China

Rating:
Summary: just a touch
Review: Leach offers a tourist snapshot of "contemporary China". His impressions lack substance and originality, give very little pleasure to anyone familiar with the country, and are of little use to those who aren't.
The title is most misleading, as this thin book mainly deals with Hong Kong and Taiwan rather than The People's Republic. Such a naïve traveler might have failed to notice that Taiwan is a separate country and Hong Kong's national identity is the subject of a heated debate in the former British colony.
Gutierrez & Portefaix have done a much better job, but a pocketbook can hardly do justice to their pictures.
In my opinion, this is the literary equivalent of a Nissin Noodle Cup.

Rating:
Summary: Provocative Shirt Pocket Tour
Review: This fresh and unrehearsed little book on China is a collection of provocative vignettes: descriptive text juxtaposed with gritty images of contemporary China -- narrative, speculative and visual impressions that capture the aura of the place. It reads like the best kind of travel log or postcard collection where the reader gets both crisp, voyeuristic accounts and the author's unedited speculations about contemporary China. Beautiful passages in which, for instance, the author contrasts tearing down old walls of Beijing with less successful attempts to tear down persistent social structures, create a kind of corporeal theory based in the material world of China. A provocative question of whether the East has been a culture of conformity or variation arises from a narrative sketch of the Terra cotta Army. Speculations about the nature of the individual and the nature of the collective, posed through western impressions of rigid conformity are rethought, imploring the reader to reconsider such preconceptions. Leftover urban spaces, colonized temporarily then re-appropriated, suffuse the text like places from Calvino's Invisible Cities. A quick, breathless read full of whirling impressions whets the appetite and leaves the reader wanting more; it's like taking a tour from the shirt pocket of the author. One sees and feels the place, the people and the vast cultural divide. Not belabored, spoken from the gut, complimentary, open-minded and yet wielding an undeniable edge, each vignette captures a fleeting moment and reveals an ideological proposition by pulling aside the shroud of first impressions. A documentary in the true sense, this little book packs a powerful punch and asks the reader to join in speculating on China's future in the 21st century.