Seven more books on China: Completing my reading list.

There’s only a very limited amount that you can understand about another country by reading books about it. I know this first-hand, from having read a ton of books about Japan while also living there for years. To the extent that anyone can ever really “understand” a whole country, you really just have to live there. Still, books can do a few important things for you here. They can open up a window into parts of a country that you probably wouldn’t encounter in your daily life — assembly lines, prisons, or national security think tanks. They can provide important historical context in order to understand modern politics. They can give you a good intro to the narratives that?other?people use when they think about a country. And so on.

A little over a year ago, I decided to read a bunch of books about China, since U.S.-China relations are so important and have become so fraught. I am not, and will never be, a China expert — if you want those, check out?Dan Wang,?Damien Ma,?Shuli Ren,?Liqian Ren,?Victor Shih,?George Magnus, and?Barry Naughton, or follow?my Twitter list for China news. But China is an important topic that any economics blogger needs to think about, and the books I’ve read over the past year have definitely helped fill in some gaps in my background knowledge. In January, I did a writeup of the first six books:

This book came highly recommended by people whose viewpoints on China I trust, and I had high hopes for it. So that may be part of why the book left me bitterly and comprehensively disappointed.

Middle Class Shanghai?purports to be a book about U.S.-China engagement, and yet the book spends astonishingly little time on?that topic. Mostly, it’s about the city of Shanghai — its history, its politics, its economics, its art and culture. That’s a fascinating topic in and of itself, but the book mostly discusses these topics in a very dry, high-level way, full of statistics and names and dates. Anecdotes and stories would have really helped the book here. Shanghai is one of the world’s great cities — a place where a number of my friends have lived, and which all of them universally praise. But none of the color and energy of that city comes through in this infodump.

More fundamentally, though, it’s not clear exactly why the author, Cheng Li, believes that Shanghai is the key to U.S.-China engagement — that the city and its middle class will somehow create a bridge between the two countries that will moderate the hawkish instincts in both. This is the thesis of the book, yet exactly how this is supposed to work is never really explained. The author’s own statistics show that the attitudes of Shanghai people who returned to their home city after studying in the U.S. are complex — they pick up liberal ideas like concern for the environment, but they also tend to be nationalistic. A quote at the beginning of the chapter on the attitudes of Shanghai returnees is “I hate American hegemony, and I love NBA games.” That’s hardly encouraging; I’m sure many of the citizens of Wilhelmine Germany loved French wine back in 1914. Anyway, if that typifies the attitude of the typical Shanghai exchange student, I am not optimistic about the attitude of the average Shanghai resident, to say nothing of the attitudes in China’s far less cosmopolitan regions.

In any case, other than cultural contact and exchange, there are few other suggestions for how Shanghai’s middle class can reshape U.S.-China engagement. It’s clear that the author really loves Shanghai, and that he also really wants the U.S. and China to put aside their differences and get along, but I think it was a mistake to try to shoehorn both of those things into a single book.