Personal experience, preferably adventurous and emotional, often seems a wonderful way to make a point. Take Peter Hessler's River Town. It's a brilliantly wry and sometimes moving description of the author's two-year stay in a small city in Sichuan, teaching English literature in a local university.
Hessler is an economical yet elegant writer. He meets dozens, if not hundreds of locals, gains their trust and the text is full of the resulting anecdotes. Above all, these stories will have foreigners living in China laughing and nodding at the accuracy of his observations.
But this is not all the book is. Hessler manages to achieve something remarkable with the result. Despite the cute stories of teaching Shakespeare and Beowulf to peasant scholars, banqueting and besting arrogant cadres at drinking games and most tellingly of all, indirectly provoking a mini-uprising in the English faculty when the university vetoes his students' self-written play, the book ends up being a cool and forensic indictment of Chinese society, and all the more ferocious as a result.
Tilting at windmills, a symbol of futility taken from the doomed student' play, becomes the book's leitmotif.
The young people he was hoping to arouse to a love of English literature turn out to be creatures of an educational system that is intent on churning out indoctrinators of the young. Instead of being taught to think for themselves, their job, usually as high school teachers, will be to further the values of the ruling communist class. Their transformation from essentially harmless, attractive young people we meet at the beginning of the book, to future cadres culminates in the nationalist outpouring on campus when Hong Kong is handed back in 1997.
The numerous citizens of China he meets, both great and small, end up at the end of the book coalescing in a dangerous mob when he's suspected of being a spy for filming on the streets. The eventual standoff is truly terrifying and the description of the transformation into a mob of a group of laughing bystanders highly evocative. Never will he be as at ease with his existing Chinese friends, despite his scrupulous attempts to distinguish them from the instigators of the crowd, a bully and his equally vile wife.
Fuling itself, the city where he has been living, will be mostly submerged beneath the colossal stupidity and waste of the waterway created by the Three Gorges dam - not coincidentally, a project first mooted by the Great Helmsman himself.
But the way the author achieves this dissection of modern China is slightly troubling, ironically so, considering one of the major themes of the book is propaganda. For example, he presses all the right buttons by using famous literary extracts, in the same way as films such as the Dead Poets' Society and Finding Forrester.
We laugh during the comic moments, and are moved when students - a remarkable number of them in just two years - kill themselves, either through slipping in squat toilets or throwing themselves off a building.
The book is carefully structured around two climaxes - the nationalistic orgy during the Hong Kong handover, and the mob scene at the end of the book.
Hessler sees himself as constantly battling the propaganda that his students are fed through their exposure - especially in the late-90s - to the state-controlled media. He especially dislikes the xenophobic element that distinguishes Chinese nationalism.
Yet if you take propaganda as the skilful use of techniques to make a political point through the manipulation of facts and especially emotion, Hessler in writing this superbly crafted book is perhaps equally guilty.
The true difference is that's he's far more intelligent and creative than the lumbering Chinese cadres he satirises.
Take the author, obviously acting as a spokesman for US - or Anglo Saxon - culture within the book. He's clearly a wonderful guy. His grandfather trained to be a priest and even prepared to go to China. His father still knows parts of the Latin mass by heart and achieves a touching moment of communication with a local priest, many of whose colleagues died during the Cultural Revolution.
Hessler junior has attended elite universities in the US and England. He's a great basketball player and hammers the locals in the annual city foot race. He's culturally sensitive, idealistic and hardworking - which is why he joins the Peace Corps in the first place. (Although to less perfect human beings, perhaps his most remarkable achievement is that he manages to spend two years in China without getting involved with a local girl. He must have had had plenty of cold showers).
In fact, had he been born in 19th century Victorian Britain, no doubt Thomas Arnold would have made him a prefect of Rugby School and sent him out with his blessing to convert the heathen, spiritually arm in arm with the saintly Scud East, of Tom Brown's Schooldays fame.
Will the book improve things in China? Europeans haven't noticed their opinions being met with open arms by Americans. In fact, comments about other people's countries can usually be likened to insults about parentage. They tend not to get a positive response.
On the other hand, the book might improve is the quality of the manipulation of information in China. Its rich arsenal of literary techniques certainly deserves to be emulated by any ambitious government information bureau. In the meantime, Hessler can surely start hawking his oeuvre around Hollywood.
