Little Emperors: A Year with the Future of China.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Despite the sharp recent retreat from high-speed growth, China’s economic boom is regarded as largely seamless and linear from the early 1990s, when policies championed by the late Deng Xiaoping launched China into double-digit growth. However, macroeconomic analysis seldom reveals how most Chinese “lived” the process of rapid growth, urban expansion, and tightening linkage with the global economy.

Joanne Dionne offers an insightful, humourous, and sympathetic look at those turbulent years through Little Emperors — her journal of over a year’s work as a teacher in Guangzhou (Canton) where she taught English to a diverse but enthusiastic group of elementary students. In many regards, her students were windows onto the “new” China taking shape around them, but Dionne herself — a veteran of an earlier stay in Japan — never backed away from opportunities to explore the many ways past and present collided in Guangzhou and other cities she visited during her stay. The mid-90s offered relatively unobstructed travel for foreigners and little interference in their impromptu interactions with ordinary Chinese. With the help of Chinese friends, Dionne travelled frequently and learned a good deal about a rapidly growing China.

Far from a stale-dated travelogue, Little Emperors provides personal, and sometimes penetrating, insights into a China whose present — and future — depend on a forgetfulness of its recent past. Dionne’s accidental friendship with an elderly English teacher and Cultural Revolution survivor during a visit to Beijing is one of Little Emperors’ most memorable chapters.

Her boisterous students taught her a good deal about changing attitudes and basic values in fast-growing Guangzhou. Probably more informative were her three successive Chinese teaching assistants, whose vastly different backgrounds, attitudes, and outlooks allowed Dionne access to the many conflicts and contradictions ordinary Chinese faced following Tiananmen. Dionne is rarely judgmental and preferred simply to let her Chinese colleagues explain their “takes” on recent events.

Little Emperors offers no statistics, official interviews, or press release reporting about mid-90s China. Instead, Dionne presents a very different China through close observation of individuals who show us, with her help, how they experienced China’s transition to economic superpower.