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Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China by Pallavi Aiyar,

288 Pages, HarperCollins India

This is a unique book about modern China. Too often we hear about China from a Western perspective. This book talks about modern China from an Indian perspective. The author, Pallavi Aiyar has spent 5 years in Beijing, first as an English teacher and then as a China based correspondent for Indian dailies. This book is important because Pallavi understands India and China in ways many of our respected political commentators don’t or can’t: she is young (and therefore not polluted by the memory of India-China’s recent history) and she has lived there.

Smoke and Mirrors is a kind of travelogue of China (mostly Beijing) 2002-2007. Some chapters deal with the minutiae of her life in a Beijing hutong and as an English teacher while others are more broad based and deal with Chinese society and economy. Like all talented journalists she wrings out meaning from the smallest of situations and occurrences. Particular emphasis is placed on how other Indians view and experience China: the Indian business man, the doorkeeper, the yoga master and so on.

My primary motivation for picking up Pallavi Aiyar’s book was to answer my simple question:

“Which is better, India or China?”

Like many of my fellow citizens, I have been extremely jealous of China’s rise.  This book does not disappoint. Pallavi Aiyar gives a logical and well thought out answer that comes towards the end of her book. So important is this answer for our politicians and fellow citizens, that I’d like to put excerpts of it on the Internet . Here is Pallavi in her own words:

But while it may have abounded with consummate salespeople and irrepressible entrepreneurs,   Chinese society remained deeply ant-intellectual. More a product of a political and educational system that discouraged criticism and encouraged group think than any primordial characteristic, this was the aspect of China I personally found most wearying.

It was the absence of a passion for ideas, the lack of delight in argument for its own sake, and the dearth of reasoned but brazen dissent that most gave me a cause for home sickness. [...]

In China, those who disagreed with mainstream, officially sanctioned views outside of the parameters set by mainstream officially sanctioned debate more often than not found themselves branded as dissidents — suspect, hunted, under threat [...]

For an argumentative Indian for a country where heterodoxy was the norm, this enforced homogeneity in Chinese thought and attitude scratched against the natural grain. There were thus occasions when despite all of India’s painful shortcomings, I would assert with conviction that it was better to be an India than endure the stifling monotony of what tended to pass as an intellectual life in China.

But then I would return to Delhi for a few days and almost immediately long to be back in Beijing [...] Later on the same day, however I might switch on the TV and catch a session of the Indian parliament, not always the most inspiration of bodies but when looked at with China-habituated eyes, more alluring than usual.

China’s economic achievement over he last thirty or so year may have been unparalleled historically, but so was India’s political feat. Its democracy was almost unique amongst post colonial states not simply for its existence against all odds in a country held together not by geography, language or ethnicity but an idea. This was an idea that asserted, even celebrated, the possibility of multiple identities. In India you could and were expected to be both many things and one thing simultaneously.

[...]

India’s great political achievement was thus in its having developed mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity along with the inescapable corollary of frequent and aggressive disagreement. The guiding and perhaps lone consensus that formed the bedrock of that mechanism was that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree — expect on the ground rules of how you will disagree (from Guha, India after Gandhi, 2007)

All of which being true still did not help to definitively answer the question, ‘If I could choose would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?’

[...] If forced to reply in broad brush strokes I would assert the following: were i to be able to ensure being born even moderately well-off, I would probably plump for India over China.

In India, money allowed you to exist happily enough despite the constant failure of government to deliver services. Most Delhi households that could afford it has private generators for when the electricity failed and private tube wells in their gardens to ensure the water supply that the municipality couldn’t. The police offered little protection from crime and so many households hired private security guards.

Having developed the necessary private channels with which to deal with the lack of public goods one was free in India to enjoy the intellectual pleasure of discussion the nature of ‘the idea of India’ or to enjoy the heady adrenalin rush of winning a well-argued debate.

These were real pleasures and freedoms and their broader significance was not merely confined to the elite. A tradition of argumentation was fundamental to India;s secularism and democratic polity, with wide-ranging implications for all sections of society.

One the other hand, were I to be born poor, I would take my chances in authoritarian China, where despite lacking a vote, the likelihood of my being decently fed, clothed and housed were considerably higher. Most crucially, China would present me with relatively greater opportunities for upward social-economic mobility. So that even though I may  have been born impoverished, there was a better chance I wouldn’t die as wretched in China, as in India.

[...]

So ultimately despite political representation for the poor in India and the absence of political participation in China, the latter trumped India when it came to the delivery of basic public goods like roads, electricity, drains, water supplies and schools where teachers actually show up.

This counter-intuitive state of affairs was linked to the fact that while in China the CCP derived its legitimacy from delivering growth, in India a government desired its legitimacy simply from its having been voted in. Delivering on its promised was thus less important that the fact of having been elected.

The legitimacy of democracy in many ways absolved Indian governments form the necessity of performing. The CCP could afford no such luxury. (Excerpts from pg. 240-245)

Wonderful wasn’t it? Thanks for the well thought out “answer” !

What I found most interesting was Pallavi’s statement that essentially, we should place a value on our ability of speak freely, write freely, protest, move about freely, choose our leaders and chart our own destiny in a democracy like India. It is not only important to measure a country’s success by the per-capita income, but by the freedoms available to its citizens. This is precisely Amartya Sen’s thesis in the wonderful Development as Freedom.

Coming back to Pallavi, I like to recommend this book unequivocally. A young Indian female intellectual reporting from China is a rare perspective indeed. Lap it up at your nearest bookstore.

Sidharth’s Rating: 4 stars of 5.