Customer Reviews

Evening Chats In Beijing

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Evening Chats in Beijing is the best book about modern China that I have ever read. As a young Chinese intellectual, I am amazed by Professor Link's sharp insights and utter understanding of the modern Chinese culture. Unlike most other books written on this topic, Professor Link shows a mind of a scholar but a heart of a humanist. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is willing to understand China and its people, especially when you appreciate honesty, sincerity and rationality when it comes to approaching cultures as foreign as Chinese.

Having spent countless hours over the last six years reading on modern China's predicament as an East Asian Studies major in college, I can't believe I just recently found this book. It's a fresh read, delightfully accessible in execution, intelligent in its treatment of these literati voices, and often profound in its prodding of the historical underbelly, suggesting many points of fissure and acute sensitivity in an often hardened, decayed lining. The book documents and analyzes the opinions of Chinese intellectuals during the relatively open period leading up to the Tiananmen incident in 1989. Link's arranged collection of anecdotes and quotes, along with his own comments, provides insight into a period that will no doubt become more and more significant in the coming years because the questions and issues on the minds and in the words of Chinese intellectuals remain largely unresolved and simmering beneath the happy surface of glorious riches.

One valid criticism of the book made already by another reviewer is the conspicuous paucity of common voices--i.e. voices of those outside of the Chinese intelligentsia. However, in defense of Link's work this objection requires far too much additional background and study to answer. Chinese intellectuals have always enjoyed a privileged position within social and political debates. While the voices of non-intellectuals would give a fuller picture, the focus on intellectuals underscores yet another tension plaguing modern China; that is, the inability of intellectuals to relate to the masses, or their lack of trust in them. This gap was made patently clear during the Tiananmen protests when students dominated the political theatre and often refused the help of, or just simply ignored, the workers.

But taking this premise for granted, Link's work is highly charged with meaning and relevance, even to a much richer China almost a decade and a half later. Most interesting are his explanations of official language, or public language, as opposed to private, personal language. While we may complain to no end of the duplicity, fakeness, and hypocrisy of politicians in the democratic world, it is sobering to think of the degree to which language meaning must be bifurcated in China. How do you make sense of a world where there is the official story, often sweetened or fabricated to suit political ends, the truth of which is defended by the government and military with threats of social alienation or physical harm, and the unofficial story, which can only be shared privately, whispered by friends and neighbors within the safety of their own homes? What does this do to one's perception of reality?

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Link's portrait and feel that it will be a significant piece of history which will continue to inform our thoughts on China as it continues to stumble into its own.

Link's book is well written and is a very interesting account of one segment of Chinese life during the early years of China's reform process. However, it is also very narrow, looking at the circumstances of the elite intellectuals and occassionally overstating his, or his close Chinese friends, importance or experiences. The book doesn't come to address the conditions or lives of the typical urban citizen of Beijing or any other Chinese city and thus is lacking. It seems Link just took much of his personal interaction with Chinese intellectuals and turned it into a book. Overall, he is successful in capturing the experiences of many Chinese who went overseas to study and returned in the late 1980s, though circumstances have changed a lot since then. Further, he is able to capture much of the discontent among intellectuals which ultimately becomes the base of the Tiananmen protests.

His book gives the comparison of the Western and the Eastern (namely Chinese) intelectuals' way of thinking in modern China periods. It gives structural and fundamental roles of the intelectuals to reform and restructure China in the middle of highly competitive world. I recommend this book as an additional resource for China studies.