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她胡说八道！

She seems to think that everybody in China is huddling in the dark too mortified of their government to utter a sound. This picture she paints of the oppression and intolerability of life in China is really nothing at all like what most people experience. To pretend like freedom of speech is what separates happiness from misery is to pretend there's never been happiness in human history. 他胡说八道！

You could cut her apathy for anybody who isn't a dissident with a knife, it's so thick! Anyone who isn't an old survivor of the Cultural Revolution with a yearning for American-style democracy is portrayed in such a pathetically negative light. This book will doubtless be read with delight by Americans eager for self-assurance, but as somebody in the geopolitical margins, I find it to be disgusting.

This is an incredibly American book. It is just dripping with American assumptions and values, making no effort to explore Chinese literature as it applies to anybody but an American. The fact that dissidents and translated novels make up the bulk of her focus should make that plain to see, if not for the rest of her claims that make it impossible to miss.

I'm confused. This is supposed to be about the books Chinese people are reading, yet the discussion so far is mostly about banned fiction, which doesn't seem to have much relevance to the subject of the book.

Loads of quotables. Perhaps it's my turn to the Sinophone mindset but I'm certainly far more receptive to the idea that too much looking at ourselves makes us forget about the importance of the community.

Pottery is a less interesting topic than the previous chapters and likely less than the next chapters. Really looking forward to the last three

The chapter about Vietnam was way too short and the chapter about the Imjin War is way too unfocused. Other than that, no complaints about this book.

I'm loving this book. Gotta read more David Robinson soon.

I don't like his focus on the word "honor". It's simply not a Chinese concept and thus not the most apt value to analyze in a Chinese historical context. I'm also a bit skeptical of his presentation of the tribute system. Overall, though, the non-sinophobic nature of this book is appealing.

I'm probably up to around 15 mistakes caught. Most are trifling, but if I had read this book three years ago it would have really confused me.

He doesn't seem distinguishable from the people he is whining about. He talks a lot about the world history, but has very few historically literate statements to make. The criticisms he offers of the likes of Shapiro and Peterson reveal that he has gone for low hanging fruit, since most of them I've read at least once or twice before in anything from Current Affairs to The Guardian. Nothing original or intellectual.

I really don't care for how this book is organized, while the content leaves a lot to be desired. He's managed to pretty much suck all the excitement out of Chinese history, which is quite the challenge.

Three transliterated names have been incorrectly rendered in the text so far. There have also been some issues of English in the body of the text, issues such that the Chinese origin of the writers seems quite apparent, but they're mild and definitely made up by the very high quality of the substance of the book. There's just one thing I'm desperately hoping will be addressed: making sense of interminable sentences

Incredibly fascinating

Insanely readable. For a book that should be boring, it's rip-roaring.

I liked it a lot up to this chapter. Now it feels like he's turned from the practical to the ideological, and building up arguments of straw to tear down.