Jonathan Mirsky

Thursday

28 Jun 2018
Jonathan Mirsky

The neighbour from hell

Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly. Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 and the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the diaspora of about 130,000 Tibetan refugees, battered by decades of Chinese oppression and ‘soft’ propaganda, is riven by confusion. Some cling to their hope that Tibet will again be sovereign and they will be able to return to their homeland. Greg Bruno, modestly described on the book’s flyleaf as a journalist, is actually an expert on many aspects of Tibet’s history, Chinese oppression and persecution — ironically termed ‘blessings’ by the Dalai Lama — and most of all the conditions of the Tibetan diaspora and the deepening despair that rends it.

The neighbour from hell

Friday

2 Feb 2018
Jonathan Mirsky

Theresa May and the curious case of human rights in China

Did Theresa May raise human rights with China during her visit to Beijing this week or not? The Chinese press has praised her for not mentioning the most neuralgic issue between China and all visiting officials. Downing Street sources, however, stated flatly that Mrs May raised the issue with both President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. The Global Times, a voice of the Chinese Communist Party, said the 'Sino-UK partnership transcends media mudslinging over human rights...May will definitely not make any comment contrary to the goals of her China trip'. It contended, too, 'while the government is responsible for public well-being, the media tends to whip up sensations while disregarding sound international relations.

Theresa May and the curious case of human rights in China

Thursday

26 Oct 2017
Jonathan Mirsky

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

The Vietnam War BBC4 The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that 'some viewers may find some scenes upsetting'. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of what he thought were leaves, which he realised were the ears of dead enemies? (In Vietnam I saw marines wearing necklaces made of ears.

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

Saturday

14 Oct 2017
Jonathan Mirsky

Richard Nixon: the nightmare president of his age

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and  lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of the press and the east-coast elite, and feelings of having been short-changed and despised by snobs, held steady until their hero and champion unmistakably broke the law and had to resign his second-term presidency. Nixon won a smashing re-election in 1972, even as it was apparent that the White House was awash with skulduggery. His closest aides were caught, arrested and charged with breaking into the Watergate complex, where there were Democrat offices — though Farrell contends that Nixon gave no express orders for these and similar acts.

Richard Nixon: the nightmare president of his age

Thursday

12 Oct 2017
Jonathan Mirsky

His dark materials | 12 October 2017

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of the age for many Americans, even as he won years of near-adulation from many others. One can only think of Donald Trump. Nixon appealed to lower- and  lower-middle-class whites from the heartland, whose hatred of the press and the east-coast elite, and feelings of having been short-changed and despised by snobs, held steady until their hero and champion unmistakably broke the law and had to resign his second-term presidency. Nixon won a smashing re-election in 1972, even as it was apparent that the White House was awash with skulduggery. His closest aides were caught, arrested and charged with breaking into the Watergate complex, where there were Democrat offices — though Farrell contends that Nixon gave no express orders for these and similar acts.

His dark materials | 12 October 2017

Thursday

13 Jul 2017
Jonathan Mirsky

The lesson of Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died, eight years into his 11-year prison term. He was the greatest champion of democracy in a country where there are many others also detained by the Communist Party, which insists those convicted are not dissidents but criminals. Tried in 2009 for subversion, Liu had just been moved under police guard into a hospital and diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. While his original sentence aroused an international outcry, followed by the award of the prize in Oslo — where his chair was empty — the news of his fatal illness provoked demands that he be allowed to go abroad for possible treatment. Liu himself said he would prefer to die in the West —as long as his wife, the indomitable Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest in Beijing for almost as long as her husband’s prison sentence, was allowed to accompany him, together with her brother, another political prisoner.

The lesson of Liu Xiaobo

Thursday

25 May 2017
Jonathan Mirsky

The ruin of a ruin

In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities. In an icy fury, Paul Veyne, a French expert on Palmyra, has dedicated this comprehensive, passionate, but concise book to the memory of the murdered Syrian scholar. In it he relates thousands of years of Palmyra’s history, describing those who lived there and pausing only briefly to underline what monsters Isis were to smash the site. You may suppose that Palmyra was just one of those many ancient cities scattered around the globe about which we should know more if only we had the time.

The ruin of a ruin

Thursday

29 Dec 2016
Jonathan Mirsky

Whisper who dares

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism. When people were standing in line, hour after hour, hoping to receive their tiny rations, if someone dropped dead, those alert enough rushed to steal their ration card.

Whisper who dares

Thursday

8 Dec 2016
Jonathan Mirsky

A girl in a million

All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed me as this one, just as events alarmed and frightened its central character. She is Okatsu, a young woman from the samurai Satsuma Clan in mid-19th-century Japan. The country has been ruled by the shogunate, a military caste, since the early 17th century; the emperors were remote figures until their restoration to power in 1868. China is already under attack and exploitation by Britain and the US, and many Japanese fear they may be next. Some urge driving the foreigners off, while others — realists — insist that treaties must be signed that yield some sovereignty to the westerners even while Japan is modernising.

A girl in a million

Thursday

29 Sep 2016
Jonathan Mirsky

Untold tales of Tibet

On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer residence in Lhasa, and began his flight to India, where he arrived on 31 March, after crossing some of Tibet’s most rugged terrain. He was so heavily disguised that the faithful crowds who had gathered to worship and protect him along the way mistakenly prostrated themselves before a monk in his entourage. Establishing in Dharamsala Tibet’s first democratically elected government, the Dalai Lama has ever since travelled the world making clear how the Chinese occupiers — who invaded Tibet in 1950 — eviscerated the country’s traditional culture. This story, mostly well told by Jianglin Li, should be required reading for foreign dupes, including a Harvard Tibetologist quoted recently in a China Daily supplement wrapped around the Daily Telegraph.

Untold tales of Tibet

Thursday

28 Apr 2016
Jonathan Mirsky

Mao devours his foes

Frank Dikötter, professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and winner of the Samuel Johnson prize in 2011, is the author of many studies on China, most notably two on Mao’s dark rule. This new book completes the trilogy. The first volume, The Tragedy of Liberation, made plain, more exhaustively than previous accounts, that from the beginning of his time as Chairman, Mao was paranoid and murderous, and that Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping egged him on. The second volume, the prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine, examined, in characteristic detail, the Chairman’s responsibility for the 1959–1961 famine, which killed 30 to 50 million Chinese. Now we are shown that millions continued to starve for years after 1961.

Mao devours his foes

Thursday

24 Sep 2015
Jonathan Mirsky

‘Money, money, money’

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3" title="Listen: Fraser Nelson and Jonathan Mirsky discuss Britain's attitude towards China" startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer] The Dalai Lama is a connoisseur of absurdity. When we met in London on Monday I reminded him that two years ago, desperate to resume relations with China, No. 10 said it had ‘turned the page on that issue,’ by which he meant the Dalai Lama. He responded with his celebrated chuckle but it became clear that he’s far from sanguine about being snubbed by Britain. He agreed with me that not even Beijing could have thought up a phrase like ‘turn the page’. And in case Beijing didn’t get that craven message, Mr Cameron’s team spelt it out: the Prime Minister has ‘no plans’ to see the Dalai Lama again.

‘Money, money, money’

Thursday

20 Aug 2015
Jonathan Mirsky

Monster of misrule

Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in 1976. Even today his giant portrait gazes down over Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 his successors massacred hundreds of students and workers. After so many years and books and articles, can anything new be said about him? Although Andrew Walder, a Stanford sociologist and leading China scholar, writes that his comprehensive and deadly analysis is primarily for non-specialists, he has made me think. President Xi Jinping, who will make a state visit to London in October, speaks highly of Mao. Such praise, concludes Walder, requires ‘highly selective historical memory and a great deal of forgetting’. What has been erased in many memories is that Mao was a monster (not a word used by Walder), responsible for countless Chinese deaths, not least the 30 million, between 1958 and 1961, who starved during a famine that owed everything to his manias (and the co-operation of cronies like Zhou Enlai).

Monster of misrule

Thursday

16 Apr 2015
Jonathan Mirsky

Little brother’s helper

Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively pulls the rug out from under the other? Of course Gyalo Thondup is entitled to tell his story, beginning with his life as a boy in a small town near the Tibet-China border where, in 1937, his younger brother was identified as the 14th Dalai Lama. He recalls everything from then on without a shadow of doubt: his family’s long overland trip to Lhasa, their transformed, luxurious life there, his trips to China, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong, learning Chinese and about China, and marrying a Chinese woman. He further describes being wooed by governments and intelligence agencies — having been entrusted by the Dalai Lama with foreign affairs — as well as his contacts with Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek and Deng Xiaoping.

Little brother’s helper

Thursday

4 Dec 2014
Jonathan Mirsky

Deng Xiaoping: following in Mao’s footsteps

Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. But apart from his fondness for eating croissants and playing bridge, and the fact that his second wife left him for a party colleague — Michael Dillon records the divorce only — we still know little about Deng himself. Mao Zedong’s personality, on the other hand, was often remarked on — from Edgar Snow’s first meeting with him in 1936 to Henry Kissinger’s in 1971(both men swooned in his presence). Dillon rightly notes that Vogel compressed a large part of Deng’s life into a mere 30 pages. In this biography the entire life and career are given appropriate space. Unfortunately, however, what the author does, with a few exceptions, is to excuse or explain away Deng’s record as a violent disciple of Mao, resorting to evasive words like ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ and ‘perhaps’.

Deng Xiaoping: following in Mao’s footsteps

Monday

17 Nov 2014
Jonathan Mirsky

Spectator books of the year: Jonathan Mirsky on dogs

The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by Mikita Brottman (William Collins, £16.99). I have read thousands of books in my 81 years and this is the only one that has made me happy. Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the real world out there, towards which I am increasingly ambivalent’. This book deals frankly and unsentimentally with the question of whether dogs really love us and describes close relationships between dogs and their owners, going back to Alexander the Great and including Virginia Woolf, Galsworthy and Dickens. And into each learned, sprightly chapter pads Grisby. The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China by Kerry Brown (I.

Spectator books of the year: Jonathan Mirsky on dogs

Thursday

2 Oct 2014
Jonathan Mirsky

Am I wrong to fear another Tiananmen?

For Beijing, the tens of thousands of protestors choking the centre of Hong Kong are such a dangerous outrage that mainland media cannot report on them. The real outrage is this: China agreed to hold free elections in 2017, but now a Beijing-appointed committee will determine whether candidates for chief executive can be relied on to toe Beijing’s line. On 6 September, a Chinese embassy official wrote to the Times that in 2017 there would be a one-man one-vote election in Hong Kong. He omitted to mention that Beijing has selected the committee that will approve the candidates. On 15 September, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote to the Daily Telegraph attacking Lord Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, for criticising Beijing’s arrangements for the election and for claiming that those arrangements are a denial of democracy.

Am I wrong to fear another Tiananmen?

Thursday

29 May 2014
Jonathan Mirsky

Talking to the ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Twenty-five years ago, Rowena Xiaoqing He, then a schoolgirl, was participating in the Tiananmen-supporting demonstrations in Canton. Far from the capital, this was one of several hundred cities that rose up during that Chinese spring. Following the Tiananmen killings on 3–4 June 1989, she was warned by her teacher to remove the black mourning band she wore on her sleeve. After some years working in Canton she moved to Canada, where she secured advanced degrees; she now teaches an undergraduate course on Tiananmen at Harvard. Tiananmen Exiles is a brave book. It concentrates on the testimonies of three of the student leaders in Beijing and Canton, two of whom are still barred from their homeland. Rowena He shows, after meticulous interviews conducted over long periods, how these men were brought up, how their views of what they intended and accomplished in 1989 differ, and, fascinatingly, how their memories and opinions have changed over the years.

Talking to the ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Tuesday

3 Dec 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

David Cameron’s craven surrender to China follows a pattern

‘This week I make a visit to China. I come with a clear ambition: to build a lasting friendship that can become a blueprint for future cooperation between our countries. We have a responsibility through our ongoing dialogue to work together on a range of wider international issues – from negotiations with Iran, to counter-terrorism and climate change.’  North Korea’s President Kim on the verge of his latest visit to Beijing? It must be. North Korea is China’s only ally in the normal sense of the word. With all other countries, Beijing’s relationship waxes and wanes depending on how ‘friendly’ Beijing deems them to be. But no, actually. This, lightly edited by me, was David Cameron writing in the Chinese trade magazine Cai Xin, on the eve of this week’s visit to China taking with him one of the largest trade delegations, 120 strong, Britain has ever sent abroad.

David Cameron’s craven surrender to China follows a pattern

Thursday

7 Nov 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

Bill Bryson’s ‘long extraordinary’ summer is too long

Hands up Spectator readers who can remember the American celebrities Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the  adulteress and husband-killer Ruth Snyder  who all, in 1927, lit up what Bill Bryson calls ‘one hell of a summer’. Born in America only five years later, I knew about most of these characters. Lindbergh, in particular, whose flight across the Atlantic from the east coast to Paris made him for some years the most famous man ‘on the planet’ (one of Bryson’s favourite phrases), attracted vast crowds; once, in a welcoming frenzy, they almost tore his plane apart — an easy feat considering that it was covered in fabric. Flying the ‘Spirit of St Louis’, Bryson observes, was ‘rather like crossing the ocean in a tent’.

Bill Bryson’s ‘long extraordinary’ summer is too long

Thursday

17 Oct 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

Is your dog enjoying more than physical exercise when you walk him?

Skip this book if you dislike dogs, or even if you are indifferent to them, or echo an acquaintance of Brian Sewell’s who told him: ‘We expected better of you than such silly, sentimental anthropomorphism.’ If you are such a person, you will be horrified by Sewell’s habits — starting with the one of the title (sometimes he sleeps with four dogs together). He also feeds his dogs from the table, doesn’t care when they destroy his rarest books to devour the animal-based glue in the bindings, and dislikes being advised to ‘get another dog’ when one of them dies, About the death of one of his favourites, he has the following to say — and this really is pretty odd: ‘I wrapped her in a child’s blanket, put her in a wicker basket and exposed it on the flat roof of the house, where rain, sun and wind reduced her to a perfect skeleton.

Is your dog enjoying more than physical exercise when you walk him?

Thursday

4 Jul 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum - review

After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what about 70-odd years of harming children in ‘care’ homes, and prisoners, with toxin injections, -radioactive blasts, electro-shocks to the brain and frontal lobotomies — all done in the interests of medical advance by leading American doctors and scientists, one of whom was -awarded a Nobel Prize? Furthermore, what if the CIA sponsored such work in the interest of defending the US against Soviet threats? We condemned Nazi scientists like Josef Mengele for doing such things, resulting in the 1947 Nuremberg Protocol forbidding experiments and treatments employing ‘force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or any ulterior form of constraint or coercion’ — a document, this invaluable book states, which most medical students and doctors have never seen.

Thursday

20 Jun 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

China’s War with Japan, by Rana Mitter - review

The Sino-Japanese struggle that began in 1937, two years before the rest of the world plunged into war, is not as unknown as Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Oxford, contends in this comprehensive new book. His copious notes, after all, display how well that conflict has been studied by many scholars. But in the sense that few Westerners under the age of 80 can string more than two sentences together about those terrible eight years, he is right. It is a big story, and for the most part Mitter tells it well. The scene — China — is vast. Two competing leaders, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, dominate it. In the wings are Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill who, once the war began for them in the Soviet Union, the Pacific and Europe, brought China on to the international stage — just enough to keep Japan at bay on the Asian mainland — but treated Chiang Kai-shek’s regime like a third-rate power.

China’s War with Japan, by Rana Mitter - review

Thursday

30 May 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

The Dark Road, by Ma Jian - review

If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of the startling Beijing Coma, prepared for this evocative and sometimes horrifying novel by travelling through Chinese regions few tourists see. There he encountered some of the millions of women who had just given birth to babies declared illegal by the one-child family laws, which were taken away and sold by corrupt officials to rich foreigners eager to adopt. He saw, too, the effects on the poor migrants who disassemble our unwanted televisions and computers and poison themselves by handling the toxic parts. And he saw the shops manufacturing fake Western luxury goods and pasting ‘Made in France’ labels on them.

Thursday

21 Mar 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig - review

Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages. Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 in despair at Hitler’s destruction of their civilisation.

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig - review

Thursday

31 Jan 2013
Jonathan Mirsky

Going under

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards. But then, slowly and horrifyingly, he charts the not-so-gradual collapse of his once super-fit body. ‘What began as a swimming diary is turning into a chronicle of ageing.

Thursday

6 Dec 2012
Jonathan Mirsky

The plot thickens | 6 December 2012

At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or ... as a primer in a particular field, or to provide a new angle on an old subject. You can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee. So what do you get from this Special? John Garnaut, an Australian journalist who specialises in Chinese affairs, describes here, in steamy prose foreshadowed by the sub-title, an example of the self-cannibalism that has wracked most communist regimes, and certainly the Chinese Communist Party almost since its founding in 1921.

Thursday

15 Nov 2012
Jonathan Mirsky

All in the telling

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly. But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny. ‘Some of the funniest stories I have heard,’ he writes, were in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. They were about ‘people having their legs shot off, defecating all over their cells and knee-capping each other’.

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