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Saturday, October 5th, 2002
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For the several years now China has ranked second only to Japan as America's biggest trade problem. But how much does Washington really know about Beijing? Very little. Worse, much of what it thinks it knows is nonsense. A major problem is the generally low quality of American scholarship on China. But one book is a shining exception. Eamonn Fingleton reviews James Mann's About Face.
If you want to know what is wrong with American policy towards China, there is no better place to start than James Mann's superb About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton.
As a skilled journalist, Mann writes clearly and to the point. But this book is more than a journalistic tour de force. Mann has been following the China story since he was posted by the Los Angeles Times to Beijing in 1984. He thus has a depth of knowledge that is unmatched by any academic China watcher I have read. That knowledge not only shines through in the main text but it is testified to in a notes section full of sources and corroborating detail.
What I particularly like about this book is its uncommon commonsense. Mann refuses to be swept off his feet by the "romance of China" -- a romance that repeatedly over the last century has discombobulated the thinking of American policy-makers, business executive, scholars and journalists. Stolidly eyeing the authoritarian reality behind all the fine words and sumptuous banquets that Beijing bestows on influential visitors, Mann constantly reminds us how sorry has been China's record on human rights in recent decades -- and how cravenly Washington has sought to sweep that record under the carpet.
This book is important too for its worldly wisdom in repeatedly showing the ease with which the Chinese system can manipulate America's money-driven and short-sighted political system. None of this is particularly surprising to those of us who have been watching U.S.-Japan relations in recent decades -- but it is rare for China experts (and still rarer for Japan experts) to highlight how the authoritarian East runs rings around our Western democratic institutions.
Essentially this book is characterized throughout by a show-me attitude to the American intellectual community's wishful thinking on an East Asia. As Mann repeatedly points out, China is far from being "bound" to converge towards Western values. Quite the reverse, thanks to the comprehensive mismanagement of American trade policy in the last fifteen years, China is now in a stronger position than ever to flaunt its rejection of those values.
First published in 1998, this book has already been around for a while. Don't be put off. About Face has no sell-by date. It is quite simply a modern classic.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
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Contact Eamonn Fingleton |
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