America Against America

Excellent read - like a time capsule and a glimpse into the future all in one.

A perceptive and thoughtful analysis of America's strengths and weaknesses. You may not agree with it 100% or even 75%, but you need to read and think about it. The author is supposedly now in Mr. Xi's inner circle of advisers; therefore the book is an even more urgently required reading for our own policymakers.

This book provides some insight into Wang Huning's thinking and view of the US. Wang has been called "Xi Jinping's Brain" so it'd be worth the time to read his experiences in the US and how his travels might inform or have informed his worldview. He's no Alexis de Toqueville, but it was an interesting, if not riveting, read.

I enjoyed reading this book if for no other reason than getting acquainted with how one Chinese scholar, and now leading political advisor, viewed the United States of the late Cold War era. Just as the US was about to reach the pinnacle of its power, one Chinese traveler already had identified some weak points in the American system. Cracks that have only grown since the late 80s/early 90s. Looking up the author, Wang Huning, I was unable to find much information on him in English. But it appears he is indeed a grey cardinal of sorts, and his opinion does carry weight with Xi and other high ranking Chinese policy-makers. This alone is reason enough to read his book. I am glad that a good English translation is finally available!

My 3 rating is a compromise between 5 and 0 (2.5 would be more exact). Wang Huning is high up in the present Chinese government, and he wrote this book after several months in the US in 1988. It's an impressionistic and semi-scholarly summary of American life described from the Chinese point of view. The organizing principle of the book is reasonably well summed up with the sentence "Why is there America?" His goal is to understand the strong weak points of American society with the overall goal of helping Chinese learn from the good while avoiding the bad. He uses Marxist language now and then but distances himself from leftist dogma and cliches, and the overall tone is more friendly than not. The bizarre part is the actual book I have here in my hand. No publisher is given, there's no pagination, and the translation is extraordinarily bad -- almost certainly a machine translation. Some sentences don't make any sense at all, and even with my poor command of modern Chinese I found myself trying to back-translate into Chinese to figure out what he actually had said.( I'm sure that someone more fluent than I am could do this better than I can). An actual translation of the actual Chinese text would be a good thing to have. Both as a way of understanding how America looks to Chinese in general and as an insight into the present Chinese ruling group, this book is of enormous interest. I also sort of enjoyed trying to puzzle out the horrible machine translation, but I doubt that many other readers enjoy that kind of thing.

I don't know what to think of the book, besides whoever published this choosing a lack of page numbers, monospaced text, and ashamed to have a page taking credit for the various typos like missed spaces and undefined acronyms they left in. If the author wrote the english text himself it may be understandable, but is it still self-published without an editor over 30 years later too? Is it someone printing an ebook if the content isn't copyrighted? Is it machine-translated or something? I can't tell if a different edition would be better or an altogether pass on the author, but don't get the stars and stripes cover.

I realize the person who wrote this book about traveling to the U.S. now holds importance in the CCP. However, the insight from this book is just mediocre. Even looking at this book from the future, it isn't as prolific as it seems. The writer puts far too much importance on odd things such as niche communities like the Amish, and uses cheesy 1980s action films about cops who fight inner city high school kids who run a drug trade. I am a bit disappointed that this is the book that took off in China that explained America's stagnation as it misses so much.

It's a self-print version instead of any formal publisher, rendering a super rough book

This book is excellent. Well written and very straightforward. Well worth reading.

Excelente estado.Los clientes deber[ian saber m[as sobre la importancia del politburo en la estructura del poder de un partido de m[as de 90 millones de miembros

Buyer beware. Sold for an audacious £29.42, the so-called hardcover copy on offer is a super-size hard-bound collection of typed-up A4 sheets. Whoever made it has not even bothered to include page numbers. It’s an unreadable monstrosity. Do not buy.

I learn quite good points from this book.

Lettura importante peccato non sia a stampa ma dattiloscritto: immagino sia esaurito l’originale