China is a hot topic. Anyone who can predict its future is worth a million bucks. And James Mann is probably worth much more if his new book China Fantasy makes a difference to your decision-making.

This slim volume is currently making big waves among China hands in the United States. It basically dismisses all their views into two categories: the "soothing scenario" and the "upheaval scenario", that is, those who believe dealing with China will lead to a more open and pluralistic political system, and those who contend China is so rife with contradictions it will inevitably implode.

For someone who was stationed in China in the 1980s as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and who has kept abreast of situations here ever since, Mann thinks in extremely broad strokes. Everything is black and white. If China does A, it is morally good; if B, bad, and the US should follow with C, etc. No room for nuances and complexities. Calibration could well be performed with a computer program. And I apologize to computer programmers everywhere because they incorporate more degrees of possibilities.

Admittedly, this book targets China hands in the US, especially those who advocate continued "engagement" or "integration" with China. Mann is impatient with them because what they preach is naivety at best and outright lies at worst. To dispel this thick cloud, he poses a "Third Scenario", in which China's economy grows by leaps and bounds but the political issues he is concerned with remain unchanged.

"Americans have frequently formed their views of China on the basis of limited or skewed information," writes Mann. He couldn't be more right. Unfortunately, he is one of them. He is so fixated on one issue that everything else is just a blur. To paraphrase questions he asked of others: Has he talked to migrant workers hundreds of them? Has he traveled to inland areas and gauged the sentiments of Chinese farmers? Has he browsed a Chinese website and pondered what millions of the young have in mind?

He might get a rude awakening that most of these people are not on the same wavelength as he is. China is so vast and fast-changing that coming up with a "Third Scenario" is by no means a sign of genius. There could be a hundred scenarios for China and each is valid because it can get an abundance of facts to back it up. The rosy picture about China in Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat is more than soothing; it's intoxicating. But it's only one scenario out of hundreds, and quite far-fetched.

If you change his "soothing" and "upheaval" terms into more generic "positive" and "negative", his own forecast could fall snugly into the second one. Think of it, it's a variation of the "upheaval scenario".

An American classmate of mine in the business school in California was an avid reader of Mann's Beijing Jeep when I recommended it to him. After he climbed the corporate ladder in the 1990s, he repeatedly vetoed proposals to enter the China market. He just couldn't forget what a mess Chrysler got itself into in the 1980s with its China investment. Now, he admits he lost big time to his competitors.

I figure that what Mann depicts in Beijing Jeep was largely accurate, for example, workers who would gaze at a Sears catalog for hours instead of getting some work done. That was the 1980s and people were curious about things they had never seen. But if you thought what happened in that book portended what would come later, you're probably kicking yourself and cursing the author for losing a golden opportunity.

Like Beijing Jeep, China Fantasy offers one man's tunnel vision with even no attempt to venture into the complexity of a changing nation.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/24/2007 page4)