Beijing Time

Description

Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing - newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. This work conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider.

Reviews

A fascinating cultural mapping of modern Beijing. Here are ring roads that resemble "successive reworkings of the old city wall"; here is the district for "saw-gash CDs" (imperfect discs dumped by western record labels on the Chinese market), where the young bob for Sex Pistols albums...The book is a useful street-level corrective to received ideas. In particular, its interviews with citizens--an ex-policeman, scavengers in plastic-bag mountains, luminaries of the art scene, cafe owners who dream of being film directors, members of a kind of granny Neighborhood Watch scheme--are wonderfully humane.--Steven Poole"The Guardian" (09/06/2008)

Author description

Michael Dutton is author of Streetlife China and the prize-winning Policing Chinese Politics; he is also Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths University of London. Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu are independent scholars.