Books
Monday, 22 March 2010 09:03
Written by Aelred Doyle

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The China book you wish they’d given you at school

Got questions? Jeffrey Wasserstrom has answers. His new book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, is slender, approachable and incredibly clearly written, and it will painlessly ease a new, more refined sense of China’s recent history into your grateful brain. Readers who know a fair bit about China already will be left better informed, looking at what they already knew in another light. Readers new to the subject couldn’t start in a better place.

Most readers interested in China will have encountered Wasserstrom by now. He’s a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, long-time China writer (Global Shanghai, China’s Brave New World) and co-founder of the blog The China Beat.

His new book is a modern China primer divided into two main sections (the past, and the present and future) and consists simply of questions and answers. Some samples: Who was Sun Yat-sen? How did the Communists beat the Nationalists? What was the Hundred Flowers Campaign? Why were the 2008 Olympics such a big deal for China?

Sounds pretty basic, right? Maybe patronizing? After all, there’s a fair chance you know the answers to those questions. We did. Or rather, we thought we did. Wasserstrom was here to gently take us by the arm and point out that, yes, that was the general gist of it, but in fact this aspect of it is a common misconception, and while we’re at it he’d like to use a follow-up question to illuminate the true crux of the matter.

It’s an obvious point, but the key here is that Wasserstrom gets to choose the questions. This means that a book that at first seems fragmented in fact builds through a logical structure. We’re building a cogent sense of the state of modern China, how it got here and where it’s going, without even noticing.

Wasserstrom’s main focus is on his American readers, and throughout he is at pains to show how China and the US continue a century-long pattern of viewing the same events in deeply different ways. He also points out how displays of power for the benefit of a domestic audience can be misinterpreted by the watching world. When you’re talking about easily misunderstood aims, differing perceptions, excitable patriots on both sides and huge preconceptions to work around, it’s important to be able to write with nuance without losing yourself in qualification. That’s where this book triumphs: Wasserstrom’s ability to explain clearly without over-simplifying.

He also explicitly points out that the two countries are more similar than most of their inhabitants think. The US went through a lot of what China is. It was once a country expanding its economy at a breakneck rate too.

Everyone should read this. There are plenty of fine books about contemporary China out there, but this is the one you’ll wish they’d given you at school.

Q&A with Jeff Wasserstrom

Why did you decide to write the book in question-answer form?
This is the format that Oxford University Press has begun to use for all the volumes in their What Everyone Needs to Know series. I wasn't sure at first how well it would work, but I quickly grew accustomed to it. Interestingly, there are quite a few books in Chinese that take a similar approach - not to 21st-century China but to other subjects. I remember just before the Hong Kong Handover flipping through a book called something like 100 Questions about Hong Kong in a Shanghai bookstore.

We’d have profited from a book like this back in school. Is it your aim in any way to have it taught in American high schools or universities?
Funny you should ask about high schools, as just after I got my first advance copy of the book, I was due to speak about Confucius to my daughter's high school World Religions class. I decided, just to see how it would go over, to combine the lecture and in-class exercise I'd already prepared with reading out a few passages from the book. I think it went over quite well. I certainly see it as a book that high school teachers of subjects like World History could find useful, and I could also imagine it being a good reading for the China week of several different sorts of introductory college survey classes, including, say, one devoted to globalization or to international politics. The main target audience for the series is the elusive intellectually curious general reader, and personally the place I'll be most excited to see my contribution to it offered for sale will be airport bookstores, as I like the idea of someone picking it up to read en route to China for his or her first visit to the country. Still, I'd also be delighted to learn of this book showing up in a lot of school libraries and assigned reading lists.

Do you think mutual understanding between China and the West is growing?
This is hard to say. On the one hand, increased travel in both directions is contributing to a degree of mutual understanding, but we're also in a period when anxieties abut China's growing importance in the world is contributing to some distorted discussion of the country in the West, while at the same time I often see quite misleading ideas about the US and Europe reinforced by press coverage of international issues in the Chinese media. So there are contradictory trends in play just now.

You talk a lot about how different historical and cultural backgrounds lead to the US and China interpreting the same events differently. Is this something that can ever be resolved?
It can never be completely resolved, but I'd stress that this issue isn't unique to the US-China relationship and that I think of history as more important than culture' in this case, as too often discussion of the latter plays into a misleading notion that there's a unified 'American' or 'Chinese' culture out there. In fact, there are different cultural strands, different world views and so on in existence in both countries.

The idea of the Chinese view of Tibet as comparable to the American view of Hawaii (which we know you don’t claim to be a perfect analogy by any means) is one we’d never seen before. Is it something others suggested to you, or your own formulation?
I borrowed that analogy from political scientist Elizabeth Perry, an old friend and one of the most consistently interesting and significant writers on China around. She mentioned the idea in passing, saying that she'd found it a useful parallel to bring up in discussions with Americans. I don't think she's published anything on the topic, but I still acknowledge her in a footnote to the book for planting the idea in my head.

If you could tell Americans just one thing to help them understand China better, what would it be? How about the other way round?
I'd tell Americans that China is much more diverse internally and much less exotic than they imagine. And the message I'd want to stress to a Chinese audience is to always keep in mind that the US media system is very different from that they are most used to, so that it just doesn't make sense to interpret a single CNN story or New York Times editorial as reflecting 'American attitudes' toward an issue or the official American position on that topic.

What worries you most about the future of China and its relations with the rest of the world? What are you most optimistic about?
I'm most concerned about the enormity of the environmental issues that the world faces right now, and how difficult it is to deal with these in the international arena. One thing I'm optimistic about is the increasing degree to which there is a truly global youth culture emerging, at least global in the sense of connecting younger people who have Internet access. This isn't a panacea to problems of international understanding, but I think it could help in the long run to get to a point where a generation of world leaders from very different parts of the globe have had more shared experiences when growing up.

What’s your next book going to be?
A study of the Boxer Crisis as a pivotal moment in world history.

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