The Sky Is Not All Grey

Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
by James Fallows

A review by Xujun Eberlein

1.
A proprietary approach I use to help assess English journalism books about China is to measure how much they tell me, a Chinese, what I don't already know. This, needless to say, lacks objectivity, and it can easily undervalue an otherwise excellent book. As an example, Out of Mao's Shadow by Philip Pan consists essentially of stories I had already read from the Chinese media or the internet. Not new to me, but that doesn’t mean the book is not worth reading for Western readers (in fact, it is).

On the other hand, this approach raises a high bar for journalists writing about China. To find stories not broadly known even to the Chinese requires not only extraordinarily acute ears, but also the admirably open mind of a deep thinker. Thus, I can narrow down my reading list to a few outstanding books. James Fallows' new book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, is one of them. Many things he writes about are new to me, but that's the least of the delightful surprises. Continue reading on The China Beat >>