HERE'S a China story. An activist in Beijing's Tiananmen Square demonstrations was angry. I did not spend 18 years getting educated in order to have guns pointed at me," he said, a couple of days after the confrontation of June, 1989. There are only two ways out now - go abroad, or go into business.
If there is a single anecdote in the 500-plus pages of this book which reveals more about one of the world's most misunderstood nations, surely it is this one. Protesters awarded an official pedigree? Why, yes. Take Muo Qizhong, a dissident sentenced to death during the Cultural Revolution. Rehabilitated, released, detained and released again, he is now chairman of the Nande Economic Group, a successful trading corporation.
A "China-watcher" of some 40 years standing, Dick Wilson is a journalist and lecturer who has already written several books on Asian politics and society - and whose latest tome is, he says, his final book on Chinese life. It's a competitive market: such is the interest in the Middle Kingdom that there appears to be no shortage of memoirs and western interpretations currently on publishers' lists.
A rapid history lesson, then, in the first 19 pages may not have been the best choice of introduction. Wilson's use of the well-worn Napoleon quote - "when the Chinese giant awakes, the world will tremble" - may also induce a yawn among those who have been enthralled by other recent works, such as China Wakes by the New York Times correspondents. Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
Yet this is equally compelling in its breadth of understanding about a complex society, representing "the world in microcosm".
Take the human rights issue. which is the subject of a new Amnesty International campaign. Chinese leaders want to achieve their economic miracle first, and then attend to political reforms, as other east Asian states did before, Wilson explains. With 55 listed capital offences, and up to 20,000 executions a year, China is the fifth lowest in the world league of friendly hosts, better only than Iraq, North Korea, Burma and Sudan. For those who don't "go into business" or flee, like some of the more fortunate dissidents, torture is a fact of life.
How does the government get away with it? It is tolerated, he explains. In a society where the sense of the collective is superior to that of the individual, the average man in the street" prefers to know that the rulers are keeping law and order. Stability among a population of 1.2 billion is the imperative.
Why then do dissidents gain any attention? Again, Wilson has an answer: Chinese leaders lack the legitimacy of election, feel insecure, and persecute their critics. In his view, the Tiananmen Square crisis was an incident", rather than a "massacre", which was distorted by the foreign media, badly handled by the current prime minister, Li Peng, against the backdrop of the Gorbachev visit to Beijing.
Without being in any way an apologist, he places events in perspective. How many of us remember that the army was not completely on the side of Deng Xiaoping during the student revolt? That at least seven leading generals wrote to the People's Daily opposing the proclamation of martial law? That the students were disunited? As the Chinese proverb attests, it is "easier to seize power than to maintain it".
Two "major groups of actors" on the political stage are bound by their own weaknesses, Wilson says. Intellectuals are uncertain about suitable forms of democracy, while the Communist Party is cracking under the strain of its lust for power and acceptance of the need for authority.
Corruption, nepotism based on respect for the family bond, Western influences, continuing female infanticide, Tibet, Confucianism, the role of the army, the breathtaking economic growth, the firm rejection of the small nation-state as a political model - Wilson appears to leave little out in an impressive reference work, which concludes on an optimistic note.
Language is the key, he emphasises. An outwardly aggressive image can be tamed if China is met halfway in the "cultural game", he suggests. Democracy as we know it is unlikely to occur overnight, but change is occurring at "grass-roots level" in local villages.
In his view, China will not be influenced is more likely to be alienated by "the preaching of a Clinton or Patten", the "condescending editorials in the Washington press" and "the critical resolutions of Western parliaments or the United Nations".
The Middle Kingdom may grow to be an "avuncular" rather than a "savage" tiger, he forecasts. It has much to teach us, he says, even if frustration and inexperience in international diplomacy prompt it to "scowl and roar".
