Night Waves - 23/01/2008

How Well Do We Understand China? Isabel Hilton introduces a special edition of the programme dedicated to the many new books being published about contemporary China. In the quest to understand China, journalists, economists, sociologists and many others regularly produce detailed accounts of 'change in the East'. But do they really help us accurately decipher events in Beijing, Shanghai and beyond? 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, and by Anchee Min, who lived through the Cultural Revolution and who is now a novelist based in San Francisco.