One of the factors that motivated me to tell the story of a
2,500-year-old Chinese city was the gradual realization that I was discovering
(for myself, at least) a much broader story about greater China. And not just
about the Chinese empire’s history and culture, but explanations for many
characteristics and behaviors of China as a twenty-first-century global
power.
Just as America today is a clear product of its careening,
four-hundred-year past, so too, present-day China bears the burdens of a much
longer, and far more fractious and tear-stained, history. “Study the past if
you would define the future,” Confucius wrote in the Analects, and so it is that any understanding of modern China on
the global economic and geopolitical stage demands an understanding of its
past.
Suzhou was never the imperial capital, never the home of
emperors, never a seat of military power beyond the city’s first few founding
decades some twenty-five centuries ago.
Yet culturally, commercially, intellectually, and aesthetically, it
could be viewed as the beating heart of the Chinese empire’s corpus for nearly
the entire millennium just past. Suzhou’s past is thus China’s past, or at
least a highly informative mirror of that broader past, and consequently
provides numerous insights into today’s (and, likely, tomorrow’s) China.
For example, the story of Suzhou sheds helpful light on the
inordinate Chinese attention to education, on the university admissions system
(their infamous, three-day-long, one-shot-only version of the SAT called the gaokao), and on the current predilection
for the very highest levels of government to be populated so heavily by
technocrats, predominantly individuals with engineering backgrounds. The same
history helps explain the long-standing desire of so many for civil service and
similar official positions, the benefits derived therefrom, the predilection
for top-down internal control, and the difficulty of imposing centrally issued
directives on a widespread bureaucracy. Suzhou’s story also yields a better
understanding of China’s attitude toward the Western world, its periodic
introversion, its deep distrust of cult religions and their charismatic
leaders, and its anathema toward any forms of social unrest and organized
protest. National characteristics like the ones above are just a handful of
those whose rationale can be better grasped through the story of Suzhou’s long,
nationally meaningful history.
The usual pathways to China’s daunting past are weighty
tomes filled with endless accounts of Emperor This and General That, Invaders
Them and Battled There, nearly always centered on palace intrigues and
succession disputes at the empire’s various seats of government over the
centuries. Beautiful Su offers a
refreshingly different approach, static in a place that was evolving, thriving,
and suffering over time with the rest of the nation. Chinese life and history
can be seen as lived, not simply viewed from 30,000 feet as some abstract
exercise of realpolitik.
