11 reviews
Sales Rank: 18288

Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384

Dewey Decimal Number: 327.510092
ASIN: B001C4NXK2

Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Ji Chaozhu was born on July 30, 1929, in the Shanxi Province of China. Throughout his decorated career, he has held posts in China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (where he was deputy director of the Department of Translation and Interpretation and deputy director of American and Oceanic Affairs). In 1982, he was appointed minister counselor of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America, and has served as China's ambassador to Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, and the Court of St. James's. From 1991 to 1996, he served as the under secretary-general of the United Nations. He currently resides in China with his wife.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

BRILLIANT!!!! November 27, 2008
Just a wonderful book! A spectacular glimpse into this point in Chinese history.
Really insightful.

4 out of 5 stars

Adds to the Canon September 22, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

The book holds your attention for its smooth and polished read. Ghost writer Foster Winans is credited in the Preface. The language is very measured, void of the kind of emotions expected from someone who gave up a good life in the west to face tremendous deprivation, stress and betrayal in post-revolutionary China.

The author, who had a US childhood and Harvard education, experienced firsthand, the Japanese bombardment, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, re-education in the countryside, Nixon's visit to China and a host of other events of the century. One wonders how anyone survived any one of these, since each pushes the limits of human health and stress tolerance.

To cover the full life, each event had to be shorn of details. Because of this, this book can't really be taken alone.

Other books flesh out the times. The Private Life of Chairman Mao is the most complete that I have read. It gives an inside look at how the Great Leap Forward was initiated and later how the Gang of Four controlled most internal and external operations creating a life threatening environment based on pettiness. This background helps to consider how the gift of the glass snail from Corning Glass and small acts such as talking to high school aquantances subjected Ji to more worry than he lets on.

Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary gives the details of Ji's mentor. This book provides a lot about the "office" politics that Ji only mentions. It gives a more detailed treatment of Zhou's medical (non) treatment and how the "young ladies" monopolized the chairman.

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World gives perspective on the Nixon visit. China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia gives an American perspective on some of these big events.

5 out of 5 stars

His life story offers insight into a billion people's lives August 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Ji Chaozhu was involved in some of the great moments, people, and institutions of the twentieth century, growing up partly in the U.S., attending Harvard, and then returning to participate in Mao's government. Through the magic of memoir writing, I learn about the entire span through his eyes.

This is the third book I've read about the Cultural Revolution. First, Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. Second, Apologies Forthcoming a book of short stories by Xujun Eberlein, and now this book. Obviously his view of the Tiananmen Square massacre is apologetic. And he doesn't even bother trying to explain the Tibet invasion, one of the great human and cultural tragedies of our time. I had to take a deep breath when he said the actions of the U.S. in Korea and Taiwan were perfidious. Do I really have to look at yet another U.S. policy from the other side's point of view? Oh, what the heck. How do I expect to ever understand the world unless I see it from other points of view?

The book is remarkably simple and straightforward. Good writing stays out of the way and lets the reader enter. When I finished, I realized with some astonishment how much history I had just walked through, in an engaging, and page-turning story. The book flew by and enriched my life.

5 out of 5 stars

Now I understand China August 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Couldn't put this book down, it was such a riveting, dramatic personal story. By the end I felt I understood China for the first time, and especially important periods like the Cultural Revolution. What makes this story so unique is that the author grew up in New York before returning to China as a college student, and his improbably amazing story intersects with everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt, who served him cookies and milk in her Washington Square townhouse, Mao and Zhou Enlai, plus six US presidents. The story is told not in a stuffy official way, but in a very human and observant voice, and a sly sense of humor. If all the Olympic attention has you wanting to "get" China and the Chinese, this is a great place to start. But it's also just a great tale.

4 out of 5 stars

Great personal history but filter the propaganda August 22, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

I knew Ji back in the 70's. At that time none of us, I suspect, had any idea the hardships he had endured in China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Toward the end of the book, however, when he gets to Tiananmen, I felt he was trying to set up his readers to conclude (incorrectly) that the Tiananmen demonstrations were essentially a reenactment of the Red Guards/Cultural Revolution excesses and as such deserved to be suppressed by whatever means necessary. This of course is the party line in China and it was disappointed to see someone like Ji parroting it. Toward the end I even began to wonder if the whole purpose of the book was to justify the Tiananmen massacre.
I was also disappointed that Ji denigrated Han Xu, his colleague and sometime superior in the Foreign Office. He depicts Han as hard line, but it was Han (now dead) who was disillusioned by the Tiananmen suppression and, according to people I trust, contemplated seeking refuge in the United States or some other democratic society.