While dropping off some stuff at the local PTA store a little while back, we browsed through the collection of used books and picked up a bunch, including “China: Alive in the Bitter Sea”, a 1982 book by Fox Butterfield, the New York Times’ first Beijing bureau chief. I’m almost through the book, and it’s been an extremely enjoyable read and a must-read for anyone interested in China.
The book, which draws its title from a Chinese phrase that means surviving in difficult circumstances, paints a vivid and sometimes gritty picture of life in China in the late 1970s, relaying the stories from a nation recovering from a decade lost to the madness and destruction of the Cultural Revolution, which raged from 1966 to 1976. Butterfield addresses seemingly every aspect of Chinese life, from erotic literature to tales of horror from labor camps.
Aside from pulling from his own experiences in China in the late 70s and early 80s, Butterfield also draws upon stories of earlier times from the many Chinese people he got to know. In retelling their stories, he demonstrates an amazing ability to get people who are living under a paranoid government that controls seemingly every aspect of daily life to open up to him. This is even more impressive considering the risks that many of these people were taking in even talking to a foreigner, much less giving personal, and sometimes sensitive, information to a foreign journalist (in fact, one of Butterfield’s interviewees was imprisoned for her actions). As someone who grew up in China in the 1980s, I can definitely relate to some of the stories while being taken aback by others, especially some of the ones about atrocities during the Cultural Revolution.
I’ve always believed that in order to truly understand what the breakneck-speed economic development of the last 20 years mean for China and its people, one must first understand where they were before that. Reading Butterfield’s book would be a good first step in gaining that understanding.