Harvey Dzodin, former director and vice president at ABC Television in New York, who was appointed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to serve as a lawyer on a presidential committee, launched his new book in Beijing recently, presenting it as both a personal reflection on China and a critique of what he sees as the West's distorted understanding of the country.
Harvey Dzodin speaks at the launch of his new book in Beijing on March 17, 2026. (Photo: Center for China and Globalization)
The book, Dreaming Dragons or Meddlesome Mandarins: A Journey Together to Uncover China's Soul, was unveiled at an event co-hosted by the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a prominent Beijing-based think tank, and Springer Nature, the academic publisher. The volume is part of the China and Globalization Series, edited by Henry Huiyao Wang, the center's founder and president, and Mabel Lu Miao, its co-founder and secretary-general.
For Dzodin, who has lived in China for nearly two decades, the book is an attempt to push back against what he described as a simplistic and often hostile Western narrative about the country.
"I wrote this book because I'm pissed off," Dzodin told the audience. "I'm pissed off that much of the Western media, of which I was a part, has not portrayed China accurately."
That sense of grievance runs through the book's title, which pairs two enduring images of China: the dragon, standing for national ambition and destiny, and the mandarin, evoking the country's long tradition of educated officialdom. Dzodin said the contrast was meant to capture both China's aspirations and the bureaucratic traditions that have shaped its political life over centuries.
"To understand China's soul," he said, "we must examine China's dreams and China's realities—past, present, and future."
The launch drew diplomats, scholars, business figures, and longtime foreign residents of China, underscoring the book's intended audience: not only specialists, but also general readers abroad who may know China mainly through geopolitical headlines.
Miao, opening the event, described Dzodin as a longtime friend of the institution and said the publication reflected a broader effort to foster more nuanced exchanges between China and the outside world. The event, she said, was meant to celebrate the release of a book that explores "diverse perspectives on China and modernization."
Emily Zhang, a senior editor at Springer Nature, said the volume sought to examine how China is understood and portrayed, and how those portrayals compare with the country's historical experience and contemporary realities. She said the book addressed themes including reform and opening up, governance, international engagement, sustainability, and demographic change.
Wang framed the book as part of a wider publishing project aimed at bringing more international voices into debates about China. Over the past several years, he said, the China and Globalization Series has expanded into a platform for scholars, diplomats, and public intellectuals to write in English about China's place in the world.
He praised Dzodin's work as a rare example of a contemporary Western observer writing from firsthand experience in China rather than from a distance. "We have not really seen many recent Western observers who have lived in China, worked in China, and written firsthand observations based on their own experience," Wang said.
In his speech, Dzodin argued that China's rise could not be understood without reckoning with its long civilizational history, including achievements that predated Europe in areas such as paper-making, the compass, and printing.
He also said Western audiences often overlooked what he sees as the central fact of modern China: its transformation from poverty to global power within a few decades.
In the book, he traces China's political evolution from the imperial era through the upheavals of the 20th century and into the reform era, before turning to contemporary questions of governance, development, soft power, and global perception.
At the launch, Dzodin said his aim was not to demand belief, but to encourage direct experience. "The only way to know China is to see it in person," he said, urging readers to form "their own opinions and judgments about this complex, evolving country rather than accepting false, misleading, and deceptive narratives."
China, he suggested, is too important, too misunderstood, and too consequential to be left trapped inside old clichés.
He closed with a line that distilled both the title of his book and the case he hopes it will make: readers should come and see for themselves that China's people, and its leadership, are "dreaming dragons and not meddlesome mandarins."
Dzodin is also an adviser to the South Think Tank, which was established by Nanfang Media Group in December 2024.
Reporter | Liu Xiaodi
