James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, is a cheerleader – albeit a cautious one – for China, his sometime home.

Fallows, author of Blind Into Baghdad (2006), has lived in Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere in China with his family, and here collects ten essays written between 2006 and 2008. He sums up the place’s extremes – half Hobbes, half Horatio Alger – by arguing that “countless questions about today’s China boil down to: How long can this go on?” Not unlike the late George Plimpton, Fallows is fascinated by all varieties of experience and endeavour, and it allows him to write deftly about the transformations roiling China, countering readers’ preconceived notions on such topics as political repression, the environment and the explosion of manufacturing.

Culturally, Fallows enjoys Win in China!, an Apprentice rip-off that’s the best of the country’s current crop of “stupid, low-budget reality shows.” In his essay ‘China Makes, The World Takes,’ Fallows looks at the surreally accelerated manufacturing boom, responsible for the rise in consumer products Americans enjoy. Other chapters deal with the slickly oppressive strictures of the Chinese government, recently on display during the Olympics. Fallows manages to humanise this intimidating aspect of the society, recounting conversations with one official who asserts that China’s material success will “eventually command respect for the political and cultural ideas which lie behind it.”

The end result is a smoothly readable excursion into a vast nation that “like America, is too big, complicated, and contradictory to have any ‘typical’ or representative character.”

Mike Newirth