Editor of the website China Dialogue, Isabel Hilton says the environmental disaster in China is dramatic. Many years ago she walked across a wooden bridge at Lo Wu to leave China, and all around were paddy fields. Now there are large cities and smog – the rivers really do run black. She chooses five books on the ecological catastrophe of China’s industrialisation, its Communist history and its fragile efforts to repair the damage.
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LSE’s Kent Deng says there are no grounds for Eurocentricism in explaining the world history of economic growth. Intensive growth of the modern type – ie, growth with better technology and high per capita income – was first recorded in China under the Sung (Song) Period of the 10th to 13th centuries. Then there was a similar growth in Tokugawa Japan of the 17th to 19th centuries. These were the forerunners of the British Industrial Revolution.
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Richard McGregor reported from Asia for 20 years - he describes the absolute horror at the destruction of Maoist times and says that the atmosphere of fear and suspicion makes China a great place to set detective fiction. He is the author of The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, which was published earlier this month by HarperCollins.
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Harvard China expert and scholar, Professor Roderick MacFarquhar says the Chinese are always accusing the Japanese of not coming to terms with what they did in World War II but the Chinese themselves have not come to terms with the Cultural Revolution. The violence is not just to be put at the door of Chairman Mao, though he fired the starter’s gun; it’s to be put at the door of individual Chinese who were incredibly cruel, in many cases, to other individual Chinese. There is this great big lack of memory which they need to come to terms with.
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Harvey Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement and on Soviet espionage in America. He has received a number of awards, including Emory’s Thomas Jefferson Award in 1999. He was recently nominated to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
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Robert Service is Professor of Russian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests cover Russian history from the late 19th century to the present day and he has written numerous books on the subject. Nowadays he is focusing on Russia in its international framework. He is currently working on the geopolitics of the Russian Revolution as well as a study of the end of the Cold War. He talks to the Browser about the books that led to his passion and the importance of analysing the causes and outcomes of political processes.
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Dr Stephen Lucas is a partner in the banking group of an international law firm, Linklaters LLP. A student of Soviet law, he wrote his PhD thesis on “The Foundations of the Law on Industrial Organisations in Russia and the Former Republics of the USSR”. For more than 15 years, he has advised companies and financial institutions on matters relating to Russian law and investment. In his view, the demise of the Soviet Union left the West somehow bereft of a mainstream political ideological alternative – and so, while the battle for liberty was won in 1991, it seems that the nature of that liberty somehow now misses an important element of radical choice and debate that was posed by the Soviets.
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Nick Thorpe lives in Budapest with his wife and five children and began reporting in February 1986 as the first western journalist to be based there. He is the only British journalist to have covered Eastern Europe from the inside for over 20 consecutive years. He witnessed the collapse of Yugoslavia, popular uprisings in Bulgaria and Serbia, and the transformation of non-violent to violent resistance in Kosovo. As the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent he continues to report the successes and the failures of a revolution which never quite reaches its goal.
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An Australian writer best known for his historical novels, Thomas Keneally portrays characters who are gripped by their historical and personal past, and decent individuals often at odds with systems of authority. At age 17, Keneally entered a Roman Catholic seminary, but he left before ordination. His best-known work, Schindler’s Ark, adapted into the film Schindler’s List, tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from the Nazis. It won the Booker Prize in 1982. His latest novel, The People’s Train, is partly set in Russia and here Keneally tells The Browser which books inspired him.
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Dr Nicholson is Dean of University College, Oxford, and is Fellow and Praelector in Russian, specialising in late 20th-century Russian literature. He tells FiveBooks that writers really were important in the Soviet Union and that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was not Solzhenitsyn’s first book.
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