This book will resonate with anyone whose career-shaping fascination with mainland China originated in the decades before the policies of “reform and opening” – any professional observer, in other words, who has been compelled to confront and adapt to new knowledge and experience that came with expanding access for scholars, students, journalists and visitors from the mid-1970s on, and whose mind has raced to stay abreast of the dizzying social changes unfolding in China since the post-Mao era.

For readers whose interest in China came later, or perhaps is just beginning to percolate, Richard Baum's China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom lays the groundwork for appreciation of the challenges of Western China-watching since the Communist Revolution. The book also provides grounds for considerable mirth at the foibles and follies of US observers attempting to divine the workings of Chinese society from outposts abroad and in Hong Kong, along with plenty of cautionary examples of misjudgements and mishaps that continue to happen even with direct interaction and study on the ground. In addition, for students or casual readers who may be new to China studies, this book supplies a readable overview of major developments in the PRC since the rapprochement in US–China relations ushered in by ping-pong diplomacy and the 1972 Nixon visit, interspersed with Baum's thoughtful and often amusing personal recollections.

Baum attributes his abiding interest in China to members of the first-generation of US China watchers whose names will remain familiar to many – most importantly, H. Arthur Steiner, whose class Baum stumbled upon as an undergraduate at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA); Robert Scalapino at UC-Berkeley, where Baum attended graduate school; and Chalmers Johnson, also at Berkeley. Baum himself went on to have a long career at UCLA, where he remains distinguished professor of political science.

Toward that first generation, Baum is almost unequivocally laudatory – although his account of sitting for his PhD oral qualifying exams as his committee members “parried and postured” with each other (p. 12) offers a preview of more insider stories to come. This book is where Baum, in addition to filling in the personal dimensions of a journey that has produced a steady stream of important works on high-level Chinese politics, explicitly abandons his preferred tone of scholarly detachment and lets loose about academia's seldom talked-about side, with its ego contests and petty politics.

Baum reserves most of his criticisms – and, logically, his feuds – for those he knows best, members of his own second generation of China watchers. Over the course of the book, we learn about his longstanding dislike of UCLA colleague Philip Huang, finally (sort of) mended before Huang's retirement, and the at-times savage rivalry between him and Michael Oksenberg, congenially set to rest well before Oksenberg's death a decade ago. Oksenberg's undisguised ambition is what seems to bother Baum most – although Baum, too, has opportunities to offer policy advice to the highest levels of US administration. His irritation with Huang arises largely from disagreement over the interpretation of events in China during the Cultural Revolution, when Huang promulgated what Baum dubs excessively rosy views – expressed, furthermore, in an “arrogant and imperious” manner (p. 46).

A prominent subtext throughout the book concerns Baum's judgments on the proper role of the scholar; while subscribing to “left of center” political views himself since his graduate student days (p. 11), he admits that he's always strategically removed himself from situations that might mark him as overtly political (while sympathizing with Berkeley's Free Speech movement, he conveniently left Sproul Plaza before police arrived to arrest demonstrators). Baum's honesty about his own behaviour is refreshing, yet the underlying contempt for those who behave differently can be disturbing. He is dismissive of scholars who took a public stance against the Vietnam War, and more disdainful yet of those who succumbed to idealistic constructions of Maoist China – ie, the sort who joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars – although he also can be gracious, so that those who later acknowledged their naïveté about the traumas of the Cultural Revolution come to be redeemed in his eyes.

Agree or not with this posture, it has given rise to stellar contributions to contemporary China studies – from Baum's early work on the prelude to the Cultural Revolution to his comprehensive account of Deng Xiaoping-era politics, Burying Mao (1996) and many more writings. Baum was an early internet adopter and is the founder and custodian of the Chinapol listserv, which has grown into an important global network for China watchers. Much as his mentors inspired him, Baum has offered inspiration and mentorship to younger generations of students interested in China; and in circumstances far more favourable to enhancing mutual understanding than when he started out, he has actively promoted student and faculty exchanges with China.

One especially striking element of this book goes unremarked upon – and that is the overwhelmingly male nature of the China field in which Baum grew up. Only two woman scholars come across with even a modicum of detail. The first is French scholar Claudie Broyelle, who is backhandedly commended for her “striking about-face” from ardent New Left Maoist to China critic (pp. 239–40). Baum's colleague and travel companion anthropologist Barbara Pillsbury, a specialist in minority cultures of Northwest China, receives more nuanced treatment in a chapter on China's developing “Wild West” – an account in which Baum comes across as the well-informed but somewhat wide-eyed tourist, which makes me want to look up Pillsbury's work.

In all, this book is a curious mix of political analysis and travelogue, retrospective and prospective, told in a tone of both self-deprecation and self-congratulation – both of which the author surely has earned.