Word: china
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...authors of Big China Books have two things in common: a conviction that they know what will happen next (even though the P.R.C. has been defying the best guesses of pundits and academic specialists alike for decades) and an ability to provide easy-to-summarize answers to Big Questions. The most successful and widely reviewed tend to have theses spelled out in provocative titles that fit into ongoing point-counterpoint debates or give rise to new ones. When China Rules the World is a case in point. Its appearance immediately triggered an expected rebuttal from Hutton, and inspired Big China...
...China Books vary greatly in quality, but even the best leave me cold due to their bird's-eye view of the P.R.C. Adopting an Olympian perspective, their authors tend to use broad strokes to portray things that actually require a fine-grained touch. For example, most treat China's population as an undifferentiated mass, or one that can be bisected along just one axis: be it the 90% Han and 10% non-Han ethnic divide, the clear ideological fault line between loyalists and dissidents, and so on. And they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth...
...Fortunately, Big China Books are not the only option for general readers curious about the P.R.C., since many significant works that take a ground-level view of the country, rather than a bird's-eye one, have also been appearing. I am thinking, for example, of Fast Boat to China (2007). This is a lively account of the human side of Shanghai-based outsourcing by Andrew Ross, who usefully dubs his study a foray into "scholarly reporting" - a term for books that, as he puts it, have "mined the overlap between ethnography and journalism...
...good way to illustrate how works of scholarly reporting differ from Big China Books is to place two 2004 publications side by side: Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China by Ian Johnson and China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead by Bruce Gilley. Both are by authors who draw on lengthy experience reporting on China and are interested in democracy and civil society. Gilley claims to know what the future holds for China. Johnson, though, focuses on telling a series of revealing tales about acts of resistance, like efforts...
...Will more Big China Books appear this decade? I think it safe to bet that they will. The desire for confident answers to Big China Questions has never been stronger. Will admirable works of scholarly reporting also keep coming out? I'm even more confident answering this question affirmatively. One such work, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, is being published in February, and it's the best yet from Peter Hessler, whose two earlier books, River Town (2001) and Oracle Bones (2006), were exemplary forays into the genre. Country Driving begins with the author recounting...