Grading Assignment China
BOOK REVIEW: Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic
by Mike Chinoy / Columbia University Press
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Martin Petersen
THE REVIEWER: Martin Petersen spent 33 years with the CIA, retiring in February 2005 as Deputy Executive Director and Acting Executive Director. An Asian expert, Mr. Petersen served in three Directorates (Analysis, Operations, and Administration) and headed two large analytic offices. He is the author of Red Robin: A Novel of Shanghai 1932, which will be published by Earnshaw Books late this year.
REVIEW — Assignment China is the outgrowth of a twelve-part documentary film series produced by the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California starting in 2008. The book includes the material in the series, which I have not seen, plus “comments and stories…left on the cutting room floor” and excerpts from an additional two dozen interviews. The observations of 135 journalists and American diplomats make up the book. Chinoy says his goal is to show “the challenges of finding truth in a vast, complicated country with a long history of distrust of outsiders.” In that he succeeds.
It is a long book, over 450 pages, and Chinoy has broken it into eras starting with the Chinese Civil War that brought Mao to power, through the turmoil of the late 1950s and 1960s, the Nixon visit, the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the growth of China as an economic giant, to the chill of today under Xi Jinping. But it is snippets—a string of observations—with little continuity other than a short paragraph between them to try to create a story line. It’s like a buffet on a cruise ship—lots of interesting items, but you don’t know where to start or what to make of it all.
And the book is about the journalists more than it is about China. Chinoy states that one aim of the book is to help the reader understand “the people who have reported on China and how they have done so…. a crucial step in understanding the news people watch and read.” And he is successful here, too. The mood swings of the press come through clearly, from the awe after the Nixon visit, to the optimism of Deng’s reforms up to Tienanmen, followed by a darker view of China. I worked China issues from 1972 to the late 1990s, and the Agency’s analysis was more sober throughout that period than the press’s.
Which is not to say the journalists on the China were not doing valuable work. They were. They were an important source of Agency analysis. Of particular interest to the China focused reader are the snippets that touch on the visit of then-President Richard Nixon, the Fang Lizhi episode, Beijing Spring, and Tiananmen Square. The famous photo of the Chinese man in front of tank was taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, and the story of how he took the picture and got it out of China is in the book.
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There are two potential audiences for this book: those interested in journalism and those whose focus is China itself. A better subtitle would have been Observations of American Journalists in the People’s Republic rather than an oral history. There is no final summing up chapter to bring the pieces into focus or address the ten questions Chinoy poses on page 5 of his introduction. This is a missed opportunity. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions. In my previous life as a manager of analysts, I would call this a data dump. There are nuggets, but the reader has to do the mining and processing.
For the reader interested in journalism and the challenges of covering a denied area, Assignment China earns three trench coats. For the China focused reader, it only rates two.
This book earns a rating of 2.5 out of four trench coats
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