John Pomfret

How does this book differ from other books on China?
There are a lot of books out about China but many of them don’t tell us anything about the Chinese people. The little that we know always seems confined to the same cohort -- the victims of the Cultural Revolution, the political prisoners, the dissident artists. I wanted to write a book about a broad spectrum of people -- businessmen, a Communist Party chief, a widow, a professor, and a sports writer -- to show how the Chinese have coped with the dizzying changes that have occurred in their country, to show their loves, lives, successes, failures, dreams and worries and present it in a way that Western readers would find accessible.
I also wanted to write a book about a unique generation -- one that bridged the madness of the Cultural Revolution and the capitalist frenzy of today. This generation, within 30 years, has experienced the equivalent of 200 years of American history -- a world-rocking industrialization, an explosion of personal (but not political) freedom, a sexual revolution, and a complete transformation of their worldview from blood-is-red communism to China's new hyper capitalism. This generation is currently ruling China. Their values -- or lack thereof -- will inform deeply how China reacts with the rest of the world as it becomes, or at least tries to become, a world power.

You first went to China as a Stanford Undergraduate. Why China? Why that country in particular?
I entered Stanford in 1977. China, then, was a forbidden place, probably the closest thing an American could get to space travel. A freshmen class on revolutionary political theory followed by a sophomore class on Chinese history got me hooked on China. China, just then, was emerging from decades of isolation. America's engagement with China had just begun. I was fascinated by this far-off place. When the opportunity came to go there, I jumped at it.

All of your classmates, and their generation, went through the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square and are now living through China's economic boom and a more relaxed political state. How did these first two events shape the people and lead the country to where it is now?
The Cultural Revolution exerted and still exerts a deep influence on the Chinese psyche of today. Chairman Mao's goal was to destroy the bonds of the Chinese family in order to transform society into one with a single loyalty to him -- as the reification of the communist party. To do that, he pitted sons and daughters against mothers and fathers, friends against friends. He aimed to turn Chinese society into a society of snitches. He succeeded. Then suddenly within a few years, the values of the Cultural Revolution -- blind devotion to the chairman -- were turned on their head. The Party arrested the Gang of Four and launched capitalist-style economic reforms. A new God emerged, not Mao but money. But the pursuit of money was not leavened by any beliefs; Mao had succeeded in destroying traditional values. So a peculiar type of capitalism has emerged in China; one not modified by any other humanistic values. It has become a dog-eat-dog, or in the significantly more apt Chinese expression, a man-eat-man, world.

How much of the role as Big Brother does the Party play in everyday life now?
China is no longer a totalitarian country. More than two decades of economic reforms and the creation of a vast array of special interest groups (private businessmen, a white collar class, foreign businessmen) have introduced an unprecedented measure of pluralism into Chinese society. People are freer in China than they have been since the Communist Revolution of 1949. They can choose their own job, they can go overseas if they can get a visa, they can live together before marriage, they can choose when they have a child (although they generally still can only have one). Yet the Party stays very much in control. It has abandoned its full-court press on the lives of the average Chinese. Instead it focuses on strategic nodes; it allows people to mouth off about the Party, but it will arrest you if you organize against it. It allows people to rail against corruption in general, but it will arrest you if you finger a corrupt politician. It allows people to demonstrate against Japan and the United States, but it will arrest you if you protest for democracy.

At one point in the book you mention there is no word in Chinese for "irony" and that "the whole structure of society is so infused with incongruity that the Chinese can't see it anymore: a Communist Party that is capitalist; an ancient culture hell-bent on burying its past; a worker's paradise of unparalleled exploitation…" Do you see this way of being ever changing?
There are a lot of ghosts bedeviling China as it seeks to transform itself into a Superpower. Some think that at a certain point in the future, China is going to have to confront its past – the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Great Leap Forward that killed 30 million people, the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Campaign. There are others who say however that China can avoid that pitfall and forget its past. They point to the students of today who know nothing of the Cultural Revolution, even though their very own parents were victimized, and barely know that in May of 1989 millions of people marched on the streets of Beijing for democracy.

Book Idiot Zhou says that Mao represented the most backwards forces in China, and that his wasn't a Communist revolution, it was a Thugs’ revolution. Most people, certainly most Americans, would be hard-pressed not to agree with him, and yet, as you mention, Mao is still everywhere in China. Why?
The Communist Party has a problem with Mao. For them he’s part George Washington, part monster. Although the Party platform completely rejects Maoism, the economy is essentially capitalist and society is as free-wheeling as it has ever been. Yet the party cannot openly reject Mao because to do that would throw into question the party’s legitimacy to govern China. Mao's mug is on all Chinese bank notes, his calligraphy adorns the gates of every major university and his portrait still hangs on Tiananmen Square because the party has no other symbol of the righteousness of its rule.

Why were you kicked out of China after the Tiananmen crackdown and what were the events that led Katharine Graham and Henry Kissinger to help get you back in?
I covered the Tiananmen protests in 1989 for the Associated Press. Several days after the crackdown, I was summoned to a police station and interrogated for several hours about my relationship with a military officer who had been a source of mine during the protests. During the interrogation I declined to reveal details of my relationship with him. After several hours of back and forth with two agents of China's state security bureau, I was informed that I was both "unfriendly and uncooperative" and ordered out of the country. My crimes were “stealing state secrets and violating martial law provisions.” I was given three days to get my life together and leave. Getting expelled from China -- and the arrest and sentencing of my source to 2.5 years in prison -- was an important lesson to me in how China operates. Theoretically I knew that the place could turn ugly very quickly but I had been blithely naive and always believed that it would never happen to me or someone close to me. The fact that someone else paid the price for my foolishness made the lesson all the more painful. I left the AP and joined the Washington Post in 1993. In 1997, an opening came up in the Post's bureau in Beijing. Mrs. Katharine Graham at the Post went to bat for me with the Chinese. The Chinese government was initially very cool to the idea of allowing me to return to China as the Post's Beijing bureau chief. But Mrs. Graham persisted and the Chinese ultimately relented. My source by that time had gotten out of jail and his life had been transformed completely.

Big Bluffer Ye is an intriguing character. How could someone go through the same experiences as his classmates and still grow up to be not only a part of the corrupt system, but a leader of it?
Big Bluffer is a character absent from most books about China published in the West. He’s a successful Communist Party apparatchik. I wanted to tell his story to place a human face on the Party machine, a machine that has help transform China into the nascent power it is today. He has his rough edges but the story of his successes as well as his toughness illustrates how the Party rules China today.

Why do you think Book Idiot Zhou was so honest with you? Why was it important for him to make you, an outsider, understand what his experiences were, and what other Chinese lives were like?
Zhou, like many of my classmates, seemed to have been waiting for an excuse to talk about his life, to sum up his experiences for posterity. In a society that has turned its back on history, purposely forgetting the tragedies of its past, the appearance of someone who cares about the past and its affect on the future was welcomed not only by Zhou but by my other classmates. I functioned as part psychological counselor, part cheerleader and part documentarian.

People talk about the US's imperialism, but isn't China, with its economic power, really the future? Why does China matter?
China matters enormously to the future of the globe. From an environmental perspective, what will the world be like when China has 200 million cars? (It has just 20 million today.) What will the world be like when the Chinese Yuan floats like the US Dollar? What will the world be like when Chinese troops, not American troops, save tsunami victims in Southeast Asia? What will the world be like when the global competition for oil and water pit China against the United States, Japan and the rest of the West? However, before we start positing China as the next great superpower we need to remember that hardwired into China’s political system are constraints against its development into a world-class power. For one, at a certain point the Party’s desire to control information will clash with its desire to lead a richer country. If the Party allows more information to circulate, it will threaten its position. If it continues to control information, it will also threaten its position. Second, graphs don't always go up. We tend to view China’s rise as inevitable. But at a certain point, the cookie will crumble, and the Communist Party will face another crisis -- massive demonstrations against corruption, bank runs, another disease like SARS. Only then will it become clear whether China's system truly has what it takes to lead the country into the future.