Word: johnson
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...Johnson meanders between personal narrative and historical analysis, departing from the matter-of-fact style of his Journal articles...
...Newspaper articles have this authoritative tone where everything is presented as fact, but you don’t get how the story is gathered,” Johnson says, speaking in a phone interview last week. For instance, Johnson constantly kept an eye out for Communist Party informants, bicycling alongside a source through the busy streets of Beijing to avoid being overheard. Slowly, Johnson managed to step into the lives of his subjects...
...short, Johnson wrote a new kind of book on China...
...past, I think journalists wrote about China in a formulaic way,” Johnson says. “The books tended to be a chapter on the economy, a chapter on politics, a chapter on agriculture, a chapter on food. But now, you can spend time with people and get inside their lives...
Granted, there have certainly been growing pains, but the pains should not blind us to the growth. In addition to corrupting and jading China, the Communists have also modernized and industrialized the country. Johnson rightly points out that the tax system and the village democratizations are terribly botched, but we have to keep the discussion in context: these reforms are all of 11 and 23 years old, respectively. Compared to other Communist countries from Cuba to North Korea, China’s record does not look nearly so bleak...