Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981-1982

by Charlotte Furth

Overview

In 1981 an American historian of China, Professor Charlotte Furth, travelled to Beijing to teach young Chinese scholars about America. Professor Furth's year-long adventures, captured in this lively memoir, tell of classroom encounters, bureaucratic entanglements, expat frustrations, unlikely friendships, and misunderstandings both comic and grave. Her sponsor, the Fulbright program of academic exchange, had just revived after thirty years of the Cold War, and carried with it American hopes for a new era of cooperation between China and the United States. Her students were shaped by the Communist revolution, schooled in its political disciplines, and torn between thirst to experience the outside world at last and anxiety about what lay ahead in a post-Mao future.

Based on Professor Furth's detailed notes and letters home at the time, this book evokes the unique atmosphere of expectation and frustration that characterized the first years of normalization. Furth belongs to a generation of American China experts who hoped for alternatives to the reductive cold war policies that made communism not only an enemy abroad but a weapon against social democracy at home. She encountered young Chinese intellectuals who also wanted to imagine a more just society at home without abandoning their primary loyalties to culture and nation. Their search for common ground can help us understand the impact of the Mao era on society and the path Chinese elites have followed since the 1980s. For Americans, it also can tell us about positions taken when forced to defend American society against friendly yet penetrating scrutiny.

This book is a valuable account for specialists on Sino-American relations and on the formative years of the generation of Chinese who lead the People's Republic of China today. It is also a fascinating read for anyone who wants to explore the pleasures and perils of Chinese and American struggles to understand one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604979848
Publisher:	Cambria Press
Publication date:	03/20/2017
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.37(d)

Table of Contents

List of figures

Preface

Chapter 1. Becoming a Historian of China in Cold War America

Chapter 2. Arrival— The Friendship Hotel

Chapter 3. Fulbrighters Get Oriented

Chapter 4. Students and Teachers

Chapter 5. Student Stories

Chapter 6. American Studies

Chapter 7. The Visiting Professor

Chapter 8. Spring Fever

Chapter 9. Departures

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Praise for the Book

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

“Charlotte Furth's memoir provides a window into a China that few of us can remember or even believe possible: a country that was not the economic and political powerhouse of today, but a hesitant, slightly paranoid society emerging from decades of being closed-off to the outside world. As one of the rare witnesses to this crucial transition, Professor Furth takes us into the life of China's most important university, showing the struggle to accept her group of visiting scholars--a microcosm for the debate in China at the time over whether the country really should open up. Written honestly and candidly, this memoir will be of interest to scholars of US-China engagement but also to general readers eager to see how much China has changed over the past decades.” —Ian Johnson, Beijing correspondent for The New York Times, and author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao

“Charlotte Furth, a distinguished scholar of China’s past, turns her gaze now on a special moment in her own. The resulting memoir is alternately amusing and moving. Written in an engaging and candid style, this book is a pleasure to read and opens a fascinating window on an intriguing but little studied moment in recent Chinese history.” —Jeffrey Wasserstrom, editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China

“The scale and reach of China’s transformation since the death of Mao challenges historical perspective. Few Americans today have any sense of how far China has come since it’s opening in the early 1980s. Charlotte Furth was there to see the start of the defrost with the country’s opening and her lively account of her experiences in China then provides a unique and invaluable record. Hers is a touching, gentle, humorous, and thoughtful story. It is also useful in these days of rising tensions between China and the United States to be reminded of China’s social reality not very long ago.” —Gordon H. Chang, Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities, Stanford University and author of Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China

“Written in a sober, yet intimate, tone, Charlotte Furth’s memoir of her time teaching in China during the very early years of the reform era brings to life the tensions, contradictions, and promises of that period. A famed historian writing about her personal experience, Furth gives us a vivid portrayal of a China ‘on the verge,’ and of the emotions, fears, and hopes it elicited in those who saw it up close. This book is a gem for specialists and curious onlookers alike.” —Fabio Lanza, Department of History, University of Arizona

“As a trained China historian and astute observer, Charlotte Furth has provided us with a nuanced and well-crafted narrative of her life as a foreign teacher at a major Chinese university emerging from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. As one of the first Fulbright teachers in China after 1949, she was sailing in uncharted waters, but managed to impart a better understanding of the United States for her students, while gaining their trust. She has perfectly captured the ambiance and environment of Beijing in the early 1980’s: poverty, the winter stockpiles of cabbage, the hordes of cyclists, dust storms, lack of personal choice, bureaucratic restrictions, and ‘spiritual pollution.’ From the encounters she describes, the reader will appreciate the continuing importance of social relationships while working and living in China, especially in successfully coping with the madding ambiguity of Chinese bureaucracy and opaque social norms.” —John Thomson, first Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs, American Embassy in Beijing (1979–1981)

From the Publisher