Author and OM Hugh Battye (C3 1990-95) tells A Tale of Two Chinas: A Fifteen-Year Odyssey Through China’s Cultural Heartlands, which depicts his time living in mainland China between 2005 and 2020,

It combine travel writing with discussion of the mainland’s politics, economy, history, and other prevalent themes. It’s overall aim could be succinctly summarised as “describing twenty-first China in two halves”.

Part One (“Mainstream Urban China”) recounts his time as a language student and teacher in three the northern cities of Tianjin, Xining and Lanzhou. Through his experiences, interactions and reflections, he not only takes the reader on his own journey, but also on a grand tour of mainstream Chinese society, covering many of the major political, economic and cultural topics of the Reform period, as well as of Xi Jinping’s New Era.

Part Two (“Minority Rural China”) goes one step deeper, documenting his time conducting ethnographic fieldwork among two marginalised minority communities in the rural northwest. Here again, through narrating his own experiences, he also paints a vivid picture of this second “China”, from thick descriptions of Islamic and Tibetan Buddhist festivals to portraits of village life still guided by the agricultural seasons. In navigating both of the major fault lines of Chinese society – the city and the countryside, the Han mainstream and the minorities – the two parts combine to provide a fresh and unique perspective on the complexity that is the modern People’s Republic.