Sinomania: Writing about China from the London Review of Books

LRB Collections #5

by William Empson, Isabel Hilton, Christopher Hitchens

‘What a European Old China Hand said had to be listened to carefully for the bits absurd enough to be repeated.’ – William Empson

China, as the writer Zha Jianying once put it, ‘is way too big a cow for anyone to tackle in full’. People say first-tier and fourth-tier cities in China are like different planets. Sometimes a person might feel foreign in her own country, Sheng Yun writes in her introduction, confronted by so many things that go beyond her wildest imagination. This collection’s panoramic take on modern China is comprised of divergent close-ups: from Beijing to Tibet, from bandits in Mengtze to Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, from the suicide of a famous poet to the death by drinking of a government official.

Featuring: William Empson, Isabel Hilton, Christopher Hitchens, Long Ling, Hilary Mantel, Zheng Peidi, Roy Porter, Nikil Saval, Eliot Weinberger, Sheng Yun and Slavoj Žižek.

Genres: China, Essays

101 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.

He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics. Jonathan Bate has said that the three greatest English Literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

Empson has been styled a "critic of genius" by Sir Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings of certain authors; and Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him, because of their force and eccentricity. Empson's bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death, and a reputation in part also as a "licensed buffoon" (Empson's own phrase).

Reviews

[Simon]

In this little paperback the London Review of Books has brought together a selection of articles it published written about China between 1982 and 2017. As such, they are rather out of date, yet interesting to read nevertheless. Many are by Westerners whose often condescending or judgmental writing can be irritating. I most enjoyed the pieces by Chinese writers: Zheng Pedi writing about her personal experience of the Cultural Revolution, Long Ling about the death of a guest at a banquet, and particularly Sheng Yun about the one-child policy. I look forward to the LRB publishing a further collection of pieces about contemporary China.

[Isabelle Sim]

unfortunately some of these fall into the category of writing that pisses me off lowkey (very meaningless and western-centric attempts to discuss chinese people & culture) but some are very good! i especially liked the piece on tibet

[Owen Hatherley]

Really not sure Zizek merited inclusion as an interesting thinker on China but a very neat pocketbook for the most part here.