Chinese Shadows
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Behind the carefully constructed facade of Mao's China lurks a world of contradiction, repression, and cultural devastation — and Simon Leys, one of the most perceptive Western observers of the People's Republic, tears that facade apart with surgical precision. Chinese Shadows chronicles Leys' travels through China in the early 1970s, presenting a damning, first-hand account of life under the Cultural Revolution: the destruction of ancient monuments, the silencing of intellectuals, the suffocating grip of political orthodoxy, and the grim theatre of a society performing contentment for foreign visitors. Written with the wit of a scholar and the moral outrage of a humanist, this work stands as one of the most courageous political essays of the twentieth century, cutting against the grain of Western leftist romanticism about Maoist China. Leys — the pen name of Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans — argues with elegant ferocity that the ideological fog obscuring the true nature of the regime served not the Chinese people, but their rulers. A landmark of political testimony, Chinese Shadows leaves the reader asking one unsettling question: how much of what we believe about closed societies is simply what those societies want us to see?
Author: Simon Leys
Format: Hardback
Genre: Asian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Behind the carefully constructed facade of Mao's China lurks a world of contradiction, repression, and cultural devastation — and Simon Leys, one of the most perceptive Western observers of the People's Republic, tears that facade apart with surgical precision. Chinese Shadows chronicles Leys' travels through China in the early 1970s, presenting a damning, first-hand account of life under the Cultural Revolution: the destruction of ancient monuments, the silencing of intellectuals, the suffocating grip of political orthodoxy, and the grim theatre of a society performing contentment for foreign visitors. Written with the wit of a scholar and the moral outrage of a humanist, this work stands as one of the most courageous political essays of the twentieth century, cutting against the grain of Western leftist romanticism about Maoist China. Leys — the pen name of Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans — argues with elegant ferocity that the ideological fog obscuring the true nature of the regime served not the Chinese people, but their rulers. A landmark of political testimony, Chinese Shadows leaves the reader asking one unsettling question: how much of what we believe about closed societies is simply what those societies want us to see?