China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
by Fox Butterfield
Summary
When Washington and Beijing normalized relations in 1979, Fox Butterfield opened the New York Times bureau in China, the paper's first since the revolution, and China: Alive in the Bitter Sea is the book he brought out of his two years there. It was the first full portrait of daily Chinese life by an American newspaper correspondent based in the country since 1949, and it holds up because Butterfield went after texture rather than pronouncements: how the danwei, the work unit, governed housing, marriage, travel, and gossip; how the back door of connections, guanxi, actually allocated everything ration books claimed to; how the Cultural Revolution's survivors carried their decade of denunciations, beatings, and rustication; how courtship, divorce, crime, and privilege worked in a society that officially had none of them. His sources were the ordinary and extraordinary Chinese who risked real trouble to talk to an American reporter, students and officials, workers and returned exiles, and the book keeps faith with them by refusing both Cold War caricature and the romantic Maoism many Western visitors had retailed in the 1970s. The China that emerges is exhausted, resourceful, cynical about slogans, and stirring awake into Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and Butterfield caught the turn at the exact moment it began. The book won the 1983 American Book Award for General Nonfiction in hardcover, the National Book Award under its name of those years, and its title, from an old Chinese phrase for enduring hardship, announced its allegiance to the people rather than the government. Later reporting has updated everything and replaced nothing; this is the baseline portrait of China at the hinge.
Historical Context & Significance
Butterfield, one of the Times reporters on the Pentagon Papers, had studied Chinese history under John Fairbank at Harvard and waited years in Hong Kong and Taiwan for the door to open; the 1983 National Book Award honored what he did with the first look inside. The book appeared in 1982, when American fascination with the newly opened China was at its height and honest accounts were scarce, and its unsentimental picture of the Cultural Revolution's human wreckage corrected a decade of credulous Western travelogues. It set the template for the foreign correspondent's China book, a genre every succeeding bureau chief has attempted, and its portrait of guanxi and the work unit is still cited by scholars of the era.