Customer Reviews

Streetlife China (Cambridge Modern China Series)

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If you were in China and studied American history, you would never learn about slackers, pop music or be able to quote the movie the Princess Bride. Were you to then come to America, you would find yourself in an area whose history and political structure you understood, but in a society beyond what you had read and filled with people who can quote beer commercials you've never seen.

Fortunately for those outside China looking in, we have Dutton. Like Barme, Dutton looks at the stuff that most people miss: advertisements for STD cures on flyers in Beijing, new slang, fads that come and go without changing the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, but that slightly touch millions of lives in China. Without overstepping his bounds and claiming to have great insight in to the Chinese psyche based on these little facets of society, Dutton looks at the general attitudes on the street that he's gathered while in China. Apart from the propaganda bureau and the Public Security bureau (China's cops), no political actors pop up in his book. He quotes artists, triads and prostitutes for a look at China that lets students get a little of what they would have learned by living and slumming on the streets of Beijing.

This is not a great way to start understanding China, but is a fantastic addition to your bookshelf if you want to flesh out your academic learning with a bit of street-level detail.

This is possibly the most interesting book I have read in several years. Considering that the book, strictly speaking, is an academic study, this makes it all the more remarkable that Michael Dutton has created a highly readable account of a shadowy world within a world: China's "floating population". Weaving his own insights into carefully selected excerpts of translations of Chinese scholars, government documents, and personal interviews, Dutton creates a vision of China virtually ignored by the Western media.

Dutton correctly asserts at the beginning of the book that the dominant image of China in the Western mind is the infamous incident of the lone dissident facing off against a tank in Tiananmen Square. Dutton's insight is reinforced by numerous examples, such as Mike Wallace's ineffectual interview of Jiang Zemin, where he brings up this precise incident, clearly oblivious to far more interesting topics. (See ...C-SPAN "when they" aired the much more revealing unedited version of the interview). However, while the outside world only imagines China, the daily reality of living in China's large cities, such as Shanghai, brings one face-to-face with the reality of the floating population; and if one is up to it, face-to-face with their often dismal fate.

This is a remarkable and disturbing book, and a must-read for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China.

I guess this goes with the territory of how this book was put together, but some of the essays are good and some are bad. Some of the essays written by the Chinese have good context, but others are devoid of a context for the foreign reader or are too reflexively pro/anti China. Some of the essays are quite informative while others (such as those on tattoos) are simply someone trying to be profound. The introductions to each section can be totally glossed over.

However, this is a good book that puts together various aspects of China that are not talked about much and done in a way that balances perspectives.

I bought this book to prepare for an extended trip to China where my daughter was working. The book had been recommended to me as providing insights into contemporary life.

I can't tell you the extent of my disappointment in this book. It was painful to read because of the twists and obfuscations of the language. The limited part that I tried to read certainly didn't provide any enlightenment regarding China. Let me quote an early selections to show how convoluted the language is. From Page 5: "It is for this reason that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were so insistent that the consumptive mode is always responsible for the 'constant reproduction of the same thing'. While Adorno and Horkheimer examined the emergence of consumption in the West, the point they make about it is no less valuable in relation to China today."

Perhaps I should say the insights of the book were not visible to me. I decided any insights were not worth the time it would take me to disentangle them, and gave up on the book a few tortured pages

I can only hope other readers found the book more accessible and worthwhile.