The fastest-growing megalopolis in the world that you've never heard of is Chongqing, the boomtown of western China. Although China's impact on Westerners' lives is growing exponentially, whether it is through our buying household goods "made in China" or Chinese companies buying our debt and investing in our economies, many in the West focus on China for a host of familiar reasons: pollution, human rights abuses, computer hacking, and faulty products. However, they do little to enhance our understanding of how China operates and what it is like to live there. Denis Lejeune moved to Chongqing in 2007 to accompany his wife on a foreign posting. In Behind the Great Wall of China, he challenges Western notions of the nature of contemporary China by drawing on his experience living there. While tour agencies replay romantic images of paddy fields and mist-shrouded jagged peaks and the media play on the fears that this burgeoning superpower may generate, Lejeune paints a realistic portrait of modern China - a country that is surprising, amusing, contradictory, infuriating, sometimes endearing, and always baffling.
Lejeune challenges readers to solve this Chinese puzzle with him as he describes mixing with a vast array of locals - from government officials to peasants to students and whitecollar workers - and navigates life as a Western expat in this perplexing culture. Any Westerner who is considering working or studying in China would be far better prepared after reading his uncompromising set of impressions and experiences.
- ISBN10 161234609X
- ISBN13 9781612346090
- Publish Date 28 August 2013
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Potomac Books Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 176
- Language English