Itching the Scratches on Our Minds: American College Students Read and Re-evaluate China

Abstract

In the 1950s, as the cold war was heating up and Asia’s two largest nations were emerging from legacies of colonialism and war, Harold R. Isaacs set out to study how ordinary U.S. citizens viewed China and India. Through focus groups and interviews, along with analysis of portrayals in news and popular media, Isaacs illuminated the vague and contradictory nature of Americans’ mental onstructions of these countries and their peoples. His results—published nitially as Scratches on Our Minds, and reissued after the dramatic Sino-U.S. rapprochement of the Nixon era as Images of Asia and again nearly a decade later under the original title—might seem dated in the era of instantaneous computer-mediated communications, but his fundamental findings remain resonant and instructive.1 His observations with respect to China constitute the enduring backdrop to this chapter, which considers the role of reading and discussion in shaping U.S. college students’ impressions of the People’s Republic in the early twenty-first century … more than five decades after Isaacs examined the mindsets of prior generations.