MCLC: British Sinophobia (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: sean macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: British Sinophobia (1)
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Thanks very much for posting the link to this radio article. I found the
piece very enjoyable and intelligently laid out. Of course it's impossible
to include everything on a topic like Western (or in this case British)
images of China. 

Dodd mentions the title of Carl Crow's book the full title of which is
Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences- Some Happy, SOme Sad, of
an American in China, and What They Taught Him. It has been awhile since I
looked at that book, but I think it's worth mentioning that Crow's title
is somewhat ironic, even for an American businessman. And his views of the
people he met, and the culture of China, were refreshingly positive.
Especially if you compare him to someone like Arthur Smith.

Dodd gets held up at the revolutionary period. But I think it would be
possible to supplement the scary images of rising China and all that with
some banal images based on economic expectations. Nowadays of course,
besides the rhetoric of power and crushing might, there's a sense that
this great globa city we're constructing is like a big game of Monopoly
and everybody is obligated to play. The WSJ front page headline this
morning gives a good image of this: "China's Slower Growth Puts a Drag on
Western Profits." Obviously for our financial lords, bigger is always
better. So what's the deal? Even whispers of "slow" in our
hyper-marketized societies sound like a coming apocalyptic death-knell.

And Thomas DeQuincey, where to start? That English Opium Eater was also a
writer on economics, who by the way was heavily influenced by Ricardo, one
of Marx's touchstones. DeQuincey's opium hallucinations are an integral
part of romantic literature, and a symbolic, convoluted nightmarish
preface to the Opium Wars.

All the best,

Sean