Carlos Graieb’s review of the book “China Contemporânea” falls short of the reader’s expectations and below the usual standard in the print media. It lacks objectivity and impartiality. The diction, the adjectives, the types of judgments made were borrowed from the language of digital influencers. In this mimicry, the whims of social network activists prevail: speeches, in a peremptory tone, without prior meditation, on subjects that they do not dominate. The critic’s considerations give the impression of a hasty and incomplete reading. Let’s see.
In the commentary on Luiz Enrique Vieira de Souza’s article on the environmental situation in China, Graieb only shows the negative aspects. It ignores pages that present advancements such as internalizing environmental criteria in legislation and investments in clean energy, energy efficiency and reforestation. The reader is not informed that the explicit objective of the sociologist was to establish an assessment of the contradictory course of the question, of the polarity between “flow of ecological modernization” and “vectors of environmental degradation”.
Graieb described the article by economist and USP professor Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa as “difficult reading”. The reasons listed – the confrontation of theories of economic history, the effort of abstraction – reveal the critic’s contempt for conceptual thought, a form of knowledge inaugurated by Socrates and a structuring axis of modern science since Galileo.
The critic accused Elias Jabbour and Alexis Dantas, specialists recognized for the originality of their analyzes by economists from different schools, such as Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira and Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, of “ideological compromise”. The ideology, thus posed, is attributed to the other; by resorting to ad hominem, intellectual discussion is avoided. This record begs the question: why aren’t Graieb’s earlier judgments about China “ideological”?
The review does not even inform that the article by Jabbour and Dantas examines the role of the state in the management, coordination and planning of the economy, supporting the thesis that this intervention would have generated a specific economic-social training. : “market socialism”. He also does not mention the pillars of the essay, the concepts of “new project economy” and “geopolitics institutionalized by China”.
Graieb refuses to comment on Wladimir Pomar’s article because of the author’s “political activist” references. Pomar is known in the news media for having coordinated Lula’s campaign in 1989. His intellectual respectability also stems from his investigations into the Chinese enigma, a subject on which he has published nearly ten books. The critic’s attitude is similar to that of the ideologues of the School without a Party, who intend to ban from the bibliography the books of Karl Marx, an eminent political activist.
The reviewer admits that Francisco Foot Hardman’s article left him “puzzled”. It does not specify whether it is because he came across the application of the concepts of “simultaneism” and “fusion” to cultural-historical space-times or because he was unable to comment on the works. which are analyzed there by novelist Mo Yan and filmmaker Jia Zhangke. His reaction to the discomfort, a joke devoid of grace, is surprising, as it repeats the behavior of the semi-literate.
Graieb does not hide his prejudices and his anti-intellectualism. No wonder he prefers to maintain stereotypes rather than recognize Brazil’s valuable contributions to understanding the genesis, development and future of China’s rise.