Are Americans Intoxicated by ‘Our’ China?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.30.08 | 11:31 AM ET
Interesting piece in the Washington Post by novelist Nicole Mones, who argues that the U.S.‘s enchantment with the country’s historical sites and the “mystery of China” has blinded us to the realities of the rising power. “Americans are infatuated with ‘our’ China,” she writes. “We prefer a nostalgic, exotic, vanished land that has little to do with China today.”
She points to well-worn tourist paths and “the narrative arts” to support her points, and offers many examples. But she doesn’t discuss some of the amazing recent journalism about modern China.
This week’s New Yorker has a terrific story by Evan Osnos about the “new generation’s neocon nationalists.” Osnos’s previous piece about China’s Elvis of English was also stellar, as was National Geographic’s China issue. Then there’s Peter Hessler’s National Magazine Award-winning piece, China’s Instant Cities, not to mention his books.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many, many more stories and books that attempt to get inside the “new” China.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
HS 07.30.08 | 2:04 PM ET
As someone who has traveled the length and breadth of China, knows pretty good Mandarin and has visited numerous historic sites, some quite off the beaten track, I must say I agree that there is a big rift between historic Chinese culture and its present one. This becomes even more apparent if you read some Chinese classics. From what I could see on my visits over the past decade, the country is getting greedier and nastier. I’m not altogether sure that it can continue much longer in its present state, and have a feeling that the Olympics in BJ are not going to go as planned.
Annette 07.31.08 | 1:34 AM ET
Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost.
Nicole Mones 07.31.08 | 11:27 AM ET
I just want to clarify that the op-ed essay never argued that there was not excellent China journalism coming from the West; there is. This was not an essay about what information is available in the West, but about what it is that we as a Western audience consistently make most popular. And while it is hard to compare the numbers of readers of magazine pieces and books, if you limit a look at this China-journalism question Michael Yessis has raised just to books, you’ll see the same divide again. Fine nonfiction books on modern China by authors like Hessler and John Pomfret sell only a fraction of what the top Easterns sell. Hessler’s ‘River Town’, arguably the top-selling work of China nonfiction to appear in the last decade, sold only 10-20% of the copies sold by ‘Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.’
So it isn’t an issue of the China that’s available to us, but rather of the China most of our poplation seems to desire.
And I can’t help but feel that our ‘desired’ narrative distracts us from grappling with the hard, complex contradictions to which HS alludes.