Troy parfitt why china

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Get more GetAtHome. Support this Site…. Powered by WordPress. I, for one, am quite fascinated by many such issues — but then again, I am a cultural anthropologist… You are probably more interested in whether you should bother reading the book, though — and my recommendation would be a yes. Wake up. Scientific revolution. Industrial Revolution..

Troy Parfitt is both more and less ambitious. Rather than a city, he aspires to survey an entire people by travelling to all the provinces of modern China. In some senses, therefore, this becomes more a journey reported by anecdote than through a detailed journal. Sadly, this task was performed more elegantly in Coast to Coast by Morris, but this book is nevertheless an interesting effort, in the main because the writing style is engaging and betrays a man of sophisticated sensibilities. Now heading for Hong Kong, he elects to stay in Chungking Mansions, one of the slightly more notorious places.

From this you will understand this is not a travel book in which our intrepid explorer moves without preplanning, sometimes landing on his feet and sometimes having adventures. I have no particular brief for truth which, in most cases affecting China, is always a matter of opinion based on which sources you happen to have read.

Motives are always complex and I wonder whether this book is genuinely inductive. The issue as this book unwinds is whether the inductions are weak or strong, i. Troy Parfitt more at ease with the world. The only consistency comes from the reinforcement of the lack of cleanliness and the sheeplike quality of the people who kowtow to authority figures and lead un quiet lives.

Indeed, it turns into another history lesson. As it unfolds, the mixture loses some momentum and grows more serious in tone. The only moments I smiled came when he reports the comment of a US ex-pat in Beijing who thinks the Chinese more friendly than the French, and when he discovers the delights of the Tsingtao Brewery.

Whereas others might see China as a country trying to dig itself out of a pit, he only sees the pit. This gives the tenor of the descriptions a relentlessly monochrome view. Most places have black and white qualities at the extreme. When you visit or actually live there as an ex-pat, you try to inhabit the shades of grey in-between.

This is a man who has spent some ten years as an ex-pat in Taiwan teaching English to the local Chinese and learning Mandarin in return, not something you do unless you find the experience reasonably convenient to continue.

He ends the book by returning to his native Canada. In a sense, his modern anabasis and consequent writing of the book give him an opportunity to reflect on his life. This is not to say his peregrination was militaristic, but it does acquire a veneer of hostility as it continues.

Again, Peking Duck covers this well:. Chinese history is not glorious at all, he argues, but rather thousands of years of uninterrupted warfare, carnage, violence, oppression, mayhem and misery…. Crucially, he points out that the Chinese notion of a harmonious society revolves around the quote-unquote harmonious relationship between inferiors and superiors. Beyond that, harmony does not exist… Bo Yang goes on to argue that China has contributed virtually nothing to civilization.

All of this makes for compelling and thought-provoking reading, mainly because Parfitt makes his argument so well. For all my irritation with his negative tone and broad generalizations, there were definitely many times when I found myself agreeing with him, especially about education and propaganda and the lack of eagerness to embrace meaningful change.

As I was reading this book, I found myself doing something I pretty much never do; I kept wondering about the motivations of the author and what in his own life had caused him to see things the way he did. I kept wondering what it was that had caused Parfitt to see China so unremittingly negatively and what motivated his need to besmirch it so. I go places expecting and wanting to like them and so I usually do. Parfitt seemed to go to China to prove how horrible it is and his own preconceptions gave him exactly what he sought.

Though I read this book looking forward to China getting criticized and though I found myself constantly nodding along with the incidents Parfitt describes so well, it ended up frustrating me with its lack of balance and objectivity. The answer is, as I said at the beginning, that Parfitt has done an amazing job in collecting and tying together hundreds of great anecdotes, combined with a good deal of history and political analysis, to create a highly readable and even enjoyable book, despite the parts that caused my blood pressure to rise.