In the opening chapter of his epic historical novel about the founding of Hong Kong, Taipan, James Clavell describes the mission of his protagonist, entrepreneur and alpha male Dirk Struan, the Taipan or boss of the Hong Kong expat community, as “to use riches and power to open up China to the world and particularly to British culture and British law so that each could learn from the other and grow to the benefit of both.”. He then scoffs to himself, our Dirk, and says that “Aye. It’s a dream of a madman.”. And he goes on to attempt it – over the course of a thousand-page adventure Struan fights pirates, thwarts business rivals, engages in labyrinthine games of politics with Chinese officials, makes love to his darling concubine May-may, and finds time to exposit to us on the benefits of free trade and open markets. Taipan is a novel about many things; enormous in scope and scale, it purports to be a semifictional, almost mythical account of Hong Kong, focused less on historical accuracy and fact than capturing an essence. Clavell is staking out a claim to knowledge of the identities of Hong Kong, China and Britain, and their intertwined fates – he is, as well, using this apparent knowledge to weave an ideological vision of the world which remains more relevant today than perhaps he would have realised. In Taipan we have the dream of Anglosphere imperialism refined to a sharp point – in its orientalism, free market utopianism, and its obsession with Great Men shaping foreign lands, we have all the mess of the usual western interpretation of Asia distilled into a single enormous adventure story.
1: “You want me to be Christian? Then I’m Christian,” she had said cheerfully.
Clavell’s most famous novel is not Taipan but Shogun, a story that while superficially similar in its white-man-in-Asia setting is in some sense more of a fantasy-piece. Shogun follows William Blackthorne, English ship’s pilot marooned in Japan at the tail-end of the Sengoku Period, as he bumbles his way through the political games between Toranaga, a fictional stand-in for Ieyasu Tokugawa, and his rivals clamouring for power in the wake of the death of former ruler Nakamura, a fictionalised Toyotomi Hideyoshi. It is rooted in Clavell’s experience as a prisoner of war of the Japanese in World War Two, notable especially in early scenes where Blackthorne, also a prisoner of the Japanese under local ruler Yabu, comes face to face with a culture that seems to him incomprehensibly cruel both to its own people and especially so to he and his fellow captive sailors. Blackthorne’s role in the overall narrative is not too over the top – no white superhero who decides the fate of nations, he remains only one pawn in the wider machinations of Lord Toranaga – he does eventually come to adapt to Japanese culture, prove his worth as a man both to various Japanese women and to the hard-bitten samurai, and carve out a place for himself in this strange new world. This relative nuance reflects the novel’s roots in Clavell’s own experiences, and in general the ambiguity of the West towards Japan, that self-orientalised island which at the time of Shogun’s release was just then blazing a trail as the first Asian country to begin to reach a western standard of living. Blackthorne cannot master Japan, but he can over time recognise that the Japanese, despite their alien culture, are men too; he can bond with them and adapt to their way of life, even respect it as superior in some areas. His victories are modest; his successes are personal. Clavell’s fake playground-Japan of honourable bushido warriors is his proving ground and in the end he proves himself. In this Shogun is a classic work of adventure-story orientalism, full of talk of honour, beautiful girls fascinated by the white man, and pulp fiction cliches, but with at least a little more self-awareness – in its narrative positioning of Blackthorne as subordinate to the Japanese characters, who ultimately decide the future of the country, not he, it speaks of good intentions which are not always so obvious in western depictions of Asia from this period.
Taipan aims higher. Dirk Struan is no helpless prisoner who has to fight his way to the position of warrior; he is a respected businessman, pirate and taipan. And his mission, as outlined by the quote above, is ideological: his “mad crusade to open up China and bring her into the world” underpins the entire plot, which after all is initiated by him, in his desire to claim Hong Kong for Britain as “the key to Asia: this miserable threadbare rock, without which all the open ports and the future will be meaningless.” Struan is based on the real-life William Jardine, who did play a vital role in convincing Britain to take Hong Kong – but this driving mission of bringing China into the world is wholly ahistorical, belonging to Struan alone, and it recasts the historical events depicted entirely. Much as Shogun is less about real Japan – there are very few people who would take it seriously in that regard – than about the fantasies of a late-imperial British writer who wished to grapple with his own ideas about the country, Taipan is about not the real Hong Kong but the image of it that existed in the western mind; an image defined by terms such as laissez-faire and free trade, by the civilising mission of British imperial history and the imperative to opening up, tearing down and flooding in that came to be known in the future as globalisation. Shogun is World War Two Japan, with its morbid bushido death cult, projected back onto a loose replica of the late Sengoku Period – Taipan is a projection backwards of a vision of post-war Hong Kong that in 1966 was still in development, but which would flower fully in the 1980s as with the blessing of free-market radicals like Milton Friedman the city would be seen as a paradise of open markets and deregulation, built by free men working hand in hand without the fetters of meddling governments. “He was certain that China had something special to offer the world.” the novel tells us. “What it was, he did not know. One day perhaps he would find out.” Hong Kong is rewritten from an almost accidental product of imperial greed into the beginnings of a great ideological undertaking to liberate China from herself and to spread the gospel of free trade around the world, with Struan as its architect and master.
But Clavell is a writer, not only an ideologue. As Shogun explores and plays with its own fetishisation of Japan – there are countless scenes where Blackthorne’s racist generalisations about the Japanese are met with equally-racist Japanese generalisations about his own culture, showing the ultimate emptiness of both – Taipan both gives us the most stock “mighty whitey” hero possible, a master businessman who embodies Clavell’s own objectivist, libertarian politics, and allows him to meet his limits just as Blackthorne does. Struan is outplayed at various points by both Chinese officials and other businessmen, and is shown to be – as Blackthorne – not capable of dominating the Asian culture he is immersed in but rather influenced by it, adopting Chinese notions of cleanliness – scandalising his son, who has just arrived from England, with the idea that he should “bathe your whole body once a week. You use paper and wash your hands…And you brush your teeth daily.” – and thinking in terms of “joss”, a classically Clavell bastardisation of Chinese ideas about good fortune and luck. But he as well rankles with the reality of this culture – his outbursts of Christian morality in the face of local cultural practices are not portrayed as always correct but often corrected in the face of real-life practicality – “This is na a Chinese funeral.” he proclaims after the death of his brother, “We canna have professional mourners!”- only for May-may to remind him: “Then how for do you public honour your loved brother, and give him face before the real people of Hong Kong?”. He has no answer to this, as is often the case with her questions.
It is May-may who embodies Struan’s ultimate fallibility – the daughter of an official given to Struan who is secretly on a mission to “train a barbarian into civilized ways”, she with her semi-broken English and eroticised description comes across as a caricature. But over the course of the novel, as we both see them together and get scenes from her point of view, written in natural English instead of pidgin, it becomes apparent that she is Struan’s only real equal, able to tough it out in dangerous situations as he does, covering for his blindspots in Chinese culture and custom, and increasingly providing him with emotional support as he becomes unmoored by disaster after disaster unfolding in the fledgling colony, from piracy to Malaria to family tragedy and political conspiracy. Their relationship is fraught with mutual frustration and mutual dependence – she peppers her English with Scots colloquialisms, he adopts Chinese habits, and all the while they both struggle with the broader cultural gap between them. In one of the novel’s most interesting scenes they share a discussion on religion, and it is revealed that while Struan has converted her to Christianity she does not take it seriously, treating the Christian God as another Chinese folk deity to be asked for favours – “Of course,” she says, “if I had choice—which I dinna, because there is only one God—I’d prefer Chinese god.” – and he is entirely unable to convince her of the wrongness of this, and she even pokes holes in his own flawed morality and his failure to embody Christian ideals by his adultery. He never triumphs over her -“Learn from us, from the lessons of England, lass.” he tells her in one scene, after she deplores the violence he’s just inflicted upon a group of pirates. “The world can grow into an ordered place where all are equal before the law. And the law is just. Honest. Without graft.” “Is that so important if you are starving?” she replies. And “He (Struan) thought about that for a long time.”
He at one point in a racist musing thinks that “There was no Chinese word for the European concept of love”, and yet over the course of the novel it is clear not just that he loves May-may but that she loves him, and while we shouldn’t overlook her sexualisation and infantilisation – and the amount of times he gets into weirdly violent sex with her, which does just stink of objectivism, don’t it – in their relationship is Clavell’s attempt to bring balance to his white superman story; her increasing emotional importance to him is a major development over the course of the narrative, as the one person he finds it difficult to emotionally manipulate or plot against in pursuit of his dream. This culminates in his later decision to marry her and bring her back to England when he leaves Hong Kong, which he knows will be a kind of social suicide, indicates to some extent both his endless superheroic resolve – By the gods…I’m going to marry May-may if it’s the last thing I do. And the pox on everyone!” – and the limit of his ambition, as he is no longer capable of giving everything of himself to his dream as he has prior – he would rather be with the woman he loves, no matter what troubles it creates, than subsume even his heart to the dream of opening up China.
At the start of the novel he declares his aggressive intent to Hong Kong itself: “If I were you, Island, I’d hate me too. You hate the plan! Well, I tell you, Island, the plan’s good, by God. Good, you hear? China needs the world and the world needs China. And you’re the key to unlock the gates of China, and you know it and I know it, and that’s what I’m going to do, and you’re going to help!” But by the end of the novel his thoughts have turned: “Why na leave that cursed island as it was before?” he asks himself. “You may be wrong—Hong Kong may na be necessary to Britain. What do you prove by your mad crusade to open up China and bring her into the world on your terms, in your way? Leave China to her own joss and go home. With May-may if she lives.” He tells himself to “give up China- she’s a vampire mistress”. And yet he is unable to quite do this, remaining in Hong Kong until the end – and in the novel’s climax the Taipan, this superhero figure whose grand dreams motivated him to take on all of Asia, dies dramatically but pointlessly in a typhoon as the island which he set himself so against finally pushes back, and he dies as well with May-may, as they proclaim their love for one another one last time. Blackthorne, the prisoner, may never leave Japan but at least he comes to terms with the East; Struan, the hero, never quite manages to. But this is perhaps the novel’s ultimate, contradictory point. “How else can you dominate joss?” May-may asks him at one point. “If you smile when you lose, then you win in life.” And so our objectivist hero, in an ultimately very un-objectivist ending, does not triumph over nature, over all his enemies and over his own personal desires. His quest for glory – just like Blackthorne’s quest to return to England in Shogun – is a failure. All of his larger-than-life exploits end not in vindicated success but with sudden and horrid death.
But the dream – the plan to “unlock the gates of China” – continues. “We play the Chinese game with Chinese rules,” Struan muses at one point, in orientalist cliché so thick as to be cloying, “in Chinese time.” Such was the vision of James Clavell of the founding of Hong Kong – the vision of a free-market radical, one that would come to be shared by far more people than only him.
2: “Without trade the world will become what it was once—a hell where only the strongest arm and the heaviest lash was law.”
Clavell wrote two sequels to Taipan. In one – entitled Gai-jin, for the Japanese word for foreigner – we follow Struan’s Noble House to Japan in the Bakumatsu Period as the nation is on the cusp of opening up, in a kind of crossover follow-up to both Taipan and Shogun that reveals what happened in Japan after Toranaga’s victory and elaborates upon the fates of characters from Taipan twenty years ago. The next book in the series is Noble House, named after Dirk Struan’s business from Taipan, and it jumps ahead to 1950s Hong Kong, and it is here where Clavell makes the leap backwards from writer to idealogue; the novel continues the dramatic, soap opera plotting style of the earlier books, but now in a modern context, with Ian Dunross, current Taipan, a high-flying business executive instead of a dashing opium trader like Struan; the thugs and pirates are replaced with Hong Kong gangsters and Cold War spies, and Hong Kong, in Clavell’s usual semifictional style, is shown as a kaleidoscopic free market paradise, full of intrigue, danger, sex and possibility. Clavell released the book in 1981, deep into Hong Kong’s 1980s boom, after it had become an obsession of Milton Friedman’s, who said that “if you want to see capitalism in action, come to Hong Kong”, hailing it as a non-interventionist state in which “government is limited to its proper function” as a minimalist presence which exists primarily to facilitate market exchange. Clavell’s Noble House was part of this Hong Kong mania – he sent a copy to objectivism founder Ayn Rand, and in interviews gave fulsome praise to “that buccaneering society of Hong Kong”.
This fantasy of Hong Kong was of course untrue, built on wilful ignorance and selective interpretation. While generations of economists and Hongkongers have shown pride in a mythical idea of the city as being built from the ground up by hustle and capitalist grit, in fact the heavy hand of the state was essential to its success; from the forceful impositions of the British colonial presence in the first place, to the reforms in infrastructure and welfare pioneered by Murray MacLehose in the 1970s to prevent the very social implosion the enormous growth and inequality of the 1950s and 1960s had almost threatened, to the role of the Chinese socialist state in facilitating cross-border connections that supercharged the boom of the 1980s, there was no moment in Hong Kong’s history where it was ever powered solely by market forces. Friedman was correct to assert that the city was capitalism in action – in the sense that Hong Kong’s extremely powerful authoritarian state was necessary to build the conditions for the open and free sections of its economy that he and his ilk fell in love with.
It is in this sense, then, that we must return to Dirk Struan. Struan’s ideological project as depicted in Taipan is informed by the same notions as Friedman’s love affair with the city a century later – both see Hong Kong as a redoubt for liberty, for Friedman set against the tyranny of both the quiet socialism of social democracy and the loud socialism of the communist bloc, and for Struan set against the Manchu regime: “For the ordinary Chinese want we want, he thought, and there’s nae difference between us.” It is in this sense that Taipan for its time of publication seems almost a nuanced, thoughtful depiction of race relations between east and west – compared to the sinister Fu Manchu aura of fellow British imperialist Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, this is a perspective that for its day deserves some credit, set against a backdrop of hoary stereotypes and orientalisms as it may be. But it is not within these things that we find the crucial element – the Chinese having no word for love, the cringeworthy Chinglish dialogue, whatever the hell “joss” is supposed to be, etc. It’s rather the same error committed by Friedman and countless others in their loving gaze being cast towards Hong Kong and Asia, and even by many whose gaze is fearful; to see the East and to imagine there a future capitalism, to witness in Asia a divergent path in which they discovered the dark secrets of free-market success.
“The difference in the economic policies followed by Hong Kong and Britain was a pure accident.” Friedman once said. “The colonial office in Britain happened to send John Cowperthwaite to Hong Kong to serve as its financial secretary. Cowperthwaite was a Scotsman and very much a disciple of Adam Smith. At the time, while Britain was moving to a socialist and welfare state, Cowperthwaite insisted that Hong Kong practice laissez-faire. He refused to impose any tariffs. He insisted on keeping taxes down.” The contrast between Britain’s apparent ‘socialist welfare state’ of the 1950s and the supposedly sensible, laissez-faire approach taken by Hong Kong is meant to be illustrative – Hong Kong is capitalism, true capitalism, whether that is for good or ill. From the free-marketer point of view Hong Kong – and today’s China, and Japan and South Korea – represent how it should be done, capitalism without being chained to democracy. From the leftist point of view, we instead can find a bogeyman in East Asia, “capitalism with Asian values”, threatening a future that will be coming soon to us. Both of these approaches obscure something larger than the role or lack of role of the state, going on to obscure history itself; there is no Hong Kong without British imperialism or still less without Chinese communism, and there is no Japanese reconstruction or “Miracle on the Han River”, Asian Tigers etc. without the context of the Cold War providing near-unconditional US support for capital-focused developmental dictatorships which prevented all other attempts at other kinds of state-building in Asia.
Simply, to idealize or demonise the Asian capitalist experience is to ignore how specific it is, not because of “Asian values” but because of historical circumstances, and to be either continually disappointed or relieved when it fails to materialize in our own part of the world; and in the case of Friedman and his free-marketers, to do untold damage with radical experiments trying to repeat Hong Kong’s historical experience out of context elsewhere. “Happy to reduce the territory to caricature, the neoliberals shipped out version of a Portable Hong Kong in their carry-on bags”, as Quinn Slobodian puts in in his Crack-up Capitalism, tracing the origins of today’s market zealotry back to these years of starry-eyed observation of distant, exotic Hong Kong; the orientalism of the market radicals lies in reading the situation in post-war Hong Kong as some kind of ideal model of free-market economics, divorced from history or political context and reduced, as Friedman put it, to pure accident – specifically, the pure accident of having a smart enough white man put in charge of the hardest-working non-whites around.
3: “Every fourth person on earth’s Chinese now, Robb. We’ve the great chance to help them now. To learn our ways. British ways. Law and order and justice. Christianity.”
Viewed through this lens, we can realize that while Taipan is, to some extent, relatively racially progressive, it ultimately does not escape the lens which the west has viewed Asia since the days of 18th century intellectuals praising the Celestial Empire as the most advanced form of government possible, since the Meiji Restoration and the Japanophilia of late Victorian gentlemen, since certain British observers fantasied during the Taiping Rebellion of “the overthrow of the Tartar supremacy, and the eventual elevation of a different race to imperial influence”. This lens is that of exceptionalising Asia through ahistorical, superficial analysis rooted in racial stereotypes of Asia’s mythical hard work, prowess, and organisational skill – as Slobodian puts it, “Instead of democratic capitalism flowing outward from a Western source, they (anarcho-capitalists) saw a more efficient, nondemocratic form of capitalism, perfect in Asia, rolling westward to revive the ‘sclerotic European race’.” At the bottom of this is the figure of the Chinese worker, a fictional figure formed from glances of seemingly stoic, non-complaining coolie labourers on brief trips through China by westerners. For hundreds of years now westerners have been finding in the figure of the coolie a crude potentiality which Manchu (or communist) mismanagement wasted. “The foreign visitor”, writes Corey Byrnes in his essay A Cheaper Machine for the Work, on this very topic, “was confronted by a system in which the transfer of natural forces through the human failed to fuel the progress of society. The human machine and the natural machine found along the Yangzi was in many ways superior to those in the West, but their social manifestation was profoundly out of order. As a result, energy was wasted in the maintenance of an ancient way of life…it is his [the coolie’s] Chineseness that allowed him to work in a manner that was not just unlike the work of Euro-Americans, but subhuman, animal and thus potentially superhuman.”
It is this contradictory impression of East Asia, subhuman and superhuman at once, that remains a deeply-rooted influence in western understanding of the region, from lurid stories about Japanese overwork culture, sexual perversion and eccentricity, to criticism of Korea’s plummeting birth rate and fascinated gossipy exposes of the horrors of the K-pop industry, from images of Chinese communism as a vast inefficient police state that nevertheless poses a mortal threat to democracy; indeed, it is epitomised in the perhaps-apocryphal story from Milton Freidman where he came across thousands of workers building a canal with shovels; and his host, a government bureaucrat, explained that they weren’t using machines because this was a jobs program. Friedman was supposed to have replied that they should have been using spoons, then, not shovels; highlighting the inherent inefficiency of leaving feckless Chinese to run things themselves. The key to Taipan, to Friedman and to our love affair with Hong Kong and Japan and South Korea and Taiwan which continues even now is this – that the Asians, as a massed group, are excellent workers within the contexts we set for them. This of course is where the free-market dream once more bumps up against reality. Another famous Friedman anecdote related to China is his stark dismissal of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, then under construction: “a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids”. Anyone who has seen Pudong recently, thriving and finished, would find the hubris of this amusing. Asia, the Orient, is not in fact subhuman and superhuman at once, but only human, and this is perhaps for us more alien, more difficult to get used to, than any of the wild fantasies we cooked up. There will be no Blade Runner future. The Chinese are not coming to save or enslave us, and neither do they particularly need our help the way we think they do. It is this that Clavell, as a writer, showed some awareness of, with his foolish Taipan Dirk Struan unable to work out where he stood in relation to Asia and dying of it as a result. But the others who followed their libertarian dreams to Hong Kong, who still dream now of reverse-engineering their misunderstood version of the Japanese, Chinese, Singaporean system to home to produce democracy-free, hyperefficient market-dominated neo-capitalism; they lack even the self-awareness of James Clavell, an imperial nostalgic and self-declared objectivist who dedicated Noble House to Queen Elizabeth II.
But as our anecdote about Milton Friedman and Pudong shows, these strange wandering white men, these would-be Dirk Struans, have never been right at all, despite their status as useful idiots to real capitalists everywhere. Ironically it is China, the ultimate objective of Dirk Struan’s claiming of Hong Kong for Britain, that shows this best, as the Chinese system teeters upon the brink of being the first of the Asian miracle states to dare to move outside of the contexts set by the Americans at the cusp of the Cold War, to escape the subhuman-superhuman role made for East Asia in America’s world – and if China does manage to escape America, it will assuredly be through the mundane, unexciting, unentrepreneurial power of state organisation and regulation, the standardising of the patchwork carpet of the reform era and the bringing-together of the wild excesses of the market under state oversight – in other words, exactly the evils of “creeping socialism” that the market fundamentalists fled to the exotic East to escape in the first place.
At one point in Taipan, Struan resolves to take May-may back to England with him in a flight of fancy, of objectivist, Great Man overconfidence, that not only will they accept her but that it will serve his Chinese dream – “May-may’ll prove, beyond all doubt—for all time—among the people that really count in society, that the Oriental is completely worthy and worthwhile. May-may hersel’ will hasten the day of equality. And it’ll be in my own lifetime.” – only to insult her accidently and grievously with his unfortunate reaction to seeing her in western dress, and only managing to fix things with an explosion of fake anger that, as he reasons, manages to help her to restore her lost face – “Struan realized that it was useless to argue or reason with May-may. You canna treat her as a European, he told himself. Deal with her as though you’re Chinese. “ Hating himself as he does so, he whips her and abuses her verbally and they fall in bed together, and he tells her – although the insult was his – that she is forgiven. It is this scene that I think of when I think of Taipan, not the pirates or the sword fights or the endless politicking – James Clavell’s masterpiece fever-dream, a psychological study of the contradictions of the Anglo-European perspective on Asia that fascinates with its absurdity, its casual horror, its dehumanisation of the Other and lust for it at once, its demonstration that one can love something with all one’s heart and yet never really come to understand it. Milton Friedman won a Nobel prize for economics, and his acolytes are still out there plotting to build their utopia. James Clavell’s Shogun is now an acclaimed prestige TV series. It’s in this sense, then, that Taipan remains relevant. I would recommend it – for sometimes it takes a true believer to illustrate the limitations of their own beliefs. Just watch out for all the sex stuff.
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