Hessler's "Country Driving": Not Recommended Reading in China?

http://www.bruce-humes.com/?p=1860

Book reviews of books by foreigners about China can be translated, even if the books themselves might not be published in the PRC. But there’s a certain art to it...

Comments

# 1.   

Great post. Check Humes' blog for more detail on how the recent Time article "Big China Books: Enough of the Big Picture" was covered in the Chinese press...extensive cross-outs illustrate content that was deleted in the Chinese translation. I can understand why "they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth of 'thousands of years of continuous civilization,' " was deleted in the state press, but what was the rationale, I wonder, for leaving out the opening paragraph of the article: "A Texas-based media-tracking organization recently announced that it had concluded, via a sophisticated statistical analysis of news sources, that China’s leapfrog up the global economic hierarchy was the top story of the past decade." Seems more flattering to leave it in.

Cindy Carter, February 3, 2010, 8:44p.m.

# 2.   

Whoa, apparently there is nothing salvageable in that book at all…

Eric Abrahamsen, February 4, 2010, 12:47a.m.

# 3.   

@Cindy

China's economic leapfrogging is no longer news in China; it's CCP gospel.

The reassuring news for the Chinese reader is that 1) Foreign experts are obsessed with The Middle Kingdom; and 2) They still can't decode us...

Bruce, February 4, 2010, 2:22a.m.

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