China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality

Mosher, one of the first Westerners allowed to live in a Chinese village in the 1970s, has no illusions. He shows that before the 1989 massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, China experienced the Terror of 1950-1953 which cost millions of lives, the countrywide search-and-destroy missions that went under the name of ``land reform,'' the 40-year nightmare of purges and arrests. In an eye-opening polemic as tonic as a cold shower, he lambasts China-watchers, foreign policy experts, politicians, newspaper correspondents and academics who have idealized, romanticized or otherwise misrepresented China over the years. In this category he includes John Fairbank, Edgar Snow, Theodore White, Henry Kissinger, Pearl Buck, Tom Hayden. Director of the Claremont Institute's Asian Studies Center, Mosher blasts Nixon's 1972 visit to China in an election year as ``poltiical theater on a grand scale.'' His illuminating analysis reveals how the U.S. media, having treated Chinese dissidents as a ``sideshow'' for decades, were unprepared for the recent crackdown on protesters. (Nov.)