Not surprisingly, I've been paying a lot of attention lately to the general interest books on the PRC that have been coming out, in part due to my perennial desire to keep learning about the country and in part to see what sort of competition there is for my own China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. In the crowded field of recent publications, the hardest to categorize is probably Richard Baum's latest, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom (University of Washington Press, 2010). This is because it is less one text than three rolled together.
It's a concise survey of recent Chinese political history. But it's also a potted history of the American China studies establishment -- or, rather, that establishment's social scientific wing of which Baum is part, since humanities fields such as history and literature get only glancing attention. And it's a memoir of one leader of that establishment's life in Chinese studies, a coming of age and career highlights tale that often showcases the author's puckish side. One choice anecdote, for example, involves a young Baum's ultimately unsuccessful effort to fast-talk his way into a visa for travel into mainland China, back in the 1960s when Americans could very rarely get them. His ploy was to make the most of a mislabeled photograph in a pro-Communist Hong Kong newspaper that referred to him as a "friend of China" enamored of Mao's writings, and also described him as a French merchant seaman rather than a graduate student from California.
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