Books on China
Monday 28 May 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Playlist
How well do we understand China?
Isabel Hilton introduces a special edition of Night Waves dedicated to the plethora of new books being published about contemporary China.
In the quest to understand the world's new superpower, journalists, economists, sociologists and many others are regularly producing detailed accounts of 'change in the East'.
But do they really help us accurately decipher events in Beijing, Shanghai and beyond, or are they simply mirrors of our own anxieties about the world's future? And how does the British picture of China compare with the view from America?
Isabel is joined by the journalists Rob Gifford, Jonathan Fenby and Duncan Hewitt, all of whom have written or are writing studies of China, by Joshua Kurlantzick, author of a study of the impact of China's 'soft power' offensive in the non-Western world, and by Anchee Min, who lived through the Cultural Revolution and who is now a novelist based in San Francisco.
Getting Rich First: Life In A Changing China by Duncan Hewitt is published by Chatto & Windus.
Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the World by Joshua Kurlantsick is published by Yale University Press in June.
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford is published by Bloomsbury in June.
Serve the People! by Yan Lianke, translated by Julia Lovell, is published by Constable in June.
