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tanyarobinson 's review for:
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
by Rob Gifford
I didn't enjoy China Road as much as the last book I read on modern China (Chinese Lessons). My take-away from this one is the understanding that China is actually a huge multi-ethnic continent. Westerners tend to generalize and think that everyone there is Han Chinese, when in fact the whole Western side of the country is made up of Uighurs, Mongolians, Tajiks, and other Central Asians, many of them Muslim. Beijing's control of these far reaches is inconsistent, and many of these people feel exploited by the imperialist capital. Yet economic progress is felt all the way to the western Kazakhstan border; Gifford compares the Chinese interior to the American West of the 1890's.
He writes:
China is more complex than I realized! 3.5 stars for China Road.
He writes:
When you see China from the air, you realize the magnitude of what the government in Beijing is trying to do. It is not building a country, it is building a continent. A billion and a half people live in Europe and North and South America, divided up into more than fifty sovereign states. Nearly a billion and a half Chinese people live in one single sovereign state.
China is more complex than I realized! 3.5 stars for China Road.