This successor volume to China beyond the Headlines takes the reader even farther beyond the "front stage" to explore a China few Westerners have seen. Seeking to bridge the gap between what specialists understand and the general public believes, the contributors challenge readers to move past the usual images of China presented by the media and to think about shared problems. In an entirely new set of essays, they explore such critical issues as environmental degradation, nationalism, unemployment, film and literature, news reporting, the Internet, sex tourism, and the costs of the economic boom to vividly portray the complexity of life in contemporary China and how surprisingly often it speaks to the American experience.
Lionel M. Jensen is associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Timothy B. Weston is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Culture Matters—A Report from the Field of U.S.-China Relations Introduction: The New China, a Different United States Part I: Front Stage Chapter 1: Trouble-Makers or Truth-Sayers? The Peculiar Status of Foreign Correspondents in China Chapter 2: The Political Roots of China's Environmental Degradation Chapter 3: Fueling China's Capitalist Transformation: The Human Cost Chapter 4: Qigong, Falun Gong, and the Body Politic in Contemporary China Chapter 5: Narratives to Live By: The Century of Humiliation and Chinese National Identity Today Chapter 6: The Internet: A Force to Transform Chinese Society? Chapter 7: The Politics of Filmmaking and Movie Watching Part II: Back Stage Chapter 8: Fictional China Chapter 9: Of Rice and Meat: Real Chinese Food Chapter 10: Herding the Masses: Public Opinion and Democracy in Today's China Chapter 11: Sex Tourism and the Lure of the Ethnic Erotic in Southwest China Chapter 12: Welcome to Paradise! A Sino-American Joint-Venture Project Chapter 13: The New Chinese Intellectual: Globalized, Disoriented, Reoriented Chapter 14: Reporting China since the 1960s Afterword: China, the United States, and the Fragile Planet
