Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Biggest China Story of 2007
[Mr. Wasserstrom teaches Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, and is currently completing work on “Global Shanghai, 1850-2010,” a book under contract with Routledge.]
When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the year’s big China story? They’ll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, dealing with everything from toy recalls to carbon emissions, space exploration to currency controls, Beijing’s Olympic preparations to Pudong getting the world’s tallest skyscraper.
There have been so many print, broadcast and online reports devoted to the P.R.C. this year, in fact, that our future historians might decided that a sense of the non-stop newsworthiness of the world’s most populous country was 2007’s biggest China story. Western fascination with and concern about the P.R.C. has been growing for years. But it’s reached a tipping point. Previously, when China made global headlines for months on end, there was something specific you could point to, like Nixon going to Beijing or Tiananmen. But that’s not the case now.
This upsurge in media attention made 2007 a busy year for China specialists who struggle to stay abreast of reports about the country we study. But in my case, there was an added dimension. My latest book, “China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times,” came out mid-year, claiming to provide non-specialist readers with stories, information, and analytical tools to help them put Chinese developments into perspective. Hence, I’ve been worried ever since completing the writing in 2006 that breaking news would make it obsolete—before it appeared or while it was just a few months old!
Thankfully, despite the plethora of 2007 China stories, this hasn’t happened.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not claiming clairvoyance. I didn’t expect 2007 to be a year when we’d worry about tainted toothpaste, Mia Farrow would dub the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics,” Beijing would launch a moon shot, and horrific reports would surface of slave labor being used to man brick kilns. In a largely prediction-free book, I didn’t assert that 2007 would be the year Macao surpassed Las Vegas in gambling revenue and Ang Lee would join the long list of famous directors who’ve made Shanghai films. And as for that city, often called a “Paris of the East,” I definitely didn’t foresee that it’d be visited in 2007 by a famous Paris of the West — Paris Hilton — whose assessment of it was quoted by Chinese and Western news agencies alike: “Shanghai looks like the future!”
On the other hand, one prediction I made has definitely already started coming true. I wrote in the book that many of the “questions about” the P.R.C. that had recently gotten increased attention were “likely to loom larger still during the months and years to come,” as the Beijing Games and Shanghai World Expo drew nearer.
And 2007 has not made obsolete one of my main arguments: that the strange long-term love-hate relationship between the United States and the world’s most populous country is still going strong. American thinking has long been distorted by the interplay of two fantasies. One, a dream of Americanization, in which China is imagined as a “land of decent people on the verge of converting to our ways and buying our products in record numbers—just as soon as they overcome the lingering hold of a few outmoded traditions.” The other, a demonizing nightmare of China as a “big, bad place that poses a threat to all that we hold dear.” Both are still very much in play.
This doesn’t mean that, were I writing “China’s Brave New World” now, it would be exactly the same book. After following events in 2007, I’d stress more strongly that this is a time in the U.S. when dark nightmare visions of a “China threat” are more prevalent than rosy dreams of a Chinese conversion. I’d use the brick kiln reports to flesh out discussion of the Dickensian aspects of the regime’s embrace of an “anything goes” form of capitalist development.
Finally, I’d add something to “Faster than a Speeding Bullet Train,” a chapter that focuses on Shanghai. I refer there to a number of people who have recently described the city’s 21st century incarnation as excitingly or disturbingly futuristic. If the book does well enough to warrant a second edition, a certain hotel heiress’s name will get a place on the list.
Read entire article at Far Eastern Economic Review (supplement)
When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the year’s big China story? They’ll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, dealing with everything from toy recalls to carbon emissions, space exploration to currency controls, Beijing’s Olympic preparations to Pudong getting the world’s tallest skyscraper.
There have been so many print, broadcast and online reports devoted to the P.R.C. this year, in fact, that our future historians might decided that a sense of the non-stop newsworthiness of the world’s most populous country was 2007’s biggest China story. Western fascination with and concern about the P.R.C. has been growing for years. But it’s reached a tipping point. Previously, when China made global headlines for months on end, there was something specific you could point to, like Nixon going to Beijing or Tiananmen. But that’s not the case now.
This upsurge in media attention made 2007 a busy year for China specialists who struggle to stay abreast of reports about the country we study. But in my case, there was an added dimension. My latest book, “China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times,” came out mid-year, claiming to provide non-specialist readers with stories, information, and analytical tools to help them put Chinese developments into perspective. Hence, I’ve been worried ever since completing the writing in 2006 that breaking news would make it obsolete—before it appeared or while it was just a few months old!
Thankfully, despite the plethora of 2007 China stories, this hasn’t happened.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not claiming clairvoyance. I didn’t expect 2007 to be a year when we’d worry about tainted toothpaste, Mia Farrow would dub the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics,” Beijing would launch a moon shot, and horrific reports would surface of slave labor being used to man brick kilns. In a largely prediction-free book, I didn’t assert that 2007 would be the year Macao surpassed Las Vegas in gambling revenue and Ang Lee would join the long list of famous directors who’ve made Shanghai films. And as for that city, often called a “Paris of the East,” I definitely didn’t foresee that it’d be visited in 2007 by a famous Paris of the West — Paris Hilton — whose assessment of it was quoted by Chinese and Western news agencies alike: “Shanghai looks like the future!”
On the other hand, one prediction I made has definitely already started coming true. I wrote in the book that many of the “questions about” the P.R.C. that had recently gotten increased attention were “likely to loom larger still during the months and years to come,” as the Beijing Games and Shanghai World Expo drew nearer.
And 2007 has not made obsolete one of my main arguments: that the strange long-term love-hate relationship between the United States and the world’s most populous country is still going strong. American thinking has long been distorted by the interplay of two fantasies. One, a dream of Americanization, in which China is imagined as a “land of decent people on the verge of converting to our ways and buying our products in record numbers—just as soon as they overcome the lingering hold of a few outmoded traditions.” The other, a demonizing nightmare of China as a “big, bad place that poses a threat to all that we hold dear.” Both are still very much in play.
This doesn’t mean that, were I writing “China’s Brave New World” now, it would be exactly the same book. After following events in 2007, I’d stress more strongly that this is a time in the U.S. when dark nightmare visions of a “China threat” are more prevalent than rosy dreams of a Chinese conversion. I’d use the brick kiln reports to flesh out discussion of the Dickensian aspects of the regime’s embrace of an “anything goes” form of capitalist development.
Finally, I’d add something to “Faster than a Speeding Bullet Train,” a chapter that focuses on Shanghai. I refer there to a number of people who have recently described the city’s 21st century incarnation as excitingly or disturbingly futuristic. If the book does well enough to warrant a second edition, a certain hotel heiress’s name will get a place on the list.