Word: butterfields
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...that the Communists hestitate to resort to force if "necessary." Arbitrary justice and unfair punishments abound, Butterfield notes, and the labor camp system is just as chilling as the Soviet Union. Struggle sessions, confessions, slave work, and summary execution are the rule in Chinese gulags. Butterfield learned from former prisoners. He is troubled by the failure of Westerners--who have followed closely the terrors of the Soviet gulags--to examine as closely similar excesses of the Chinese system...
BEYOND THE APATHY and terror of China, however, Butterfield tries to show a little of what everyday life is like--the struggle to get by in the morass of tight control, endless bureaucracy, mania for secrecy, and inefficient economic planning. The key here, he reiterates, is guan-xi, or connections. Tying together China's millions are invisible threads of relation between friends and acquaintances. "It's who you know. . .if you do something for him...then he'll do something..."--this sort of backdoor agreement is the lifeblood of the system, and the real avenue for getting things done...
Moreover, he describes an economy wracked by inefficiency and inequality. New equipment lies unused in factories around the country. Too much emphasis has been placed on heavy industry, and the government has neglected such fundamental sectors as transportation, housing, consumer goods, and agriculture. Indeed, Butterfield notes that in the land where Mao hoped to bring about equality for the countryside, farmers lag for behind city-dwellers economically, and the central planners have done little to bridge this...
...Although Butterfield's vision of China is bleak, he never degenerates into spite. The approach is factual and dispassionate, the work detailed and well-documented. Butterfield's conclusions are not the result of one or two conversations, but of dozens of interviews, penetrating observations, and a deep understanding of Chinese traditions. He compiles an impressive array of contacts and uses them well, giving us not a blind and hateful rejection of Chinese communism, but a precise analysis of its problems...
...Butterfield is the first to agree that the Communist rule is a marked improvement over that of the decrepit Nationalist regime it replaced. But this apology for China's present problems, he notes quite correctly, ignores the "reality that 65 percent of China's one billion people...have been born since liberation and don't remember the bad old days...all they can remember is tumultuous political campaigns and a sluggish economy." Such an explanation is "condescending and insulting," he notes. "It suggests that China could not do as well economically as its neighbors Taiwan and South Korea, or achieve...