Simon Leys

The writer and historian Ian Buruma selects five Western perspectives of the East, including a novel of colonial India, a travelogue of disappearing Japan, and the collection of essays that lifted the veil on Mao’s China.

The changing relationship between China and America will be one of the defining foreign policy issues of our times. To understand its dynamic, says sinologist Orville Schell, we must take account of China’s lingering sense of victimhood.

Former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times shares his insights on the Chinese Communist Party – from the absolute horror at the destruction of Maoist times, to Yao Ming, to political power structures and more