Reviews of the new nationalist tome, Unhappy China, are coming in. From the Wall Street Journal:
Several reviews in the Chinese media have ridiculed “Unhappy China” as an attempt to cash in on nationalistic sentiment. The book is a way to “fish money from the pockets of the angry youth and angry elderly,” wrote one critic in the China Youth Daily, a leading state-run newspaper.
An English-language article by Xinhua, the state-run news agency, said the book had failed to hit a chord with average Chinese, and quoted blistering critiques from bloggers and academics calling its nationalism embarrassing and unconstructive.
An article in Newsweek reports that the book is the product of a changing mood in China amid the global financial meltdown:
The mood in china appears to be reaching a tipping point, as its normally bland leaders abandon cautious diplo-speak under the pressures of the global financial crisis. First, they blamed American capitalism for the crisis and Premier Wen Jiabao publicly pressed Washington to ensure the safety of some $2 trillion in U.S. debt held by Beijing. Then Central Bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan called for replacing the greenback with a new reserve currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a move that would assure the long-term decline of the dollar. All this signals an increasingly assertive economic nationalism, and it is only the tip of the iceberg.
