Many thanks to Wayne Turmel for originally introducing me to the good people at 8CR, Todd Sattersten (formerly), Jack Covert, and especially Jon Mueller. Here’s the first in a new series I’ll be writing, called Angels Abroad.

From a federal penitentary in Florida, Conrad Black weighs in with his opinions about China’s rise.

My favourite passage from the article:

“China has a centrally directed economy, and calculates growth rates as a func…tion of production, not spending; and production is deemed to occur when it is commissioned by the state. Thus, all Chinese predictions of economic growth are self-fulfilling: The central economic leadership orders production of toasters or submarines and announces construction of roads and sports stadiums, and the anticipated costs are added to the GDP at once.”

Evan writes about the sudden disappearance of civil rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong.

It’s not always in this short, afflicted life of ours that we get the chance to make amends for our past transgressions. At best, our sins constantly dog us, spoiling any chance we may have at getting beyond our one-time capricious oversights. At their worst, our former sins torment us during our every waking hour, horrifying us to such an extent that the ultimate outcome is to inflict grievous harm upon ourselves. Hari-kiri, suicide, or falling on our sword by any other name.

Following an activist youth in the thrall of radical Mao Zedong Thought (aka “Maoism”) while becoming proficient in Marxist and Communist ideology during China’s tumultuous anti-rightist “Great” Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), celebrated Canadian journalist Jan Wong returned to the PRC in a rather different guise — as The Globe and Mail’s chief Beijing correspondent. Throughout the book, she admits to us that the gig was her way of seeking some measure of salvation for her Maoist mistakes.

RED CHINA BLUES (416pp) recounts Wong’s personal “long march.” It begins with a frank declaration: that the book seeks to assuage her past, an existence rife with rampant “self-criticism,” a flippant disdain for all things Western and for capitalist materialism (her father is the proprietor of the Bill Wong chain of Chinese restaurants in Montreal, Canada), and a forgettable experience of twice playing the snitching stool pigeon against a pair of former Peking University classmates.

As the book rises to a crescendo during the catastrophic events at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, Wong dutifully details the folly of her youth, attempting — successsfully, in my opinion — to make amends by exposing the noble work of the latter-day dissidents (from mid-’90s China) and the monumental struggles they experienced in their work to improve a China on the rapid economic upward thrust. Efforts conducted in the face of a panicky PRC government wishing nothing more than to condemn the humiliation of the Tiananmen Square incident to a nameless faceless tomb. She faithfully retraces the steps of her adolescent journey into the evil clutches of the Mao Zedong personality cult, astutely picking apart the microscopic strands of the authoritarian psychology (some would say, pathology) which continues to haunt the leaders of today’s Chinese Politburo and leaders who pull the strings of power in the PRC.

The China which Wong describes in 1996 (when the book was published) is a China not quite sure of itself and its promising (or haunting) future. Existing in vicious denial about the events of its past two decades, the China of Wong’s book does anything and everything in its grasp to squelch any discussion of its obvious Tiananmen mishandling — both by the PRC’s army  and its protesting students and their supporters. The China Wong describes has instead opted to make a Faustian pact with its former adveraries in promising them material comfort and progress at any cost, staking its very future on its ability to do into the forseeable future.

The narratives introduces the key protagonists of the era — student protesters and activists who populated the Public Security Bureau’s then notorious “hit list” — then-students like the intrepid Uyghur Wu’er Kaixi, the list’s No. 2, who boldly demonstrated together with his university peers for a dismantling of the corrupt old-boy networks that remain a staple of late 21st-century Chinese dealings more than ten years since the publication of this book.

Wong also tells about China’s wretchedly poor peasantry, those overworked, huddled rural souls too distant from China’s various commercial capitals to truly enjoy the fruits of the country’s “peaceful rise,” unable to participate in the China Dream. She often goes undercover (Wong is an Overseas Chinese) to bring us the story, and often at great risk to her person knowing full-well that the slightest slip-up might lead to her expulsion and possible imprisonment in China for going places she clearly shouldn’t, for asking questions deemed verboten by the leaders of the world’s most populous country.

Always entertaining and delectably poignant at other spots, Wong weaves an insightful tale less about a sleeping giant caught in an uncertain transitional flux, but more about a personal crusade against a regrettable impetuous youth wastefully spent caught in the enthralling throes of a corrupt movement whicxh cruelly betrayed its most strident acolytes.

I guarantee you this: you will feel for Jan Wong as you make your way through this read. You can almost taste her sincerity, her desperate wish to see the realization of her version of the ideal China, that very same China of her imagination which drew her in so mightily decades ago.

It’s a China she one day hopes its citizens will live long enough enough to experience for themselves.