Review of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor was originally published in the Vancouver Sun on August 14, 2010.
In the spring of 2006, I enrolled in a curious course at the B.C. Institute of Technology in Vancouver. It was called the “Fundamentals of Doing Business with China,” but it [...]

An excerpt of a review by Jonathan Clements, the author of Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy:
Author Eric Enno Tamm is a journalist with firm ecological credentials and no fear of rattling cages. Applying for a visa in Vancouver, Tamm finds his path blocked by Chinese officialdom, but this only spurs him even more to imitate his [...]

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. The official publishing date is September 1, 2010, but [...]

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.

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 [...]

In 2006, I visited Osh, Central Asia's most ancient Silk Road market in southern Kyrgyzstan, for a few days while researching my book, The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China. I spent time investigating the Osh and Karasuu bazaars as part of my [...]

On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Tsar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty’s sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last Tsarist agent in the so-called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China’s modernization, from reform of education, [...]