Featured Writing
Fragile China: The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
February 4, 2012
Copyright The Wall Street Journal
What becomes of a nation when it attains its long-harbored goal of surpassing the world’s longtime economic leader?
Recent history offers two imperfect but instructive examples. In the early 20th century, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany interpreted its sprint past Britain as license to reshape the world in its image—by force.
Several decades later Japan began conquering the world with its goods, briefly surpassing the U.S., at least in per capita nominal GDP. This prompted much hand-wringing in the West about how to keep up with this new economic juggernaut and its rapidly acquired wealth. Almost as quickly as it had risen, though, in the 1990s Japan embarked on an extended navel-gazing walkabout from which it has never really returned.
Both of these episodes have been explored thoroughly in literature. But “The Fat Years,” an inventive and highly topical novel by Chan Koonchung, is among the first to explore a scenario that much of the world is speculating about today: What happens once China can boast having the world’s top economy? His descriptions of the excesses of contemporary China—the book is set in the very near future of 2013—are so vivid that the book was banned in China when it was first published in 2009, and the background of world economic crisis has the immediacy of journalism, a setup to which Mr. Chan adds a speculative dystopian twist.
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Continue Reading Against All Odds: How ‘Crazy’ Kim Jong Il Outfoxed the World
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Continue Reading And Once More the World Shrugs at the Congo
Surviving Mao, Revamping a Nation
Published October 21, 2011
Copyright The Wall Street Journal From the outset of his hefty biography of the second most powerful leader in the history of modern China, Ezra Vogel wants readers to know that writing about Deng Xiaoping was not easy. As a figure who for decades swam with the sharks—and survived—at the highest levels of Chinese politics under an emperor-like Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) relied on a prodigious memory rather than prepared texts when he spoke; he left behind no notes or personal papers; and in most matters he scrupulously observed party discipline. Even as he suffered through three purges, Deng was said to have refrained from speaking with his wife and children about political matters. Such limitations on the aspiring …
