America Against America

I enjoyed reading this book if for no other reason than getting acquainted with how one Chinese scholar, and now leading political advisor, viewed the United States of the late Cold War era. Just as the US was about to reach the pinnacle of its power, one Chinese traveler already had identified some weak points in the American system. Cracks that have only grown since the late 80s/early 90s.Looking up the author, Wang Huning, I was unable to find much information on him in English. But it appears he is indeed a grey cardinal of sorts, and his opinion does carry weight with Xi and other high ranking Chinese policy-makers. This alone is reason enough to read his book.I am glad that a good English translation is finally available!

This book provides some insight into Wang Huning's thinking and view of the US. Wang has been called "Xi Jinping's Brain" so it'd be worth the time to read his experiences in the US and how his travels might inform or have informed his worldview. He's no Alexis de Toqueville, but it was an interesting, if not riveting, read.

Not a very good read. Stark raving gobbly-gook.

My 3 rating is a compromise between 5 and 0 (2.5 would be more exact).Wang Huning is high up in the present Chinese government, and he wrote this book after several months in the US in 1988. It's an impressionistic and semi-scholarly summary of American life described from the Chinese point of view. The organizing principle of the book is reasonably well summed up with the sentence "Why is there America?" His goal is to understand the strong weak points of American society with the overall goal of helping Chinese learn from the good while avoiding the bad. He uses Marxist language now and then but distances himself from leftist dogma and cliches, and the overall tone is more friendly than not.The bizarre part is the actual book I have here in my hand. No publisher is given, there's no pagination, and the translation is extraordinarily bad -- almost certainly a machine translation. Some sentences don't make any sense at all, and even with my poor command of modern Chinese I found myself trying to back-translate into Chinese to figure out what he actually had said.( I'm sure that someone more fluent than I am could do this better than I can). An actual translation of the actual Chinese text would be a good thing to have.Both as a way of understanding how America looks to Chinese in general and as an insight into the present Chinese ruling group, this book is of enormous interest. I also sort of enjoyed trying to puzzle out the horrible machine translation, but I doubt that many other readers enjoy that kind of thing.

As others have noted, this translation is very poor. Yet Dr. Wang's thoughts and conclusions come through and are invaluable for those trying to understand current Chinese attitudes towards America. Remembering that this man's opinions are fundamental in guiding current Chinese leadership, the book is a must.

I like the author's way of categorizing what is valued by left and right society. Also, it seems like he is not judgemental, or even claiming China has a better solution. I did not find it hard to read. I think it shows why the China-US relationship has evolved the way it has.The drawbacks: plain text, no typesetting. Some ambiguity due to grammatical translation problems, but these are minor in the context.