China Candid Book Report

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China Candid

Tell what the book is about. Do not give a summary of the story, but give the topic, geographic area, and timespan that the book covers. This should take only one mid-length paragraph.

China Candid: A People's Account of the People's Republic of China is an insider's look at the modern People's Republic of China. Through intimate conversations conducted over many years, China Candid provides an alternative history of the nation from its founding as a socialist state in 1949 up to the present. Artists, politicians, businessmen and -women, former Red Guards, migrant workers, prostitutes, teachers, computer geeks, hustlers, and other citizens of contemporary China all speak frankly about what it is like to live in a rising superpower under authoritarian rule. These citizens give new insights into the face of law and order in China as well as the changes that have occurred in modern China's transition from Mao's Red China to a market-oriented Socialist state.

Give the book's key argument/point.

The perceptions of China as a country where people enjoy abundant economic opportunity, while suffering atrocious human rights violations, are naive and shallow. Economic opportunity is restricted to a connected few and human rights issues are not detrimental to the lives of average Chinese. Furthermore, such pronouncements about a country as large and old as China ignores the inevitable diversity of human experience and the utter strangeness of daily life in favor of a neat national narrative.

3. Discuss the book's sources and methodology: what kind of evidence and methods the author uses to make his/her point.

The book relies on 26 separate interviews with people from a broad range of lifestyles and socioeconomic backgrounds. Representative respondents include a new tycoon, a worker coming to Beijing from the countryside, a young athlete, the founder of a private orphanage, a prostitute, and a computer hacker.

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Each respondent is selected to provide insight into a key area of modern China, e.g. The businessman and migrant worker for economics, the athlete for the 2008 Olympics, and the computer hacker for censorship.

Ye introduces each interview with some background about the respondent. He also uses the introduction to convey the dominant national narrative on each subject, extracted from mainstream media and histories. More importantly, he points out the areas and details about which the mainstream media and histories are silent. Finally, he guides the respondents with questions which gives the interviews a smoothness and coherency that it otherwise may not have had.

4. Analyze if the argument hold water. Is the point well made and supported with solid evidence and reasoning? If you were a juror, would you buy the author's argument/point or not? Why or why not?

Ye does not explicitly make arguments himself. The only writing Ye is responsible for in the book are the introductions to each interview. A bit of his thrust can be detected in these introductions. When introducing a rags-to-riches millionaire, he mentions a 1993 article in the China Business Times that celebrated the growth of China's uber-rich, before adding that "Few of the megawealthy in China are willing to talk about how they made their money. Here was one millionaire who was happy to tell his story." (13). From this, we can infer that Ye is not enamored with the China Business Times or the uber-rich.

Ye delivers most of his rhetoric in the way that he organizes the respondent's answers to his questions. He organizes the answers in a way that highlights the role of politics….....

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