SOURCE: Fleming, Peter. “A Realist on China.” Spectator 156, no. 5618 (2 February 1936): 352.

In the following review, Fleming finds My Country and My People to be a well written book filled with much knowledge and honest description of China's people and their culture.

This book [My Country and My People], although its quality is uneven, is worth all the other modern books about China put together. There are places where the emphasis is wrong, passages where the writing is woolly, but on the whole the treatment is incisive, dispassionate, and above all honest. After all the nonsense written about China by foreigners, after all the special pleading of the Chinese intelligentsia, Mr. Lin Yutang's method of explaining China comes as a welcome relief. He does not apologise; he makes no use of statistics; he thumps no tub and grinds no axe; he simply tries to show what the Chinese are really...