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Reviews of Books
Rossellini's career, the advisory role of historian Philippe Erlanger, the functioning of the Office de la
Radiodiffusion-Television Francaise, and the "rise to
power of Charles de Gaulle and his Fifth Republic" (p.
126). The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, from this
perspective, emerges as a complex and sometimes
contradictory "allegory," with various "parallels" and
"analogies" to "recent French history" (p. 135). At the
same time, according to Grindon, there are other
noteworthy connections between Rossellini's cinematic style and the methods of Annalist historiography,
since both present "routine activities in a unified
historical landscape" (p. 163). There are also "associations" (if not direct influences) that link the film with
other products of the "French cultural milieu" of the
1960s (p. 137), most prominently, Michel Foucault's
The Order of Things (1966, 1970) and Guy Debord's
Society of the Spectacle (1967).
For reasons that Grindon does not explore, this type
of contextualization works much better with European
productions than with big-budget American films. Or
perhaps Grindon's affinity for Georg Lukacs's theory
of realism and typage in the European historical novel
means that Hollywood productions, often in the melodramatic mode, are by definition suspect. Warren
Beatty's Reds, for instance, is not just criticized but
also critiqued for "fail[ing] to develop historical analysis that can transcend personality" (p. 207). We do
not, however, have to ascribe to a Lukacsian model to
find in Grindon's book a valuable introduction to the
historical analysis of historical fiction films.
GREGORY A. WALLER
University of Kentucky
RICHARD MADSEN. China and the American Dream: A
Moral Inquiry. (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book.) Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1995.
Pp. xxiii, 262. $27.50.
Richard Madsen is doubly rare among sociologists in
that, although trained in the China field, he has also
written thoughtfully about America, and a central
interest of his work has consistently been the moral
condition of his subjects.
Madsen's latest book combines both of these characteristics. The point of departure is the singularly
strong reaction Americans had to the Tiananmen
massacre of 1989. The author's attempt to make sense
of this reaction leads him to reconstruct the history of
the Chinese-American relationship from the 1960s to
the present. He does this, however, not in the usual
language of foreign relations studies, but in terms of
such categories as myth, master story, dreams, and
values. Indeed, the short answer Madsen gives to his
own question is that Tiananmen supplied "an unexpected, incorrect ending" (p. 4) to the mythologized
narrative about China's prospects that, over the years,
Americans had nurtured.
This narrative, which the author generally refers to
as the "liberal" China myth (or, more awkwardly, the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
"liberal master story"), was briefly challenged in the
1960s from both the Right and the Left. After the
196Os, however, it had no serious rivals. The liberal
myth saw China as a "troubled modernizer," which, if
you scratched deeply enough, consisted of people not
very different from ourselves. It was easy, therefore,
for Americans to get excited about China, to wish it
well. Unfortunately, it was also easy to romanticize
it-Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, ironically,
pointed the way-and become bitterly disappointed
when Chinese realities failed to fulfill our fantasies.
Madsen shows how during the 1970s the liberal
China myth became institutionalized in various sectors
of American society (religious, academic, and so on).
He also takes note of the challenges to the myth
(China's "atrocious" human rights record, for exampie) that emerged after the establishment of full
diplomatic relations in 1979. By and large, however,
the myth stood its ground, bolstered by the unprecedented openness and freedom characterizing Chinese
and American interactions during the 1980s.
Madsen also looks at Chinese reactions to the liberal
myth. One reaction that has been unusually widespread, especially among intellectuals, has been a
devastating loss of cultural self-confidence. In a world
in which everything of value came from America, the
television documentary Deathsong of the River (Heshang [1988]) seemed to ask, what was left for China to
contribute? In the final part of the book, the author,
finding Chinese expectations of America no more
realistic than American hopes for China, argues for the
fashioning of a new set of master myths, more attuned
to the very different world in which both peoples now
exist.
Madsen's alternative view of the recent history of
U.S.-Chinese relations has much to offer. Still, as a
historian, I found myself responding nervously in two
areas. First, the author's tendency to want to establish
moral equivalences between China and America (albeit with qualifications) strikes me as forced. Granted,
American democracy is flawed, but to suggest that
democracy is simply "more deeply embedded and
more fully realized" (p. 226) in America fundamentally
muddies the issue.
Second, although Madsen is far from insensitive to
the burdens of the past, by choosing to begin his
historical analysis in the 1960s he unduly foreshortens
some of his most important themes. The loss of
cultural confidence of Chinese intellectuals is a long
and painful story that had its inception not in the 1980s
but in the late Qing dynasty. And the theme of
Tiananmen as a betrayal of American hopes for China
owes some of its potency (how much is hard to say) to
earlier betrayals of American hopes. The liberal American myth about China-and the problems it has
created-is an old, old story.
PAUL A. COHEN
Wellesley College
JUNE 1996