What do you think of Chinese news magazines, for example Sanlian Life Week and China Newsweek?
I think some of it is very good; some of it is very mixed. This is natural, because some of the editors simply don’t have any foreign experience, and some of the editors don’t have second or third languages to suck in all these materials, let it sit and think about what it means for China. I think that kind of global perspective is very, very important. And Chinese people always cry foul when they read foreign media reportage of China. They immediately feel hurt. Some of it is justified but some of it isn’t, because you can’t expect editors in Paris or London to be equally informed about China. But I think it’s also because we don’t teach history, a full range of history, to the younger generation [in China]. For those reasons I decided to spend more than four years editing China: Portrait of a Country, which is a visual history of China. When they don’t have the full range of knowledge then it is very easy for Chinese youth to be totally nationalistic, because they don’t understand th
