The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Hardcover)

~ James Mann (Author) "This is not a book about China itself..." (more)
Key Phrases: village elections, continuing repression, cold war mentality, United States, Soviet Union, South Korea (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Margaret MacMillan

James Mann is a distinguished journalist and historian who covered China for the Los Angeles Times; his 1999 book, About Face, was a first-rate account of the troubled path of U.S.-Chinese relations after President Richard M. Nixon's decision to open contacts with the communist government, and his 2004 bestseller, Rise of the Vulcans, explored President Bush's war cabinet. In The China Fantasy, he now adds polemicist to his resume.

As this angry, lively little book makes clear, Mann has had enough! His main target is all those American policymakers -- aided and abetted by big business, the media and Beltway think tanks -- who have sold a bill of goods to the American people. Since Nixon first made his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Mann charges, American elites have dispensed soothing and dangerously misleading nostrums to the public. Yes, China under the control of the Communist Party is somewhat authoritarian -- even, if you want to be rude, a totalitarian state. But that state of affairs, Americans are reassured, can't last forever. At some point, perhaps quite soon, China's dramatic economic development will inevitably lead to democracy as its growing middle class demands more rights and freedoms. Meanwhile, and confusingly, comes a set of warnings that China is more fragile than it seems and that if we don't all handle it with kid gloves, it could collapse into chaos and civil war, as it has done so often before.

Consequently, Mann argues, foreign critics of China's human rights abuses are told not to be so outspoken. After all, there is no point in hurting Chinese feelings or making the Chinese authorities dig in their heels. Mann is particularly scathing about what he describes as the "Lexicon of Dismissal." Criticism of China is dismissed as "bashing," "provocative" or "anti-China" (a favorite of the Chinese themselves), and any such censure always runs the risk of turning China into an enemy.

In his anger over this muzzling trend, Mann comes close to seeing a conspiracy by well-meaning but self-serving American elites -- with, of course, the happy acquiescence of the Chinese communists -- to keep the United States investing in and trading with China.

The China Fantasy raises an awkward and important question: What if there is a third alternative between the rise of democracy and the collapse of China's political order? What if that alternative is the survival of the one-party state, with all its apparatus of control and repression? In an era when capitalists can join the party built by Mao, the Chinese communists have already shown how adept they are at changing their spots. What would it mean for the United States -- and, indeed, the world -- if 20 or 30 years from now a much richer and more powerful China proved to be every bit as authoritarian a state as it is today? What if that China were one in which the middle classes decided, much as they did in Hitler's Germany, to opt for stability and prosperity over democracy?

Mann thinks that scenario highly likely, even if he does not share the alarmist view now taking root in some Washington circles that China is going to challenge the United States militarily. His concern is both that an undemocratic China is bad for the Chinese themselves and that it will be bad for the world, giving comfort and even support to other unsavory regimes as it already does to that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. What seems to outrage him most, though, is that the American people are going to go on being deceived.

Like all good polemics, this one raises more questions than it answers. Can the Chinese Communist Party, which now numbers some 70 million people, really be as monolithic or as cunning as he suggests? Is the American establishment really of one mind on China? Is there no possibility of the Chinese middle classes, or at least part of them, joining forces with the country's long-suffering peasants to push for greater democracy? We will have to wait and see, but, in the meantime, Mann has done a fine job of making sure that we won't do so complacently.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"Lucid, shrewd, and...blessedly level-headed." --New York Times --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (February 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670038253
• ISBN-13: 978-0670038251
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #354,159 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #12 in

  Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Comparative Government

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Trying to change the mainstream paradigm on China, March 28, 2007

By	S. Yu "Sun Tzu" (Kentucky, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

At first glance, "China Fantasy" by James Mann is just another line of a lengthy string of books since the mid-1990s ("China Dream; Coming Collapse of China; Coming Conflict with China"; etc etc) expressing Western concern about where the rapid changes in China are leading it. However, the strength of The China Fantasy is that it breaks with mainstream tradition in important ways.

Firstly, China hawks since the mid-1990s have traditionally come from the Right wing, aligned closely with neoconservatism, and driven primarily by security threat perception to an extent, in my opinion, which has always been exaggerated, but whose excesses led to the persecution of a Taiwanese American scientist toward the end of the decade (and created a fearful political climate for Chinese Americans). Others may feel that those fears were justified. Personally, it is a pleasant surprise to see a China expert who passionately opposes the Chinese government on the grounds of its human rights atrocities, and who reaches out to both political parties in the US (if anything, Mann's focus is more leftish). Mann has seized a certain moral high ground for the China hawks taken straight from the post-Tiananmen spirit.

Secondly and even more importantly, Mann presents a genuinely new idea from the perspective of the mainstream media of the past decade, an idea whose time has come: the possibility that China may continue to prosper, but fail to democratize its political system, and that the growing middle class which is seen as a force for democracy may become a force against it. With nearly twenty years having passed since Tiananmen, every day that passes which sees the repressive Chinese regime failing to change its ways further weakens the argument of those who adhere to the 'Soothing Scenario'; it is, like Mann argues, a scenario that cannot be disproven until it is too late. In addition, Mann ties liberal criticisms of globalization squarely in China policy, presenting it as the central consequence of the status quo by pointing out how wealthier 'classes' in the US and China, by use of misleading rhetoric on one hand and brute force on the other, support economic policies that benefit them at the expense of the many. This too is an important thesis that has not gotten much attention.

Although The China Fantasy mainly asks a predictive question that brings out the social scientist in the reader, this is a deliberately political tract, designed to shock or persuade the reader out of an ill-justified complacency. Thus, it should be taken with a great of salt, as I feel even Mann himself would probably agree; there are parts of the book where he as a China expert should have known where to qualify a statement but he did not (for example, in defining the Cultural Revolution as lasting from 1966-76).

My biggest criticism of this book is that Mann could have spent just a little less time going after superficial rhetoric and just a little more time supporting his main thesis: that China could continue to prosper economically without democratizing. Ironically, at one point Mann implies that people who argue that the Chinese do not want democracy have a bigoted attitude because people in almost every other country seem to want it; but Mann is arguing that the Chinese will not democratize even if they become wealthy when people in almost every other country have. By his own standards, is this not just as bigoted?

Nonetheless, Mann's prediction will prove correct if no one takes any concrete action to alter the status quo. I still believe that China will eventually democratize, but Mann reminds us of the Marxist fallacy that 'history' equals inevitability, a fallacy that many who adhere to the so-called 'Soothing Scenario' implicitly seem to have fallen into. Democracy in China will *not* happen if people, including Americans, simply play a waiting game until it magically does. Yes, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 when no one would have predicted it two years earlier. But it may not have happened without movements like Solidarity, or Radio Free Europe, or Reagan's high-minded diplomacy at the Berlin Wall and with General Secretary Gorbachev; none of which have current parallels with China. Right or wrong in its prediction, Mann's book deserves a read.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise and persuasive, April 22, 2007

By	Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

"The China Fantasy" by James Mann succeeds in thoroughly debunking the widely-held view that capitalism will inevitably bring democracy to China. Providing a brief historical account of U.S.-Chinese relations from the Nixon administration to the present, Mr. Mann makes clear that business opportunism has driven the agenda at the expense of human rights and democracy in both countries. Mr. Mann's decades of subject matter expertise have prepared him to present a concise and persuasive work on an important topic that should be widely read and discussed by policy makers and concerned citizens alike.

Mr. Mann's specific focus is on the public relations aspect of U.S.-Chinese relations. Mr. Mann contends that a succession of business-friendly politicians have sold the American public on what he calls the 'soothing scenario', or the prospect of a democracy that will somehow emerge as a result of China's deepening economic ties with the West. Mr. Mann explains that this rubric has provided cover for high-ranking U.S. officials who have often used their connections to smooth the way for multinational corporations to set up shop in China in order to exploit its abundant supply of cheap labor. However, Mr. Mann provides a number of counter arguments explaining why the soothing scenario is a highly problematic proposition, with perhaps the most persuasive point being that democracy could allow the masses of destitute Chinese peasants to easily undo the privileges that the relatively small Chinese upper and middle classes have enjoyed under the protection of the single-party system.

Mr. Mann alerts us to the importance of demanding China to enact democratic reforms sooner rather than later, when the Chinese economy might become too strong for outside influence to have any effect. Declining U.S. wages and plant closures caused by increased competition with repressed Chinese labor is but one well-known problem; the Chinese government's support of authoritarian regimes in other countries so that it can propagandize to its domestic audience is a lesser-known but perhaps more serious issue. While one would be hard pressed to detect a political bias in Mr. Mann's writing, the implicit lesson that capitalism can be wholly congruous with governmental repression serves to rebuke free-marketeers such as Thomas Friedman and provides grist for those who may be critical of globalization.

Interestingly, Mr. Mann makes a series of short-range predictions about how the media might frame its coverage of the 2008 Olympic games to be held in China. Mr. Mann believes that on the one hand, superficial news coverage will intend to pacify Western audiences while on the other hand, nationalistic themes will serve to paper over the reality of growing inequality on the Chinese mainland. The author also suspects that China will assuage the West with hints of reform that will probably never materialize while cynically parlaying its moment in the world spotlight to attract renewed rounds of investment.

I highly recommend this timely, insightful and important book to everyone.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars china in american eyes..., March 19, 2007

By	Edward A. Gargan (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

jim mann has written a clear-eyed analysis of american perspectives, in their various hues, on china, all of which tend to excuse beijing's record of repression and authoritarianism. while the self-interest of investors and the timidity of the american political establishment - republican and democratic both - have not only tolerated but sought to excuse chinese gross abuse of human rights and freedoms, mann's book systematically peels away the rationales, excuses, willful ignorances, and tacit acceptance of china's conduct. he also demolishes the self-delusions of many leading columnists who are burdened by a fatuous belief in the inevitability of democracy's rise in china, a belief based as much on their ignorance as their naivete about china. building on his earlier book, "about face," mann challenges american policy makers and investors (for example google and yahoo, which have acceded to demands of china's secret police for users' data and the censoring of their websites) to bring the same standards of international behavior that they demand of the rest of the world to the leadership in beijing. this is an important book.