What will happen when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to Lhasa, and controls her own gun-factories and arsenals?

Every journalist is walking on a fault line — of unresolved and ambivalent historic situations — trying to represent it some way in words. It is probably the essence of the journalistic profession … that reporters deal with ambivalent situations where the outcome is uncertain, the values are mixed, and the sides are in conflict.

Most coverage of China in the mainstream press aims to alert the West to the promise and perils of rapid economic growth in the country. You might think that writing about a civilization with a long history in terms of whether its ‘rise’ would help Westerners make or lose money is self-limiting. However, most journalists, especially correspondents of business periodicals, don’t aim very high. At their most thoughtful, they might speculate about the timetable for the introduction of Western-style ‘democracy’ in China. Not surprisingly, their writings reveal very little about how most Chinese live or see themselves and the world, but very much about how certain ideological assumptions and prejudices of the ‘West,’ so strengthened by its supposed victory in the Cold War, have overwhelmed many journalists in Britain and America…[A]ny worthwhile discussion of the New China must continually dismantle ideological frameworks in both China and the West and focus on the diversity and many internal schisms of Chinese society…

[O]nly journalism that aspires to the condition of literature can do justice to contemporary China: a mode of writing that creates in its readers not certainty of any kind but a profound sense of the ambiguity and irony inherent in human desires and aspirations