Why China Will Never Rule the World

by Ernie Diaz

For the first time in the history of foreign writing on China, a book with only one disingenuous feature: the title. You can read that title, Why China Will Never Rule the World, and be forgiven for assuming author Troy Parfitt has laboriously amassed a 400+ page tome of weighty analysis with which to assess both sides’ chances in the next Cold War. Pish posh. If you ask Mr. Parfitt, China doesn’t rule because, to employ the threadbare idiom, it sucks.

Thus with the title does Parfitt deftly bait jingoistic square heads and other one-percenters who won’t read a book about China unless it resembles a position paper they can tout to fellow members of the G. Gordon Liddy Appreciation Society. For the rest of us, Parfitt has blasted a new watershed in the mountain of China writing, with the first Post-PC China travel book.

If you’ve been in China a while, you may have come to enjoy that smug feeling of complicity when a foreign writer is being dry, arch, wry, circumspect, and everything else  but direct about the country’s shortcomings. You’ll get none of that from Troy Parfitt. He’s that rare but memorable significant other who has the sand not to fall back on “Hey, it’s not you, it’s me,” but rather informs you of your poor bedroom performance as the reason for the break up.

So yes, unless you’re that guy at the bar making everyone else uncomfortable with your high-decibel Sino-bashing, this book will make you squirm. If you’re Chinese, it will make you want to kill. Is there a Mandarin character for fatwah? Troy Parfitt had best hope not.

Really, the bald-faced temerity with which Parfitt hands down his pronouncements on all perceived defects in the Chinese character. Such arrogance – such insolence! Kindly check off the following Parfitt sound bites that you’ve never once thought to yourself, friends of China:

“…Chinese people consider Westerners to be naïve and unsophisticated in the extreme…”

“Perhaps it’s because the Chinese lead lives of such great tedium that they are such great busybodies.”

“China is a nation of great fakery; there’s fake sushi, fake steak, fake gravy, …fake education, fake rights, fake laws, fake courts, fake judges, a fake congress, a fake constitution…”

“It never ceases to amaze me, especially in light of the fact there’s so little trust in the Chinese world, just how eager people are to submit to an authority figure – to any authority figure, even one whose job it is to lead people through karaoke… “

“…Chinese culture remains locked in a self-replicating state of chaos, myopia, inefficiency, intolerance, violence, and irrationality. It is, in a word, backward.”

You checked them all, right? So did we, so did we. But we’re doing a disservice to make it sound as though Parfitt’s sole purpose is to lambast the Chinese with a two-by-four. After all, he’s no callow backpacker in the throws of culture shock, but a Taiwan expat with a decade’s seasoning. Thus his frequent summations of what plagues the celestial soul are punch lines to his misadventures in China’s most famous spots, delivered in the entitled air with which Eminem uses the N-word.

And oh, what an ill-starred perambulation of the Middle Kingdom did Parfitt make. From Harbin to Nanning, he is met with psychotic bureaucrats, treacherous ticket agents, and assorted cast members of profound annoyance. Think Larry David touring Dante’s Inferno. Again and again, Parfitt finds the last shreds of his enthusiasm curbed by Chinese hell-bent on confirming a hypothesis he does his damndest to refute with perverse levels of patience and reason. We’ll pass on trying to convey the humor of even one of his episodes – you have to be there, and Parfitt takes you there, where you’re laughing with him and at him and hearing the schmaltzy sitcom horn riffs all at the same time.

But yes, there is a unifying theme to the travelogue, to blast the trending notion that China’s ascendancy is anything other than economic. To set the stage, Parfitt uses the time-honored method of segueing from his arrival in a new spot to a bit of instructive history, yet does so with rare élan. Mao was deranged, Chiang Kai-shek a bumbling fool, so you’ve heard…but did you know the former communicated military strategy by shaking his legs? That the latter plundered a Japan-built Taiwan in the name of anti-Communist unification? That Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) was rescued from his soured gangster connections by an English servant? Parfitt manages to keep the history lessons concise yet bursting with juicy tidbits, all to illustrate that China’s most celebrated figures and glories are built on foundations as wobbly as those of migrant worker housing. A slap in the face to those who like their myths intact, but then those types are begging for a little chin music, no? Perhaps that’s just sour grapes from we who’ve lived to see Jefferson recast as a syphilitic slave molester.

Not that Parfitt deconstructs Chinese history purely for disparaging or comedic effect. Eventually he launches into a comparison of contemporaries Confucius and Socrates, arriving at the philosophical roots of his argument:

“Socrates believed that the status quo ought to be continually questioned and challenged. That would make for a better and more just society. Furthermore, citizens are morally bound to scrutinize those in authority. Confucius believed that the status quo must never be questioned or challenged. It may only be altered by those in authority. Consequently, change in a Confucian society occurs incrementally, if it occurs at all. Presently, China and its culture and society are being touted as dynamic, but that is the very thing they aren’t.”

Wherever you stand on China’s world-status, its future and past, Why China Will Never Rule the World is an immensely enjoyable read, given a requisite thickness of skin. We’ll even recommend it to Chinese readers in the spirit we’d recommend Israel boosters read an intimate portrait of Gaza, or Americans read about what the hell is really going on in Kabul and Kandahar. It’s a weak world-view that bears no challenging.

Finally, any China tourists other than those on packaged tours are well advised to read through Why China Will Never Rule the World. Parfitt excels at showing you the China that happens while you’re busy making other plans: the Africans aggressively hawking marijuana, the attendants in empty dining cars who won’t let you choose your own seat. If nothing else, such readers will be intermediate China-bashers before they even get off the plane.

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1. The End of the World
2. Film review: The World of Suzy Wong
3. Buddha Dreams and this World of Horror
4. China Links, China Expat Style
5. China Briefing’s China Business Guides

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