Back in the days of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when China was very nearly a closed country, there came up a phenomenon called "the three-week sinologist." This was a person, usually a showbiz, journalistic, or political celebrity, who had somehow wangled a Chinese visa and done a three-week tour of the country (model factory, model collective farm, Great Wall, revolutionary ballet performance,...) under the close supervision of "interpreters" and "guides" who were in fact, of course, secret police personnel. Then the "three week sinologist" went back to Europe or America and wrote a book about how great...