Review: Book shows China has a fragile side, too

— -- China today often seems like an economics seminar masquerading as a country.

For students of global commerce, the Asian giant offers pointed lessons on the good (double-digit annual growth rates), the bad (distorted currency policies) and the ugly (a disturbing number of potentially hazardous products).

It would, therefore, be easy to lose sight of the astonishing human drama unfolding as China regains its place at the center of world events. In China Road, a thoughtful portrayal of a country that is exercising an ever larger impact upon Americans' lives, National Public Radio's Rob Gifford rightly keeps his focus on the people.

The book is the story of Gifford's extraordinary road trip along China's Route 312, which links glittering Shanghai in the east with the dusty Kazakh border more than 3,000 miles to the west. Unfortunately, China Road, which grew from a seven-part NPR series, suffers from a slow start. Like a traveler circling his neighborhood before hitting the open road, Gifford dawdles over an introduction to China that has an obligatory and unexceptional feel.

But once he begins recounting his adventures — whether jostling on inter-city buses or being chauffeured by a taxi driver and his amorous friend — the tale accelerates. Along the way, Gifford is pressed into service as a preacher in an unofficial Christian church, befriends a pair of Chinese Amway peddlers and spends a night in the desert with a Muslim who is wrestling with his Chinese identity.

But this is more than just an intrepid traveler's account of his journey. Gifford has some hard-earned wisdom to impart about China, and his qualifications entitle him to a hearing. Six years as NPR's Beijing correspondent capped a two-decade-long fascination with China that began with language studies there in 1987. Gifford's resulting fluency affords him intimate access to the laobaixing or "Old Hundred Names," the Chinese equivalent of the average man, throughout his reporting.

With China's economy seemingly destined to expand indefinitely, Gifford's pessimism about the future is striking. He sees in China's history an unbroken 2,000-year record of the state crushing independent thinking, regarding it as a mortal challenge to unified rule over a multi-ethnic, continent-sized country.

"What we have in China is a mobile 21st-century society shackled to a sclerotic 1950s, Leninist-style political system. The economy is changing, the society is changing, but the politics are not, and that is starting to cause sufficient problems in governance, and even in the economy, to call China's rise to potential greatness into question," he writes. "China is more fragile and brittle than it appears."

Gifford's view represents a dissent from the soothing conventional wisdom, disseminated by mainstream U.S. politicians and corporate executives, that China's economic development will inevitably spur political liberalization. His verdict: Social tensions in the countryside are nearing the point of no return. An unanticipated shock could spark a societal unraveling that would lash China's global customers, including the United States.

China Road is the latest addition to a growing literature revolving around China's weakness, not its strength. In the past year, James Kynge's China Shakes the World and Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower have made cases that China's rise is threatened by myriad challenges: massive environmental degradation, political corruption, a yawning gap between the fast-growing export-oriented coast and the impoverished interior.

This is an important message and one that is underappreciated in American politics, where overheated rhetoric about commercial disputes often makes it sound as if the country with the $14 trillion economy and the world's largest military is China, not the United States.

Gifford's hope lies with China's long-suffering peasants, whom he argues should be dealt in on any plans for political reform, as well as a new generation of leaders expected to assume power after the 18th Communist Party Congress in 2012. But this affectionate and even-handed student of China offers no guarantees.