Favorite Articles Issue 4 – China
April 16, 2025
China
This week I have dug up three articles on the one country at the forefront of people’s minds: China. Despite my best efforts to understand the country, China remains a mystery. Like my own birth country (the USA), China is too large to easily understand at a glance. Although I have read much about China and tried to understand some of its nuance, I still feel as though I am the proverbial blind man piecing together an elephant. Thus, having only touched the surface, I must admit that I have no idea what China is. However, I hope that the three articles linked below provide some insight and help you understand what China might be and what it may have become.
Chabuduo
James Palmer’s 2016 essay, “What Chinese Corner-Cutting Reveals about Modernity”, offers insight into China’s economic boom and its potential for bust. Palmer’s essay centers on the mandarin term chabuduo meaning ‘good enough’. Palmer argues that chabuduo is a cultural encapsulation of the break-neck pace of development in China, but that the attitude it stands for has costs and repercussions that have already begun to reveal cracks that may ultimately fracture the country. Whether the country has broken apart in the 9 years since this essay’s publication is up for debate.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-about-modernity
Modernity
2018’s “Human Impulses Run Riot: China’s Shocking Pace of Change” written by Yu Hua outlines the impact of China’s tumultuous modern history. Yu Hua carries his readers through Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, and Xi Jinping’s dictatorial pursuits to characterize the fractious reality of a country that wants the world to ignore the cracks in its monolithic image.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/06/human-impulses-run-riot-chinas-shocking-pace-of-change
Enigma
Another James Palmer essay, “Nobody Knows Anything about China: Including the Chinese Government”, describes China as a veritable black box. Written in 2018, Palmer’s essay presages China’s efforts to obtain biometric information from its citizenry to demystify the country. Even China doesn’t understand China, but through recent investments in big data, the government is on a mission to know everything about everyone, all the time.