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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On Wednesday Xi Jinping presided over a Beijing military parade celebrating the 80th anniversary of Japan’s World War II defeat. Eighty-eight years ago his mother, Qi Xin, watched Japanese troops march into the city, at the outset of a conflict that would define her formative years and instill lessons she would later pass on to her son.
In an extract from his new book, Breakneck, Dan Wang hops on his bike to explore how China’s problems throw America’s into stark relief. How is it, he asks while biking through Guizhou, that China’s...
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