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Rating: 
Summary: China As Left Undefined By Most Academics
Review: If you were in China and studied American history, you would never learn about slackers, pop music or be able to quote the movie the Princess Bride. Were you to then come to America, you would find yourself in an area whose history and political structure you understood, but in a society beyond what you had read and filled with people who can quote beer commercials you've never seen. Fortunately for those outside China looking in, we have Dutton. Like Barme, Dutton looks at the stuff that most people miss: advertisements for STD cures on flyers in Beijing, new slang, fads that come and go without changing the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, but that slightly touch millions of lives in China. Without overstepping his bounds and claiming to have great insight in to the Chinese psyche based on these little facets of society, Dutton looks at the general attitudes on the street that he's gathered while in China. Apart from the propaganda bureau and the Public Security bureau (China's cops), no political actors pop up in his book. He quotes artists, triads and prostitutes for a look at China that lets students get a little of what they would have learned by living and slumming on the streets of Beijing. This is not a great way to start understanding China, but is a fantastic addition to your bookshelf if you want to flesh out your academic learning with a bit of street-level detail.
Rating: 
Summary: A Remarkable Insight Into An Unseen World
Review: This is possibly the most interesting book I have read in several years. Considering that the book, strictly speaking, is an academic study, this makes it all the more remarkable that Michael Dutton has created a highly readable account of a shadowy world within a world: China's "floating population". Weaving his own insights into carefully selected excerpts of translations of Chinese scholars, government documents, and personal interviews, Dutton creates a vision of China virtually ignored by the Western media. Dutton correctly asserts at the beginning of the book that the dominant image of China in the Western mind is the infamous incident of the lone dissident facing off against a tank in Tiananmen Square. Dutton's insight is reinforced by numerous examples, such as Mike Wallace's ineffectual interview of Jiang Zemin, where he brings up this precise incident, clearly oblivious to far more interesting topics. (See ...C-SPAN "when they" aired the much more revealing unedited version of the interview). However, while the outside world only imagines China, the daily reality of living in China's large cities, such as Shanghai, brings one face-to-face with the reality of the floating population; and if one is up to it, face-to-face with their often dismal fate. This is a remarkable and disturbing book, and a must-read for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China.
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