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Title: About Face : A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton by James Mann ISBN: 0-679-76861-0 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: A good reporter becomes an outstanding historian
Comment: The discipline of history is in need of the ethos of the good journalist: objectivity. That is what Mann brings to the history of US/China relations. His account demonstrates a repeating pattern of instability in US China policy. Mann uncovers its cause: the competition between diplomatic institutions and the covert-personal diplomacy of individuals (such as Kissinger and Brzezinski). He also brings to light the positive contribution of individual "team players" (such as James Lilley) that should not be overlooked but often do. This book is well written. On a train ride from Hong Kong to Beijing, I could not put it down.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Sharp Eye on China
Comment: If you want to know what is wrong with American policy towards China, there is no better place to start than James Mann's superb "About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton."

As a skilled journalist, Mann writes clearly and to the point. But this book is more than a journalistic tour de force. Mann has been following the China story since he was posted by the Los Angeles Times to Beijing in 1984 and his experience has produced a depth of knowledge unmatched by any academic China watcher I have read. That knowledge not only shines through in the main text but it is testified to in a notes section full of sources and corroborating detail.

What I particularly like about this book is its uncommon commonsense. Mann refuses to be swept off his feet by the "romance of China" -- a romance that repeatedly over the last century has discombobulated the thinking of American policy-makers, business executive, scholars and journalists. Stolidly eyeing the authoritarian reality behind all the fine words and sumptuous banquets that Beijing bestows on influential visitors, Mann constantly reminds us how sorry has been China's record on human rights in recent decades -- and how cravenly Washington has sought to sweep that record under the carpet.

This book is important too for its worldly wisdom in repeatedly showing the ease with which the Chinese system can manipulate America's money-driven and short-sighted political system. None of this is particularly surprising to those of us who have been watching U.S.-Japan relations in recent decades -- but it is rare for China experts (and still rarer for Japan experts) to highlight how the East runs rings around our Western democratic institutions.

Essentially this book is characterized throughout by a show-me attitude to the American intellectual community's vapid determinism on East Asia. As Mann repeatedly points out, China is far from being "bound" to converge towards Western values. Quite the reverse, thanks to the comprehensive mismanagement of American trade policy in the last fifteen years, China is now in a stronger position than ever to flaunt its rejection of those values.

First published in 1998, this book has already been around for a while. Don't be put off. "About Face" has no sell-by date. It is a modern classic.

-- Eamonn Fingleton, author of "In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity ."

Rating: 5
Summary: Want to know China, read this book
Comment: This book is a must for one who wants to learn more about China.
My professor at Fletcher, Tuft assigned this book and I love it.

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