Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese

From the publisher: "A courageous, significant book by one of the few westerners to overcome the Chinese-foreigner syndrome." After the 1979 thaw in relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, Steven W. Mosher was one of a handful of Americans in 30 years permitted to take up residence in a Chinese village. Swept into China by a sudden groundswell of diplomatic good will and friendship (and aided hugely by his fluency in the Cantonese dialect), he found he was able to live and work in southern China largely unaccompanied and unsupervised by state and local officials. For a year, while carrying on research in cultural anthropology, Mosher ate and drank with his peasant neighbors, celebrated and mourned with them, played basketball and took tea with them, and discussed sex and politics with them. Broken Earth is his account - told often in the Chinese' own words - of what it is really like to live in the People's Republic today. It is an unexpectedly intimate look behind the Bamboo Curtain of authorized facts.".…