One of the riches treasures that Gustaf Mannerheim brought back from his journey along the Silk Road from 1906 to 1908 is his very considerable collection of photographs. The pictures contain a huge quantity of information, and the collection amounts to a colourful reportage of a bygone world and of peoples known to few Westerners at the time.

Continue Reading

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria talks with Robert Kaplan, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic, about his article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Geography of Chinese Power.”

Continue Reading

Ken Miller, president of a merchant banking firm and director of the USA Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, has written a level-headed, sophisticated and cautiously optimistic article about China’s financial might in Foreign Affairs.

Continue Reading

In 2000 to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Cheka, Nikolai Patrushev, who succeeded Vladimir Putin as director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), made a rather frightful comment: “Our best colleagues, the honor and pride of the FSB, don’t do their work for the money… It is their sense of service. They are, if you like, our new ‘nobility.’”

Continue Reading

Richard McGregor’s new book, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, should be required reading for anyone wanting to do any kind of business in China. His narrative unfolds like Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard, in which the writer tracks the mysterious cat through the Himalayas. With every gripping anecdote, McGregor gets closer to capturing the essence of the Party, but in the end this “beast”, like the snow leopard, proves elusive.

Continue Reading

After what seemed like an eternity, the hard cover first edition of my book, published by Douglas & McIntyre, finally arrived this morning by courier. It has been a monumental project, which began a decade ago over a pint of lager at Lund University in Sweden.

Continue Reading

The whizzes at Chinfographics have recently designed some interesting graphics showing how China’s enormity also creates anonymity for its many large cities. This is especially true for cities in the vast interior of China, far from the coastal mega-cities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen that are so well known in the West. While researching my book, I trekked through many of these huge, unheard of cities.

Continue Reading

The final resting place of Genghis Khan is an utter wasteland—befitting, perhaps, of a ruthless conqueror who laid waste to so much of the world.
It is located about 70 kilometres south of Dongsheng, the capital of the prefecture of Ordos in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Once dominated by Mongol nomads, the prefecture, with [...]

Continue Reading

In 2006, I visited Osh, Central Asia’s most ancient Silk Road market in southern Kyrgyzstan, for a few days while researching my book. I spent time investigating the Osh and Karasuu bazaars as part of my interest in the New Silk Road. (Chapter 5 is titled “Travels on the Synthetic Road.”) I never felt any [...]

Continue Reading

“To analyze China’s future,” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently opined, “we need to better understand China’s extraordinary history, including its long evolution of reform and foreign engagement. That is a complex task.”

Rudd should know. The Australian Prime Minister majored in Mandarin and Chinese history at university, and his country with its geographic proximity and [...]

Continue Reading