Book Review: Postcards from Tomorrow Square - Reports from China by James Fallows

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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. Nearly everything he writes about is new to me, but that's the least of the delightful surprises.

Being an old China foot, having stepped out after growing up there but still keeping a close eye on it, I found Postcards from Tomorrow Square to be surprisingly fresh and deep. Nowadays, with outspoken critics of China shouting from one line, and vocal supporters yelling back retorts from another, it seems there is little room left for dispassionate discussion. This book enquires into the heart of some of the most important issues facing China, and America, rather than picking at them from the sides. As such, it forms one of the best collections of writing on China I have seen.

The book is made up of 12 essays, 11 of which were published in the Atlantic Monthly between 2006 and 2008. There is a fair breadth of topics covered, and a fascinating array of characters lined up. The topics range from gambling to the balance of trade to technology innovation, from farming to internet policing to reality shows. The book provided me by far the clearest explanation of how China's "great fire wall" works, and why the imbalance in trade between the United States and China is unsustainable for both countries.

Unlike some other Western reporters who thought they knew what they were looking for in China, Fallows, a renowned journalist, was unexpectedly unassuming when he entered China again in 2006, having been there several times already during the 1980s and '90s. "This opportunity for discovery is the real payoff of life as a reporter: the chance to answer questions you did not previously know you wanted to ask," Fallows writes in the Introduction. And he does not shy away from saying his stories "do not presume to be complete or final accounts. They offer a few parts of the complicated picture of China."

Article Author: Xujun Eberlein

Xujun Eberlein, author of "Apologies Forthcoming," is a writer originally from China. She hosts the literary and cultural blog Inside-out China.

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