China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom
This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People's Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author's UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum's professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching - the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what's really going on behind China's veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras.
Richard Baum is distinguished professor of political science at UCLA and director emeritus of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. He is the author of Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton U. Press) and the founder and list manager of Chinapol, an
electronic forum serving the international China-watching community. His 48-lecture video course, "The Fall and Rise of China," produced for The Teaching Company's Great Courses series, was released last month.
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