Book Review Archives

Much of the West’s fascination with China comes not just from the scale of its transformation, but the Maoist basket-case baseline from which the economy and society has made such a spectacular recovery. Chinese contemporary art, in particular, has made several fortunes from Cultural Revolution imagery, and English-language memoirs from that period number in the dozens, from Wild Swans to Son of the Revolution.
Posted August 11, 2008

For two dollars, the curious can clamber up the Tiananmen rostrum and stand where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. From this vantage, one gets the same view the Great Helmsman had of the legendary square, and some of the hulking buildings that would come to symbolize the People's Republic: the Great Hall, the National Museum, and the Monument to the People's Heroes, a towering monument to class struggle that faces north, piercing the feng shui of the city's ancient central axis. Like a museum itself, none of this imposing arrangement has changed since C save for the addition of Mao's mausoleum in 1977, and a phalanx of video cameras C making the square feel like what it was meant to be: a physical manifestation of state power determined to maintain an old vision of the future.
Posted July 30, 2008

China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest? by Randall Peerenboom. Reviewed by Nicholas Bequelin
Posted January 14, 2008

Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, portrays India as a place that “has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality.” It is not a place where village life, often exalted in Indian literature, is built upon family unity, but a place where parents don’t bother to name their children. Mr. Adiga’s is an India where votes are bought and elections are fixed, where never-ending bribes are packed in expensive Italian handbags, and where working “with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication and insincerity” leads to enrichment and success.
Posted May 15, 2008

In 2005, there were 191 million international migrants, or people living outside their native countries, according to data from the United Nations. Compare this to as many as 210 million Chinese migrant workers moving from their rural homes to cities, and it's easy to see why some immigration experts call it the largest mass migration in human history.
Posted May 13, 2008

As a non-expert in urban theory, I can hardly presume to marshal a surefooted command of postmodern and postcolonial analysis in critiquing Michael Dutton’s elaborate theoretical edifice. One thing, however, is certain: Beijing Time is a terrible read. Since misery loves company, perhaps I should inflict a bit of the prose upon our readers.

The short story In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (the basis of Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon) tells the tale of a murder through three conflicting accounts of the crime, one told by the deceased victim, one by the victim’s wife and the third by the accused criminal. Each account is very different and the reader can easily see the ways each narrator attempts to cast him or herself in a certain light. But each is also consistent with corroborating stories and the physical evidence at the scene of the crime. At the end of the story, one is left with the hopeless task of cobbling together some semblance of truth from the three narratives.

While the old cliché that one can never judge a book by its cover holds true, it is occasionally possible to make some accurate judgements based on how far apart the book’s covers are. In the case of Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, the covers are separated by 329 pages – which either indicates that the sheer ambition of this project will have proved foolhardy, or that the book is printed in microscopic print.

Mr. Khanna adopts a sober tone in this work, maintaining steadfast neutrality in analyzing the astonishing growth of the two countries, which will surely do much to reshape the way the world looks in the coming years. Besides neutrality, Mr. Khanna combines limpid prose and a sound evidence-based approach to make the book a refreshing alternative to many arcane, elliptical academic tracts on the subject.

During the present crisis in Burma, pro-democracy activists and others have made appeals to the United Nations, the United States, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to intervene. Japan is almost totally absent, putting aside the diplomatic demarches over the murder of photojournalist Kenji Nagai. That is quite remarkable considering that Burma once was one of Japans closest development partners in Southeast Asia. But it was a very peculiar relationship. Until the last round of upheavals in 1988, prosperous and democratic Japan poured massive amounts of development aid into a grossly mismanaged, authoritarian socialist state. The regime, which was set up when General Ne Win seized power in 1962, would most likely have collapsed without Japanese aid. When Ne Win, the man who took Burma from prosperity to poverty, died in December 2002, he was almost forgotten"and so was most of Japans influence in Burma.