If you want to understand how & why Logo, Haz, etc. are wrong about China, this is the book to read. It is the best, and possibly the only, book I have found which grasps that the essence of Chinese culture is the tension between obsession w/ "face" & and extreme "informalism"
Midler has spent most of life living in China, working as fixer, and his approach is to juxtapose his own experiences in China with those of various missionaries & explorers in the 19th & early 20th centuries
His basic thesis is that the closer we are to China, the less we understand the Chinese, particularly the "informal" nature of their cultural & political systems. Since this is difficult concept for westerns to get, I will provide some examples in thred below.
Here Midler discusses how the Chinese unit of measuring long stances was created to be essentially subjective & variable
Remarks on the Chinese legal system. Note contradiction in how judges are told to rule, which serves to keep the door open for the discretion of individual bureaucrats
One of the most telling examples he gives is how the Chinese handle plane or train crashes. Unlike the USA, where pilot error is always blamed, the Chinese tend to fault the mechanical systems themselves
Long but worth it. Passage about failure of british expedition to gift a large and complex clock to the emperor, b/c he was embarrassed by the display of organization and unity of the english craftsmen, knowing China was not capable of the same
English missionary predicts the success of communism well in advance, knowing that the Chinese would embrace due to shame about lack of social organization
City Guangzhou decides to remove the front page of the SCMP and distribute it anyway due to discomfort re: front page story
Discussion of Chinese propensity to invent obviously fake statistics, including fake cave population, fake arrests and so on, and how this many westerners eat this stuff up
Despite much propaganda about Chinese military threat, Chinese have never had the aptitude or interest in real warfare
China instigates the opium wars, many opium deaths due to Chinese cutting the opium with toxic fillers to make more money
I may update more later, but for now here is Midlerโs conclusion which is extremely important. We totally misunderstand Chinese objectives, imagining they have the same goals we do
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