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There are many books about coming to China and about the whacky adventures of laowai as they transition from excitement to confusion to redemption. It’s a genre unto itself. But few talk about the experience with the warmth and emotion of Alan Paul’s new book Big in China. 
Those who thought that Dylan was going to get up on stage in Beijing to harangue the CCP and then lead the crowd in a singalong of “Ai Shall be Released” were seriously kidding themselves. I know that when writing reviews it’s important to focus on the book and less so on the author. I’m breaking this rule. Jefferey Wasserstrom has to be on of the most tireless writers/scholars on China today. Seriously, I have no idea when he sleeps. He teaches history at UC Irvine, supervises a very dynamic group of graduate students, is the author of numerous articles, a blogger for Huffington Post, the driving force behind The China Beat, and in the last three years has published three books: the wry and observant China’s Brave New World – And Other Tales for Global Times (2007), the ambitious scholarly work Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and now a new book with a perhaps even more ambitious premise, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010). Just this past week, he’s finished up a month long series of talks at M on the Bund in Shanghai. The man is a force of nature. Moreover, Professor Wasserstrom is a model for bridging the divide between good academic scholarship and the needs of a general readership, a divide that seems all the more wide when it comes to writing about China. The term “public With the 90th anniversary of the CCP just around the corner (okay, next July…), the Party brass and their academic ass sucks got together for a high-level history hootenanny. At the kick-off, China’s Heir-Apparent-But-We-Still-Can’t-Admit-That-Publicly-Yet Xi Jinping called for more education regarding the Party’s history. Xi said the Party, having experienced the tests of revolution, development and reform, “successfully united and led the Chinese people to achieve miracles under an extremely complicated circumstance.” “Over the past 89 years, the CPC contributed greatly to the nation’s independence, unification and the people’s well-being,” he said. Well, I for one am relieved…because THAT’S a story that hasn’t been told enough times through China’s education, media, or entertainment industry. I suspect though that Xi’s main message had less to do with trumpeting a triumphalist narrative of Party history than about his accompanying admonition against those who sought to “distort or smear the Party’s history.” For the CCP-impaired or if you are otherwise unaccustomed to Zhongnanhai-speak, allow me to translate: “People are starting to see through all of our bullshit, so we need to pump some ex-lax into the cattle feed and get the shovels ready.” It’s not clear if Xi was responding to an actual threat within |
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