63 pages • 2 hours read
China in Ten Words
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Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, including executions and suicides.
Yu Hua begins by recounting his first job out of medical school in 1978, working as a dentist in a small town in southern China. In addition to his regular duties, he was tasked with administering vaccinations to factory workers and children each summer. At the time, China was a poor country, but it provided free immunizations through a strong public health network.
Due to the lack of disposable needles and primitive sterilization methods, the reusable needles would develop barbs over time. While the factory workers endured the pain stoically, Yu Hua was deeply affected when he witnessed the intense distress and bleeding the barbed needles caused in young children. This experience led him to take the time to grind the needles to keep them sharp, despite the toll it took on his fingers.
Yu Hua expresses remorse for not having realized sooner the pain he was causing others, believing that if he had pricked his own arm with a barbed needle he would have understood their suffering. This realization left a lasting impact on him, both as a person and as a writer, teaching him that knowing what it means to live and write comes from making the suffering of others a part of one’s own experience. Yu Hua explains that when he writes about China’s pain, he is also writing about his own pain.
Yu Hua then transitions to a discussion of China’s rapid development over the past 30 years, noting that the speed of change has often obscured the underlying causes of the numerous conflicts and problems that have arisen. He sees his task as a writer to trace these issues back to their roots, even if doing so causes discomfort.
Drawing on the Confucian philosopher Mencius, Yu Hua suggests that adversity can strengthen individuals and nations, while ease and comfort may lead to decline. By writing about his personal pain and the pain of China, he aims to explore this idea of growth through hardship.
Recognizing the impossibility of covering every aspect of modern China, Yu Hua limits himself to examining 10 words, using them as lenses to view contemporary Chinese life from various angles. He compares this approach to a bus driver’s route, starting from daily life and making stops at the intersections of different topics, before returning to the beginning.
Through this journey, Yu Hua seeks to distill the complexities and contradictions of today’s China into a concise narrative which combines observation, analysis, and personal anecdotes, ultimately aiming to provide clarity and understanding amidst the country’s rapid transformation.
Chapter 1 Summary: “People”
Yu Hua begins by noting the peculiar status of “the people” in contemporary China, observing that it is a term now primarily used by officials rather than the people themselves. This marks a striking contrast to Yu Hua’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when “the people” was a weighty and ubiquitous expression, closely tied to the figure of Chairman Mao. With the guileless insight of a child, Yu Hua developed the notion that “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people” (3)—a saying that was initially met with skepticism and unease by the adults in his life, who feared the consequences of him saying the wrong thing in a time of revolutionary fervor. Gradually, however, Yu Hua’s idea gained acceptance in his town, much to his dismay; as the originator of the concept, he felt his ownership of it slipping away.
From this personal vignette, Yu Hua turns his attention to the sweeping transformations that reshaped China over the recent three decades, as the country transitioned from a politics-driven society to one where money reigns supreme. He identifies the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 as a pivotal moment in this shift, a watershed event which marked the final, explosive expenditure of the political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution. Yu Hua notes that Beijing residents were drawn to support the student protesters less by their calls for democratic freedoms than by their denunciations of official corruption. This distinction presaged the swift replacement of the passion for political change with a passion for getting rich in the aftermath of the June 4 crackdown.
Yu Hua’s describes the atmosphere in Beijing during the spring of 1989, highlighting the exhilarating sense of unity and shared purpose that prevailed among the people. In an “anarchist heaven,” the police disappeared from the streets, replaced by students and locals who maintained order with a spirit of camaraderie and common cause. He recounts attending a meeting of liberal intellectuals, where petty squabbles over the ranking of names on a petition were silenced by the somber news that reformist leader Zhao Ziyang had been hospitalized—a sign of his fall from power, which sent the assembled intellectuals scattering.
Shifting focus, Yu Hua sheds light on the plight of petitioners, or “judicial refugees,” in China—the most disadvantaged members of society who seek redress for injustices through the country’s extra-legal appeals system. Exhausting all resources as they navigate a labyrinthine and often corrupt bureaucracy, these petitioners resort to sleeping in the streets and enduring police harassment as they pursue the slender hope of finding a fair-minded official who will hear their case. Yu Hua recounts how these marginalized individuals organized to pay their respects to Zhao Ziyang upon his death in 2005, seeing in the leader an even greater victim of injustice than themselves.
Returning to his personal narrative, Yu Hua describes his surreal return to Beijing on June 3, 1989, just as the military crackdown was beginning. He captures the disorienting experience of re-entering the city as throngs of people were desperately trying to leave, and his subsequent harrowing journey out of the capital on a crowded train. In the aftermath of the crackdown, Yu Hua reflects on the chilling erasure of the Tiananmen protests from official media and public memory, lamenting that few young people in China today know anything about the momentous events of 1989.
Yet despite this enforced forgetting, he asserts that the true meaning of “the people” was seared into his consciousness during a pivotal moment in late May 1989. Cycling back from Tiananmen Square on a frigid night, Yu Hua encountered an awe-inspiring scene: a massive gathering of unarmed citizens, standing firm in their conviction to block soldiers and tanks with their bodies alone. The warmth and passion emanating from the crowd, as they raised their voices in the national anthem under the night sky, led Yu Hua to a profound realization: “For when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light, and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what ‘the people’ means” (14).
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
The Personal as a Microcosm of the National is a prominent theme in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of China in Ten Words. Yu Hua draws upon his own experiences and memories to illuminate broader aspects of Chinese society and history. For example, his childhood notion that “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people” reflects the pervasive cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution (3). Similarly, his account of the Tiananmen Square protests and their aftermath serves as a microcosm of the hopes, fears, and disillusionment that characterized a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history.
Irreverence amid Oppression is another significant theme in this section of the book. Yu Hua’s playful and subversive approach to language, exemplified by his childhood formulation equating the people with Chairman Mao, demonstrates a spirit of irreverence that persists even in the face of oppressive political conformity. The absurdity of the intellectual gathering where participants quibble over the ranking of their names on a petition, even as they face the imminent loss of a powerful political ally, further underscores the irony and gallows humor that can accompany moments of crisis and upheaval.
Parallels Between Past and Present emerge throughout the Introduction and Chapter 1, as Yu Hua traces the ways in which China’s recent history continues to shape its contemporary reality. The legacy of the Cultural Revolution, with its upending of traditional values and social hierarchies, finds echoes in the disorienting pace and scale of China’s more recent transformation. Similarly, the sense of solidarity and shared purpose that characterized the Tiananmen Square protests resonates with the ongoing struggle for individual freedom and dignity in the face of authoritarian control.
Structurally, these opening chapters of China in Ten Words employ a nonlinear, episodic format, weaving together personal anecdotes, historical analysis, and social commentary. This structure reinforces the book’s thematic points that the past and present do not exist in isolation from one another, and that personal experience and national politics are intertwined. The Introduction lays out the central conceit of the book—exploring contemporary China through the lens of 10 words—while Chapter 1 addresses the first of these words, “people,” using it as a springboard to examine the complex and often contradictory nature of Chinese society.
Yu Hua’s writing style is characterized by vivid, often poetic language, irony, and a sense of empathy. His prose frequently includes metaphor and allusion, as when he compares China’s rapid transformation to an actor changing masks in Sichuan opera or describes the scattered intellectuals as “falling leaves in an autumn gale” (8). At the same time, his writing is grounded in concrete, sensory details that attempt to convey the reality of his experiences, such as the “blast of heat” given off by the packed-together protesters in Tiananmen Square, “as though every one of them was a blazing torch” (14). His essays hence layer verisimilitude with poetics, just as he layers analysis with anecdotes and reflections.
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