Reviews Archives

Do you ever laugh out loud on the airplane? Take along a couple picks from our summer reading list on your holiday and your flying companions will start wondering about the lunatic sitting in 3C. We present one featured review by Ron Gluckman, as well as short reviews of some of our favorite classics.

Any recounting of Beijing history inevitably depicts two sides to the city: One Beijing is the scene of fast-fading history, while the other is rushing into a quickly appearing future. Both views are manufactured and misleading. But there is no middle ground, nor any treatment of Beijing that can adequately capture where the city has been or might be heading that can avoid being selective to some extent. These two volumes will satisfy no one completely but are still praiseworthy for different reasons.

As the beleagured Olympic torch relay slouched toward Lhasa on June 21, Beijing readied the security forces and held its breath. Tibet Communist Party Secretary Zhang Qingli kicked off the celebrations with a thinly veiled warning to Tibetans: “We will certainly be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique and safeguard the stability of Tibet … to contribute to the success of the Beijing Olympic Games.”

Early in the book, Lee Harris quotes a Chechen terrorist involved in the 2002 attack on a Moscow theater that left 169 people dead. “We will win in the end,” the Chechen declares, “because we are willing to die and you are not.” The sentiment is familiar to anyone who follows the global Islamist movement, which seeks to impose Shariah law on society and the state. Expressed in remarkably similar ways, it surfaces in al Qaeda press releases in Pakistan, jihadist propaganda videos in Iraq and Islamist T-shirts in Indonesia. Fittingly then, it sets the tone for an expansive, thoughtful and unusually frank meditation on the troubled encounter between Islam and the West.

In June, President Hu Jintao conducted a live webcast at the “Strong China Forum,” a forum run by the People’s Daily Online. More than 300 questions for President Hu were posted in advance by forum members. In an exchange lasting around four minutes, he answered three softballs. In various Chinese blogger communities and forums, many people expressed dismay that the whole thing was “over as soon as it started.” Others posted cynical replies such as: “What else do you expect?” The brief webcast was gimmicky and largely content-free. But Mr. Hu’s final comment was nonetheless interesting:

This latest collection in a long line of edited books on Burma brings together a fine array of scholars and practitioners to examine developments in the country’s politics, economics and environment. It breaks new ground with its case studies on environmental management, and also provides acute assessments of political and economic trends and prospects following Burma’s banking crisis of 2002 and 2003, the Depayin Massacre of May 2003, and the purge of General Khin Nyunt and his associates in October 2004.

Zhang Guohua was desperate to improve his family’s living standards. So in 2001 the 39-year-old father of two left Liaoning Province, in China’s economically depressed northeastern rust belt. He flew to the United Kingdom on a business-visitor visa. And, as planned, he overstayed. He got a crummy factory job putting Samsung labels on microwaves, joining the vast, shadowy network of an estimated 170,000 to 200,000 undocumented Chinese workers in United Kingdom. One night, just six months after starting, Zhang developed an acute headache near the end of a shift. Hours later he dropped dead.

In a land where a person’s career prospects and social standing are hugely affected by the intransigent and brutal hierarchy of caste, class and religion, and where cruel gender bias routinely compels expecting parents to illegally abort female fetuses viewed as unwanted burdens, the story of Mayawati Kumari is an amazing and hopeful anomaly.

In 1920, when Sun Yat-sen first donned a jacket with five buttons running down the center, four pockets, and three buttons on each sleeve, he could not have known that his garment would become the dominant fashion in China for decades, one that would eventually become a potent political symbol for an ideology that was not his own. The Sun Yat-sen suit would come to represent the ideals of the Nationalist Revolution

As the August Beijing Olympics draw near, one could almost forget that the Games will include athletes, competing for medals. Widespread controversy over Tibet, Darfur and China’s human-rights record seems to dominate the news coverage, much to Beijing’s chagrin. As Premier Wen Jiabao recently said, “We should not politicize the Olympic Games.” Some might find such remarks ironic. In Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, author Xu Guoqi comments, “More than any other sports event, the 2008 Olympic Games promise to accentuate the significance of sports as a political endeavor rather than a personal leisure pursuit—at least in the minds of recent Chinese leaders.”