Word: butterfields
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...point in the book, for example, we meet his eager friends Li and Miao Wang over dinner in their "middle class" but spartan, two-room apartment. At another, we watch a tense encounter between Butterfield and authorities over failure to pay for a train ticket he did not want, it turns into a sort of "struggle session" from which he can escape only by paying for the ticket and apologizing for his "mistake...
...China: Alive in the Bitter Sea shifts from one snippet of life to another, Butterfield's sad image of the country becomes clearer. But the book is far from disjointed. Each anecdote of woe, each unfortunate experience, each tale of persecution fleshes out Butterfield's vision of official happy China's less appealing underside. More importantly, several significant themes reverberate throughout the work and color the reader's perceptions of this mammoth country...
...Cultural Revolution, for example, has left rivers of apathy, indifference, and distrust of communism running through China. "Before the Cultural Revolution, we Chinese lived under a great illusion," one discontented daughter of intellectuals tells Butterfield. "We believed the Communists could save China and make it prosperous and strong again ...Now people have seen through this, and they have suffered a terrible loss of faith...
This apparent malaise pervades the China Butterfield visited. He sees it in the factories, where "malingering on the job has become endemic." And he sees it in a compulsory class on Marxism which he attended one day at Peking University: an embarrassed teacher is unable to elicit a response from her students on what are the basic principles of socialism. "China," Butterfield dryly notes, "has become an authoritarian country with an authority crisis...
...China, we are told. This government control is, oddly enough, more psychological than physical. Constant monitoring by neighborhood groups and workplace authorities usually make overt police and military brutality unnecessary. "The constant exposure to publilc scrutiny and peer pressure makes life in China like living in an army barrack," Butterfield writes...