are no accident.

II.

Hillary gave a run of interviews on the book tour. To my mind, listening to them is usually more interesting than reading the book. Not because interviewers like to dig for gossip — even the serious talk about foreign policy in those interviews works better than the book does.

That comes down to what she is like. She is a superb talker: widely read, clear about where she stands, tight in her logic, precise in her wording, relaxed in manner. Even if you disagree with her, it is hard to listen to her on international affairs, or any other serious subject, without respect. That is surely part of why she is so well regarded among diplomats.

But unlike Kissinger, she is not a deep thinker, and she has contributed no revolutionary idea or framework to the world. You can see it in her book and her speeches, and the book makes it clearest. It is organized region by region, and each chapter lays out the challenges there and the American policy that answered them, yet not one chapter leaves you feeling she left a mark of her own. The single episode that counts as a diplomatic win is the opening of Myanmar, and even that chapter reads as though she watched rather than drove it. It was Than Shwe stepping down of his own accord and Thein Sein's bold reforms that changed Myanmar; Hillary — and Aung San Suu Kyi too — seized the opening and helped it along. The rest of the chapters, on the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific, begin in difficulty and end in difficulty. She carried out American foreign policy well, caught every advantage going and held the line. It is hard to say what she will be remembered for.

That is not a failing. She was always a doer, not a strategist. She is a skilled operator, experienced, wide in outlook, and she understands what new technology does to societies and politics far better than her peers do. It is hard to find a weak link in this book, and still you close it with a sense of waste. She passed the test. To be remembered by history, passing is nowhere near enough.

III.

Hillary has never hidden her hard line on China, nor the ideology behind it. On this point she looks more like a Republican than Kissinger does. Kissinger disliked China's ideology, but his love of geopolitical strategy, and of the pivotal part China plays in it, far outweighed the distaste. Hillary is the opposite. She writes bluntly about several of China's foreign-policy leaders, in much the tone Kissinger uses for the Kremlin. Kissinger thought Brezhnev and his colleagues had overrated the cards in their hand, their ambition outrunning their capacity. Hillary never says as much, but the view between her lines is the same.

She is not simply "anti-China," of course. More than once she mentions how much she liked Dai Bingguo. In a private conversation, Dai showed her a photograph of his granddaughter and told her, "This is what we're in it for," which moved her deeply. (The lawyer Chen, by contrast, comes off in her pages as very nearly a clown.) But her overall tone is cool:

"US-China relations remain full of challenges. We are two large, complex countries with entirely different histories, politics and outlooks, and with economies and futures deeply tangled together. Our relationship cannot be filed simply under enemy or friend, and I suspect it never will be. We are sailing in unmarked waters, and holding a course clear of the shoals and whirlpools takes both principle and flexibility, with frequent changes of heading, sometimes at painful cost. Push too hard and we may put each other at risk. Give way too much and the other side will press further. And while we weigh all of this, we may lose sight of the fact that the other side has pressures and responsibilities of its own. The further we both follow the brave example of the diplomats before us, who closed gaps of misunderstanding and of interest, the better our chance of making progress."

But set against the historical drift of China's rise, and the surge of nationalism that comes with it, her real room for choice was small. She was not facing one or two politicians she happened not to admire; she was facing more than a billion ambitious people and the complicated look they turn on the United States. Marshall and Acheson did not start the Cold War, and the Kremlin's decay was no achievement of Kissinger's; both were the deep working of history itself. The same is true of Hillary and the mix of rivalry and cooperation between China and the United States.

This Monday Hillary came to the company for a talk and to promote the book, taking a good many questions from colleagues. Had I been there, I would probably have asked her this:

"As a Chinese person educated in both China and the United States, now working in America, every part of my life depends on the two countries staying at peace and prospering together. How long, in your view, can that hold? Will we see another world war in the twenty-first century?"

I think I can guess the official answer she would give. What I would really like to know is what she would answer honestly, to herself.

(This essay first appeared on Douban on July 23, 2014.)

Cover image from: politico