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In this arresting chronicle of one tumultuous
year in China's love-hate relationship with the West, Orville
Schell brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to
the surprising, often embattled, seldom predictable Chinese
reform movement. The most recent in his series of vivid
narratives about China's emergence into the modern world,
Discos and Democracy conveys with startling immediacy
the riptide of enthusiasm for Democracy that swept first
China's universities, then its intellectuals, and finally
its cities. Schell catches the crisis of openness and repression
which alternately engulfed the leaders of the People's Republic,
as power struggles continued to rage within the Communist
Party over the country's future.
In a way which is all his own, Schell takes
us on a journey to the very interior of Chinese society.
Whether carrying us along on a student demonstration, describing
the purging of dissident intellectuals from the Party, discussing
China's traditional notion of human rights, or allowing
us gimpses into the unexpected new worlds of Chinese bodybuilding,
advertising, disco, and cosmetic surgery, Schell's eye is
always sharp and his analysis penetrating on the fundamental
contradictions which underlie modern China's reform movement.
Orville Schell is a noted China observer
who has visited that country frequently over the past years.
He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker,
Rolling Stone, and the New York Times among other magazines
and newspapers. He is the author of numerous books on China,
the most recent of which is To Get Rich is Glorious:
China in the 1980s.
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