Description
The student uprisings in Tiananmen Square took many American observers by surprise. Yet did China itself really change, or simply our perception of it? In this brilliant historical overview, Steven Mosher argues that we have consistently misinterpreted China for many years.Mosher was one of the first Westerners to be permitted to live in a rural village in China in the 1970s, and his subsequent expulsion and dismissal from Stanford University made headlines. Here he criticizes the material that has shaped our perception of China-from newspaper coverage to the writings of intellectuals such as Edgar Snow, John K. Fairbank, and Theodore White, to Shirley MacLaine's You Can Get There From Here-tracing the distortions that led us first to cringe at the "Yellow Peril," then abruptly to reverse field and acclaim the new "Maoist Man."Mosher offers an exceptionally illuminating account of the cynicism andself-deception that lay behind Nixon's journey in 1972, yet, he argues, this was simply the most glaring example of how ideology, political expediency, and manipulation by the Chinese have con- sistently blinded us to the truth. Mosher warns that unless we are able to bring our current images of China into focus, our views about its future will continue to be dismissed as ignorant and inconsequential.
ISBN:9780465098057
