[Peace-discuss] The US & China

[Carl G. Estabrook]

[The Obama administration is desperate to provide Americans with a new  
hate-object in China, to cover over their shilling for the 1% and  
corresponding failure to improve the declining economic position of  
most Americans. (Note the fraudulent bank-fraud deal this week - very  
much in the banks' interest and not that of the public.) As generally  
in their service to power, academics step forward to provide a  
propaganda cover. Here's an important dismantling of recent academic  
writing on China.  --CGE]

"Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the  
presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision  
that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it  
consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or  
topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the  
optic, is the United States. Typically written by functionaries of the  
state, co-opted or career, they have as their underlying question:  
‘China – what’s in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, they are  
Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping is an  
instructive example. Detached for duties on the National Intelligence  
Council under Clinton (he assures the reader that the CIA has vetted  
his book for improper disclosures), Vogel is a fixture at Harvard,  
where the house magazine hails Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of  
China as the ‘capstone to a brilliant academic career’..."

The rest of the article is at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana

  
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