Past Publications [all available on Amazon]
So far, I’ve written books about China, about journalists and about investigations. Now I am the investigator, looking into the hearts of men and women faced with threats to their identity, to their self-awareness; people who make choices that go against everything they’ve believed so far.
I love to read books which explore motives and meanings and which defy convention and conformity. My most admired modern writer is Yan Lianke. Those, passed on, at whose feet I would give anything to sit, include George Eliot and Shen Congwen, Fyodor Dostoevsky (though I’d hide my wallet), Valery Grossman and Luigi Pirandello. And Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), that passionate chronicler of human vileness and redemptive love? I would be her slave.
Below are some of my earlier books, of which the most recent is the second edition of CHINA’S MEDIA IN THE EMERGING WORLD ORDER. There’s a caveat on this one: While I do believe that it is the most useful introduction, in English, to China’s media, I now consider that I was too idealistic and naïve in implying that the system in China was becoming more open to discussion, to new ideas, that the Party had sheathed its fangs. Moreover, because the contrast between the China of the 1990s and early 2000s with the China of my earliest encounters, during the so-called Cultural Revolution, or what many Chinese refer to as ‘the 10 years of terror’, was so great, I had tended to assume that a restoration of decency and happiness was gradually taking place. I did not want to believe that, in reality, communism had destroyed so much that restoration, if ever possible, would take decades. Moreover, I now understand that China is deeply divided. There remains resistance to the ruling class project of ‘westernisation’, resistance inspired by the philosophies of the Chinese Enlightenment of 500 BC and enflamed by the hideous cruelties inflicted upon the Chinese people since 1949 by Lenin’s copycats.
‘An excellent, well-written and important survey which should be on the shelves of all those interested in China and in the media’
This 3rd edition of Investigative Journalism reports on a profoundly changed media landscape
If journalists have power in the constructing of public discourse, how are they taught to use this power?
‘The reporting of environmental issues is having a profound effect on our country’
The book of a series of seminars commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown
