O’Rourke on China

THE BLURB AT THE BOTTOM of the article says that P.J. O’Rourke is “a political satirist, author, and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.” That doesn’t begin to describe just how good he is; any O’Rourke article is a treat, and the current issue of World Affairs Journal serves up an especially generous helping in a piece titled, “The Cleveland of Asia: A Journey Through China’s Rust Belt”. In addition to the humor, it has more insight into today’s China than you’ll read in a dozen articles by scholars or journalists determined to keep a straight face while searching for the significance of it all.

For example:

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it. We need to listen to what they don’t say. Here is a record of what Chinese think of politics when politics isn’t what they’re thinking of.

And:

Mr. Chen sent us on in his car to Nanjing, where Tom took me to a steel mill he used to run…The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the two or three hundred “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over. Plus the thousands of workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the local family that had the “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole an entire railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if the train didn’t have a track that led directly to them.

And:

The privately hired guide on our riverboat, David, was franker. “You’ll notice there are no tall trees along the Yangtze,” he said. “They were all cut down during the Great Leap Forward in Mao’s attempt to match U.S. steel production with wood-fueled backyard steel mills.”
We stopped at a 3,000-year-old town that was being slowly inundated. Another government guide took us ashore. We encountered a parade of townspeople beating drums and waving banners and red flags.
“It’s a promotional event for a furniture store sale,” said the government guide.
“It’s the local Communist Party gathering support for Labor Day demonstrations,” said Mai.

The article’s a bit long, so I recommend saving it for when you have the time to relax and read it all the way through. You’ll find it here.