It’s hard to think of a country that has changed as fundamentally as China without altering its basic political system. When I first visited Beijing, three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, the main avenues of the city were rivers of bicycles. The very few cars you saw were official ones, with senior party figures sitting stiffly in the back. In the street, you’d be surrounded by staring, smiling people who had never seen a European before. When I jotted things in my notebook, they would crane their necks to see the strange, barbaric signs I was making. If you asked the students in Tiananmen Square what they wanted, they invariably said “democracy”; yet scarcely any of them had the slightest idea what that meant.
Deng Xiaoping, who ultimately gave the order to open fire on the demonstrators, was responsible for the extraordinary enrichment of ordinary Chinese people, eventually lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. It’s conventional to say that modern China is based on a compromise: we’ll make you rich, if you don’t ask for political change. But that makes it sound as though it’s an open choice. In fact, the Chinese Communist party decided after 1989 that even the slightest letup in its fierce control over society might lead to a new Tiananmen, or to the kind of collapse which happened to the Soviet Union. There’s very little ideology in today’s Chinese system, as anyone who has had to plough through the basic documents of “Xi Jinping Thought” can attest. It’s all about keeping control.
From that basic notion comes everything else. The party cannot – dare not – accept any alternative sources of power. Competing thought systems, ranging from the principles of free speech and free association which guided the recent demonstrations in Hong Kong to Islam and Christianity, must be brought under the boot of the state. Rival nationalisms, in Tibet or Xinjiang, are to be destroyed altogether. Far from being the result of confidence, all this comes from a deep-seated nervousness. Any easing of control could bring down the entire structure of Chinese communism. As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. “Within four years,” he told me, “we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.”
Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned. Xi runs China with determination and occasional ferocity, but questionable political calls like the Covid lockdown, with the troubles welling up in the Chinese economy, show that things can and almost certainly will change.
This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou.
Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong. It’s not Edward Wong’s purpose to look at China’s future, but despite the propaganda flowing out of Beijing nowadays it’s clear that the stability which Xi Jinping has brought to China isn’t going to be the last word. Wong’s finely crafted book shows us why.
• John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong is published by Profile (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
