A first-hand account of China’s wild changes and rise in the 1990s and then equally rapid fall.
Illustration by Cristina Spanò
In 1985, I was invited to work as a “foreign expert” in Beijing for the magazine China Pictorial, which was published by the Foreign Languages Press under China’s Ministry of Culture. China Pictorial was a government-owned propaganda publication distributed through embassies overseas. It stretched to 24 pages a month, consisting of grainy pictures with paragraph-long captions about China’s happy national minorities and agricultural achievements.
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