49 Myths about China by Marte Kjær Galtung and Stig Stenslie

49 Myths about China by Marte Kjær Galtung and Stig Stenslie
Marte Kjær Galtung
Stig Stenslie

49 Myths about China by Marte Kjær Galtung and Stig Stenslie address several misconceptions regarding China and Chinese culture and politics.

Communism is dead in China. “China Inc.” is buying up the world. China has the United States over a barrel. The Chinese are just copycats. China is an environmental baddie, China is colonizing Africa. Mao was a monster. The end of the Communist regime is near. The 21st century belongs to China. Or does it?

Marte Kjær Galtung and Stig Stenslie highlight 49 prevalent myths about China’s past, present, and future and weigh their truth or fiction. Leading an enlightening and entertaining tour, the authors debunk widespread “knowledge” about Chinese culture, society, politics, and economy. In some cases, Chinese themselves encourage mistaken impressions. But many of these myths are really about how we Westerners see ourselves, inasmuch as China or the Chinese people are depicted as what we are not. Western perceptions of the empire in the East have for centuries oscillated between sinophilia and sinophobia, influenced by historical changes in the West as much as by events in China. This timely and provocative book offers an engaging and compelling window on a rising power we often misunderstand.

Marte Kjær Galtung is a China analyst at the Norwegian Defense Staff. She has previously worked on China with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; as a cultural attaché at the Norwegian embassy in Beijing, and subsequently on the Norwegian government’s China strategy. She is the author of China: People, History, Politics, and Culture.

Stig Stenslie is head of the Asia Branch of the Norwegian Defense Staff. He has been visiting scholar at, among others, the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, National University in Singapore, and Columbia University in New York. He is the author of several books on contemporary China and the Middle East, most recently Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia: The Challenge of Succession and Stability and Change in the Modern Middle East.

Foreword by Andrew J. Nathan

  • ISBN: 978-1-4422-3622-6
  • 266 pages
  • November 13, 2014

Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield