In this Book
- China's Brave New World: --And Other Tales for Global Times
- Book
- 2007
- Published by: Indiana University Press
If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing’s bookstore, the Librairie Avant-Garde, where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault’s philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell’s 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China—or post-9/11 America?
In these often playful, always enlightening "tales," Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China’s place in the current world order—or our own.
Table of Contents
- Foreword: Beyond Marx, Lenin, and Mao
- pp. ix-xii
- Introduction
- pp. xiii-xxiv
- Part One. Adventures in China-Watching
- 2. Mr. Mao Ringtones
- pp. 13-19
- 3. All the Coffee in China
- pp. 20-27
- Part Two. The Inscrutable West
- 6. Traveling with Twain
- pp. 48-59
- Part Three. Turn-of-the-Century Flashbacks
- 9. Mixed Emotions: China in 1999
- pp. 81-100
- 10. Karl Gets a New Cap: Budapest in 2000
- pp. 101-109
- Part Four. The Tomorrowland Diaries
- 13. China’s Brave New World
- pp. 125-132
- 14. Chicago in an Age of Illusions
- pp. 133-143
- 15. Why Go Anywhere?
- pp. 144-172
- 16. Faster than a Speeding Bullet Train
- pp. 173-185
- Afterword: Rhymes for Our Times
- pp. 186-196
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 197-200
- Bibliography of Works Discussed
- pp. 201-204