Simon Leys hates China; America loves Simon Leys

Abstract

Despite the truism that hindsight provides twenty-twenty vision, it is not true. Crucial and complex issues long remain controversial. So it is with China's Great Leap Forward. Knowledgeable analysts still differ on the costs and benefits of that effort swiftly to modernize China. What is special with Simon Leys is that he positions himself outside the parameters of the on-going debate about this experiment in modernizing China. He brushes the specialists aside with sneer and curse and concludes that the Great Leap was actually a “rejection …of modernity.”