A Year of Author Q&As for the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus Magazine

Posted: January 2nd, 2025 | No Comments »

From urban studies of China to the country’s crime fiction scene, male idols to Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, up in the hills of Dali to the craziness of China’s online world – we had it covered in the China-Britain Business Council’s Focus magazine this year with 12 author Q&As…

January – Zongyuan Zoe Liu opted to tackle a big, and very important, subject in her new book – Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions (Harvard University Press).

February – American academic Jeff Kinkley likes to read detective fiction set in China, indeed he’s read pretty much every China-related detective novel written in English and he reckons they tell us a lot about contemporary China. So he brought together his thoughts in China Mysteries: Crime Novels From China’s Others (University of Hawaii Press) and also provided us with a definitive reading list of China-set crime novels.

March – Since the late 1970s, China has undergone perhaps the most sweeping process of urbanization ever witnessed. Richard Hu looks at the changes in China’s cities since 2010 and dares to make some bold predictions about the future in his book Reinventing the Chinese City (Columbia University Press).

April – Anne Stevenson-Yang moved to Beijing in 1993 to work for the US-China Business Council. In the next quarter century she became one of the best-known foreigners in China starting businesses in publishing, software and online media. Now her books Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy and a collection of short stories Hello, Kitty (both published by Bui Jones Books, 2024) look back on her experiences.

May – Assistant Professor of International History at the LSE’s Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s new book Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press) may focus on the US experience trading with China but there is much for the UK to learn too.

June – In The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future (Bloomsbury Asian Arguments, 2024) Jonathan Chatwin travels 3,000 miles in the footsteps of Deng’s legendary “southern tour”, pursuing the stories of his journey and examining its legacies in the country today.

July – Ralph Jennings lived for seven years in Beijing and more than that in Taipei. He’s worked as a news editor with the state-owned China Daily, an advice columnist for the 21st Century weekly in Beijing and a reporter for numerous international media outlets including Reuters. All this is condensed into his helpful new book 50 Pieces of Advice on China (Earnshaw Books).

August – Former diplomat and prolific author Kerry Brown, currently Professor of Chinese Studies at Kings College London’s Lau Institute, has just published The Great Reversal (Yale University Press). Brown takes as his starting point that while modern China has a narrative of its relationship with Britain, while he argues that Britons don’t seem to have a similar understanding of our relationship with China.

September – Veteran journalist Michael Sheridan took a deep dive into China’s leader in his biography Xi, The Red Emperor, looking at his relationship with his father, the Cultural Revolution, the battle with Bo Xilai for the soul of the Party and then brings his rule right up to date examining China (and Xi’s) controversial Zero-Covid policies, his poor relations with the West, new relationship with Putin’s Russia and his highly debatable economic policies.

October – Alec Ash left a comfortable urban life in Beijing for the remote southwest of China and Dali in 2020, just before Covid hit. In the mountains he met those fleeing Chinese urban life, careers and the demands of society for, hopefully, something simpler and fulfilling. He thought he might be more fulfilled too. In The Mountains are High Ash deep dives the Dali community and tells a very different experience of Covid from those in the big cities.

November – Liu Lizhu takes a close look at China’s e-commerce explosion in Click to Boom. Just how did the world’s largest e-commerce market become a digital path to development with Liu, assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

December – and we finished off the year with Chinese Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury by Amanda Sikarskie, Peng Liu and Lan Lan. Amazingly male idols sell more lipstick, eyebrow pencil and handbags to women customers in China than female celebrities.

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