Adam's Palace

One of the China
trade's bestknown players, Jardines chief China rep Adam Williams, has just
published his first novel, The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure. It is an adventure
yarn set during the Boxer Rebellion when a deadly mixture of Manchu decadence,
western arrogance, peasant superstition and Christian holier-than-thouness led
to an uprising aimed at killing or driving from China all the Foreign Devils. CER
asked Adam what parallels and differences he sees between that time of intense
Chinese-Westerner confrontation a century ago, and today:

Both were times when Western ideas were challenging established Chinese
orthodoxies, railways against feudalism in the 1890s, stock markets and IT
against communism in the 1990s. In both eras, undreamed of wealth and stimulating
new reforms and ideas materialized; the GDP rose, but at the cost of change to
a conservative society which many found disrupting, even damaging and certainly
traumatic. The reaction to this change in our day hasn't produced the bloodbath
that slaughtered missionaries in 1900, but it can be seen in the antics of the
Falungong and, more seriously, in the anger that followed the cover-up during
SARS, when some of the dirty underside of 1990s growth was revealed. Western
ideas and systems, in both eras, had the same ambivalent allure. Nothing could
be more highminded and efficient than our stress on transparency and equitable
systems, but many Chinese sense the stink of greed behind, and question what is
being offered (and after Enron and Iraq, why shouldn't they?). In the
1890s, as foreign powers grabbed land and peasants lost their hauling jobs to
the steam trains, there was certainly a questioning of the benevolence of
progress. It is interesting that Chinese intellectuals are re-examining the historical
period in which I set my novel. The television series, Towards A Republic (Zou
Xiang Gonghe) that was shown earlier this year and is now banned, depicted the
Boxers not as proto Revolutionary Patriots, as the Communist Party would have
them, but as ignorant, superstitious peasants, reacting in a bewildered fashion
to the events of the times by escaping into animist mumbo-jumbo and for their
pains being manipulated by a terrified Court. That interpretation is closer to
mine, as is the portrayal of Minister Li Hongzhang who was shown not as the man
who sold China to the
foreigners which is the current orthodoxy, but as a forward-thinking statesman
who realised that China's
only hope was to ally itself to the new progress brought by the West – whatever
the contradictions.

The Palace of Heavenly
Pleasure (ISBN 0-340-82789-0) by Adam Williams is published by
Hodder and Stoughton.
It is available online and in airports in the Asian Region