The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power eds. by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi (review)

Published in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, The China Questions collects together thirty-six short essays, all written by experts affiliated with the center, that each answer a particular question about contemporary China in terms accessible to a general audience. As co-editor Michael Szonyi writes in the volume's introduction, the collection aims to redress the "understanding deficit" evident in the U.S. mass media's coverage of China. Together, the essays can be seen to offer an intermediary primer for the discerning U.S.-based China watcher, presenting more scope and depth than the average day-to-day journalistic coverage while eschewing the specialized language of scholarship.

As a whole, the anthology succeeds in this endeavor; easily readable and largely unencumbered by academic jargon, the essays speak directly to China-related issues that regularly saturate U.S. media coverage, including the prospects of the current Xi Jinping administration's longevity and legitimacy, China's role in global trade agreements, and the Chinese state's response to environmental crisis, among other pressing matters. In addition, several essays—such as David Der-wei Wang's consideration of utopian imaginations in contemporary literature, or Arthur Kleinman's piece on aging and mental health—offer tantalizing glimpses into the kind of socio-cultural and historical analyses that are given less press attention. While the selection of thematic areas by which the essays are grouped—politics, international relations, economy, environment, society, history, and culture—might be more or less expected, their contents offer a robust entryway for those interested in China studies from a multitude of disciplinary directions. Even more useful in this regard is the publisher's canny mobilization of digital resources. Readers can access podcasts, further discussions, and, most helpfully of all, a periodically updated supplemental reading list on the book's dedicated website (http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/china-questions/).

As Szonyi writes in the Introduction, when it comes to China's past, present, and future, "complexity matters." The form and target audience of this collection, with its easily digestible short essays, inevitably means limits to the complexity that can be addressed. The book combats this in some respect by presenting its essays not as definitive or thorough accounts in a particular specialized area but by deploying a series of questions to set the complex agenda of inquiry. As responses to these questions, the essays function both to provide a straight-forward informational answer and, for curious readers, a suggestive direction in which further inquiry can go. In the International Relations section, for instance, Alastair Iain Johnston compellingly shows how the popular perception of Chinese exceptionalism—its essentially "peace-loving" nature—also gives simultaneous rise to hostility toward other nations and support of intensified militarism. It is an analysis that undercuts the image of the Chinese nation as the "other" to America while lending itself to considerations of the similarities between Chinese and American claims to exceptionalism. In the Society section, Susan Greenhalgh's essay on the end of the One-Child Policy also gives much-needed nuance to an issue frequently covered by the Western press. Greenhalgh argues that the end of the One-Child Policy does not signal the end of state birth planning but an "adjustment" by the state; this adjustment carries the risk of inviting market forces to replace state control over reproduction, which she argues may enhance already-existent social inequalities between rich and poor. In History and Culture, Jie Li's essay shows how Chinese state propaganda, often understood as monolithic brain-washing, is more complex than it appears, and can take on new life through its ironized consumption by media-savvy audiences. As exemplified in these essays, the strongest individual pieces in the volume defamiliarize topics that often appear in mass-media representations of China and direct the reader...