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China - Life World Library (1965) by Loren Fessler ? Time-Life International ISBN: None Condition: Good China, 1965. A country of immense scale, ancient civilisation, revolutionary politics, vast rural populations, rapidly changing industry and enough historical complexity to make the average family tree look like a shopping list. Published by Time-Life International as part of its ambitious Life World Library series, Loren Fessler?s China attempts the wonderfully modest mid-century publishing task of explaining one of the largest, oldest and most populous countries on Earth in a single illustrated volume. And, naturally, it does so with confidence. This is China under Mao Zedong, at a fascinating and turbulent point in its modern history. The People?s Republic was still relatively young, the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward were recent, relations with both the Soviet Union and the West were tense, and the Cultural Revolution had not yet begun . That would start the following year, in 1966, making this book a particularly interesting snapshot of China immediately before another enormous period of political and social upheaval. Which means that a book intended as contemporary geography has now become history almost by accident. The China shown here is a world of huge cities, enormous agricultural regions, collective endeavour, heavy industry, traditional landscapes and a population living through one of the most dramatic transformations of the twentieth century. It is also a China largely inaccessible to ordinary Western travellers at the time, making illustrated books like this far more important than they might seem today. In 1965 you could not simply open a browser, type "Beijing street view" and spend twenty minutes virtually wandering down an alley before becoming distracted by restaurant reviews. You needed a book. Preferably a substantial one. With maps. And photographs. And somebody prepared to explain several thousand years of civilisation without the aid of hyperlinks. Time-Life specialised in exactly this sort of heroic optimism. The photographs are particularly valuable now. Scenes that were simply intended to show everyday life in the 1960s have acquired a completely different significance with the passing of time. Streets, clothing, bicycles, workplaces, farms, factories and domestic life are no longer merely illustrations; they are historical documents showing a society that has since changed almost beyond recognition. Modern China?with its skyscrapers, high-speed railways, smartphones, giant ports and sprawling megacities?would have seemed extraordinary to many of the people photographed here. In 1965, the bicycle was still one of the defining images of urban China. Today China can build a railway station roughly the size of a respectable British town while Britain discusses whether the existing station needs another platform. Times change. The book also inevitably reflects the assumptions and perspective of Western publishing in the mid-1960s. That is part of its interest. Vintage reference books do not merely tell us about the places they describe; they reveal how those places were understood, interpreted and sometimes misunderstood by outsiders at the time. There is something endlessly fascinating about reading yesterday?s attempt to explain the present. Especially when you already know what happened next. The political sections are naturally among the most historically interesting. Mao?s China was presented to Western readers as something distant, formidable and often mysterious. Cold War attitudes were firmly in place, information was limited, and the People?s Republic remained isolated from much of the Western world. This was seven years before Richard Nixon visited China. Six years before the People?s Republic took China?s seat at the United Nations. And only one year before the Cultural Revolution began transforming Chinese society yet again. So although this is ostensibly a geographical volume, it no.
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