ABSTRACT

Chinese writers, on their part, prefer to point at class-determined ideology as the key reason for our supposed inability to understand them. Chen Boda, in an editorial he wrote for the People's Daily at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, insisted that Western "China experts". Western reader, there is little reason to believe that some of the remarks made in front of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations would not have stood out as equally wild flights of fancy to a Chinese audience two and a half decades ago. The three texts included in this section are meant to illustrate-to the extent that it is possible-the degree to which mutual perceptions were skewed during the Cultural Revolution and the three texts are Salesmen of Reactionary Western Culture, A Great Storm and "Is China Almost Like a Dead Society?".