Recommending Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s new book about China, UCLA professor Tom Plate wrote on Seattle Times editorial section:
Understanding China is going to remain irritatingly difficult. It’s an obviously important but intensely problematic place, with a possibly fabulous or possibly tragic future. We maybe have a better shot figuring out the future of India, or even Mars.
If we leave the job of thinking about China to our general mass news media, we will wind up with mainly superficial portraits of that part of China that’s most visible to the eye and to the camera, while losing all sight and sense of that part of China that is clandestine or at least well beneath the surface.
The downside of a gross misunderstanding looms ever more significant almost every time we look over our shoulder ” and see China coming on strong, economically as well as militarily. [Full Text]
