As Stephen Schwarzman, the founding trustees of Tsinghua’s Schwarzman College put it, China in the twenty-first century is not an elective; it is core curriculum. No serious account of our age can omit it. The decisions taken in Beijing and the inventions fashioned in megacities like Shenzhen will press upon the world’s economy, its sciences and technologies, its arts, and the framework of rules —still imperfect— by which we attempt to govern common affairs.
The Greeks have long been at home in the wider world. Since Herodotus, they have travelled not merely to trade or to conquer, but to look —and to report with curiosity, wit, and an eye for the telling detail. In that spirit, this book gathers the dispatches of our modern Herodotuses as they cross China: attentive to what endures from an ancient civilisation, alert to what is startlingly new, and unsen-timental in their praise.
It is, in short, a record of encounter —insightful, candid, and timely— between two old civilisations meeting again in a century that will be shaped, in no small measure, by the one we are still learning to understand.