In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981–82 by Charlotte Furth
  • Brett Sheehan (bio)
Charlotte Furth. Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981–82. Amherst, New York: Cambria, 2017. 158 pp. Paperback $24.95, isbn 978-160497-9-848.

Charlotte Furth's new book is an on-the-ground account of the very early days of Sino-American normalization in 1981 and 1982 when she worked as a Fulbright exchange scholar at Peking University, China's premier institution of higher education. Best known for her work as a Chinese historian interested in intellectual history, gender, and medicine, Furth here provides a personal account of what it was like for a mid-career American academic to be part of the very fraught process of re-establishing relations between these two giant nations. For those new to the study of China, especially the Chinese mainland, it will reveal a world of foreigners tightly controlled, of expat communities bounded within walls (both real and cultural), of friendship stores, and of the battle to make sense of it all. This was a time when academic exchange with China seemed so foreign and, apparently so risky, a time when scholars eagerly exchanged accounts of their trips to China and their experiences with the academic world there. Which archives were most open to foreign researchers? What archives even existed? And the all-important question: was there anywhere to buy coffee? For those who saw China at this time, Charlotte's book is a touching reminder of the tentativeness of the whole affair–how Americans and Chinese alike were desperate to meet and get to know each [End Page 187] other –and how difficult that was in reality–as cultural gaps and political realities loomed in the background of every encounter.

Opening to China tells us also about the life of one of our most important China scholars, and through that life we see the growth and maturation of the field of modern Chinese history in the twentieth century. Furth's introduction firmly roots her historic time in Beijing in the life of a scholar of China who came of age during the Cold War. Like most scholars of the time, she studied about China without ever having visited the country. Trips to Taiwan and Hong Kong were as close as most foreign researchers could get. In 1976, as part of a group carefully chosen to be sympathetic to China, Furth made her first trip to the mainland. For two weeks she toured model "agricultural communes, industrial workplaces, schools, neighborhood associations, and hospitals" (p. 7). This initial carefully-choreographed trip, however, left her hungering for more, and wondering how much she had actually seen. When the chance came to go to China in 1981 as a teacher of American Studies under the auspices of the Fulbright program, she jumped at it.

Based on the voluminous letters she wrote home during that year, this book about her time there informs us about the fraught nature of public diplomacy. We see the grander institutional side of public diplomacy, which was embedded in larger structures of the Fulbright program, the US State Department, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and the various "waiban," the foreign affairs offices of every work unit in China at the time. At the same time, we see the very intimate, the personal, and the seemingly trivial details of person-to-person contact. Furth's description of the Friendship Hotel, the foreign experts' compound where she and the other Fulbright scholars lived, shows a lively community from all over the world living in a vast complex of buildings. The complex provided comforts most Chinese lacked, such as hot water available in the mornings and evenings, but also served to isolate foreigners from the Chinese. The obstacles to Sino-American interaction were not just physical. Furth soon found that she and her students were separated by a vast gap in expectations. She found, among other things that the Chinese students were turned off by her adoption of the cutting edge of American social history of the 1980s. The Chinese students, tired of the insistent class analysis of the history on which they had been reared...

pdf