The new Chinese

...The difficulties of what earlier dynasties viewed as "barbarian management" will never, to Schell's mind, disappear but only become less obvious from time to time...

...While history books may demonstrate that, in Sun Yat Sen's words, China is a "sheet of loose sand," those same books show that the Chinese are well aware that their culture has endured much longer than any other in history...

...While uncovering the human frailty of the Chinese in a refreshingly intimate manner, Schell never forgets the mutability of Chinese foreign relations...

...Despite its light, even entertaining nature, "Watch Out for the Foreign Guests" is, in a vivid sense, an informal chronicle of relations between China and the industrial nations it is seeking to emulate...

...Sinologists who entered the feverishly insular country did so in an artificial shell created by guides, guards, and editors...

...Whether that attempt to integrate itself into the world order genuinely threatens to derail China "from its commitment to honor itself," as Schell postulates, is, however, an issue best left to the Chinese...

...The realization that "normalized" relations are not achieved through the stroke of official pens but rather through the cumulative interaction of thousands of individuals comes early in the book...

...In this light, perhaps Orville Schell should have begun "Watch Out for the Foreign Guests" with a quotation from a Beijing student that appears midway through the volume: "In the past . . . some foreigners actually thought that Chinese people didn't have personalities, that we were all just like jaoji [steamed dumplings...

...Fortunately, Schell's intermittent exhortations against Chinese infatuation with the West does not interfere with his exceptional job of presenting Chinese realities...

...Schell's description of an encounter between salacious Texas cowgirls and Chinese trade delegates, or a Shanghai youth cruising on a moped with homemade jeans bearing a hand-lettered LEVI tag, certainly indicate that a change is afoot in the PRC...

...Compelled by Maoist autarky and the traditional Chinese distrust of fan kw'ei (the foreign devils), the PRC remained inscrutable to the rest of the world for decades...

...The dramatic opening of the PRC in recent years has raised provoking questions over relations between China and the West...

...Joseph E. Pattison (Joseph E. Pattison is an attorney in Washington, D. C., who has specialized in international trade matters, including U.S.-China trade...

...Perhaps the most poignant of these anecdotes is that of the Chinese woman who, having recounted her years of political indoctrination in Mongolia, confessed her thrill at finally having access to foreign music and literature: "I think to learn about what is beautiful is as important as learning about politics...

...Schell's great strength in presenting what might otherwise be one more mildly interesting addition to the new wave of China commentary is his very evident awareness of the love-hate nature of relations between the West and China...

...Schell, who presumably never lost fifteen years of his life in a political work camp, certainly seems more concerned about preserving some vague image of the "old" China than his Chinese friends...

...His thinly-veiled nostalgia for the China he knew in earlier years is certainly something that no one in China—apart from the Gang of Four and their proteges—shares...

...For most of its first thirty years, the People's Republic of China was, to Western observers, akin to the proverbial elephant being described by blind men...

...It is underscored again and again through Schell's vignettes of past Chinese suffering and present Chinese hopes...

...Schell, a veteran China watcher, captures the spirit of this "cross-cultural pollination" not only through accounts of his conversations with Chinese soldiers, workers, and students, but also through brief anecdotal sketches of the visits of PRC officials to the United States...

...Schell's latest book is a welcome and timely contribution to that new symbiosis...

...It is no surprise that most Occidentals, hearing the Middle Kingdom described only in such harsh institutional or stereotypical terms, never grasped the wealth of human factors that have always constituted Chinese society...

...Moving from a discussion about the United States with a former political prisoner in Shanghai to the tour by Deng Xiaoping of a Ford assembly plant in Georgia, or a Washington television studio where China's analogue of Walter Cronkite broadcasts special reports on American life to Beijing, the reader gets a fast-paced look at the evolving bilateral relationship...

...It is the repudiation of that foreign perception of mental monotone in China, through a look at the impact of Western culture on individual Chinese, that provides the seminal value of Schell's bright, sensitive new book...

...It is this fear that causes Schell to wince in describing Bob Hope swinging a golf club on the Great Wall, or the young soldier, Benefit-the-People Wang, who moonlights in Western garb as a Beijing pimp...

...When they returned, they variously claimed to have found a Confucian society with a communist facade, an army of stoic workers dominated by political sloganism, or a cultureless new proletarian dynasty...

...Such rapid assimilation endangers, Schell writes, "the integrity of China's national identity...

...too much of the West, too quickly, may, he says, swing the pendulum violently back...

...Watch Out for the Foreign Guests" artfully depicts the kaleidoscopic nature of relations between China and the West as they begin to abandon their mutual suspicions of one another and openly embrace...

...Most Westerners, forced to squint through narrow slits in the Bamboo Curtain at Hong Kong and Macao or listen to the distorted pronouncements of the official communist press, perceived a monolithic, soulless society violently obsessed with the Marxist philosophies of Mao Zedong...