China's Brave New World

The author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink delivers a must-read for anyone interested in the world's most rapidly changing society (James L. Watson, editor of Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia). If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing's bookstore, the Librairie Avant-Garde, where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault's philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell's 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China-or post-9/11 America? In these often playful, always enlightening tales, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China's place in the current world order-or our own. Rather effortlessly brilliant . . . It penetrates with a lightly knowing eye and ear into the interior mind, heart and soul of giant China and the innumerable Chinese.-AsiaMedia This book provides a powerful lens for outsiders to understand a globalizing China and a unique mirror for the Chinese to reflect on their own society in a global context.-Yunxiang Yan, author of Private Life Under Socialism Readers will find themselves far more observant and attentive to local distinctions when they take their first or next trip to China.-Stanley Rosen, The China Journal No. 60