CW sat down with author Paul French to chat about his new book, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.

For some background. How long have you been in China?

I was a student in 1990s. My first time coming here was in 1987. So about ten years.

You’ve just published Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. What’s your reason for writing the book?

I wanted to do a kind of a history of China through the way it had been reported in foreign press. Journalists get up to all kinds of things. So it seemed like a good hat to hang it on. I didn’t want to do another general history of Shanghai. I needed a hook to hang the story on. I had it in Carl Crowe. So I thought, why not do it through the stories of the foreign press. The journalists are interesting. [They’re insecure, crazy, drunks] They got to go anywhere. They dig deeper obviously. They went deeper than businessmen and diplomats. Also they write about themselves a lot. Journalists are very vain they want everyone to know their name. They want everyone to know where they have been and

How do you get the material for the book?

You start off by just going through the newspapers at the time. Those don’t necessarily tell you a lot. You don’t know what’s been changed what’s been edited. So you get a little bit about who the writers are. [the more illuminating is there memoirs]You’d be amazed at how many of them wrote their memoirs. They’re telling what they really thought about how was a spy, about this or that person. Then you start cross referencing and building up a knowledge. They are quite cliquey. They worked together, they slept together. Like a lot of groups, they were quite incestuous. You could look at any group [to analyze China], you could look at accountants. There have been accountants for just as long in China. But they’re just not as interesting as journalists.

Are you a journalist?

No I’m not. By day, I’m an economic analyst and by night I’m a historian. I like journalists. They are the most insecure, competitive people. And often quite bitchy, quite funny. A good number were philanderers and drunks. And how many were spies?

Journalists were spies?

Yes of course, the biggest cover-ups for spying have been as diplomats or journalists.

In the introduction to your book you say, “Still, if there were more larger-than-life characters in the foreign press corps in China then than today, it was because the times were in many ways larger, the world certainly less known and the story more compelling.” Is there not a story to China now?

There’s a story here now, and it’s quite interesting. But in terms of the stakes, they just aren’t as high. Journalists now go out and find stories about the Falun Gong. You can’t compare the Falon Gong with the Taiping Rebellion. If it we’d been here in 1919 this week, it would have been an incredible story. Or in 1900 with the Boxer Rebellion chopping off the heads of missionaries. Or it were the summer of 1937, there would be bombs dropping on Shanghai. We wouldnt be talking about a unified country, we would be talking about if china would still be there in 5 minutes time. Now there are trade spats with the European Union and someone said something and someone else said something, but it’s hardly the Opium War.

Well, where is the story right now?

At the moment, who knows. The problem is that the place that’s the most interesting for journalists is probably the last place you want to live. There aren’t huge European empires now. There’s nowhere that’s the equivalent [to China back then]. If I was a journalist, I’d want to be in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

French's “400 million consumers” will soon be out in print once again and will show, French says, how little has changed in the way people observe China changing. It was more or less fun. The point is that people don’t remember. There’s no collective memory. They come here and think they’re doing something radical. Tom Doctoroff wrote 1 billion and Carl Crowe 400 million. Foreign companies come into China thinking they’re going to make large amounts of money. We see so many companies’ projections about how much they’re going to sell go wrong. It’s particularly interesting to see people in the 1990s make the same mistakes as foreign businessmen in the 1930s. We forget what came in between.

Shanghai versus Beijing?

I have no opinion. That’s a silly question, no offense. Both cities have their good in bad. I like living in Shanghai because there is a river running through it. I think its very strange for a city to not have a river. Most do. But then Beijing isn’t really a city is it. It’s a Mongolian xxxx.

Top china books? What you think every foreigner should read?

The problem is that my favorites are all 60 years old. Carl Crowe’s 400 million consumers. If you read that you don’t need to read anything else. That’s my bible. It’s a fantastic book.

Are journalists now similar to how they were then?

They still are all crazy. They’re kids who never grow up. If you tell them to not cross the road, they’ll run across just to see what happens. No matter how much the government tells them not to do things, they still do.

What I think is true [is that] in the old days, they had no internet, they didn’t have blackberries. What they had was a lot of time. They just had time to go and really dig into stories. I think the level of reporting then was much deeper than today. Now there’s no time. Everyone’s always emailing all the time. They want another story, and update. It’s a product now. The people who are really able to do the best work are the people who have given time. The people I look at now who have that are people like Evan Osnos who works for the New Yorker. Fritz Hoffman and Greg Gerard, photographers for National Geographic. There are so few places that will give you that license. Everyone wants volume over value. That’s the problem with new media. It’s a machine that wants content.

What’s the solution?

At the moment, it’s like a plague on both your houses. At the moment we have nothing really coming out of the internet and less and less out of newspapers, apart from a few very lucky publications like the New Yorker. It depends how it goes. As long as people think blogs and citizen journalists are enough, that’s what we’ll end up with.

There’s no real foreign media in China. Before you had publications like the North-China Daily News. You had massive amounts of journalists working for papers in China for people in china. You haven’t got anything in China that’s the equivalent now. There’s no independent media. That is the story--China doesn’t want anyone to report anything. So you can’t really compare the two times. That was an incredibly free period. In those times, you had a government and opposition parties. You had a political system going on. Whereas here, of course, you haven’t gotten that.

The Nationalists would say something. Then you’d go across the road and see what the Communists would say. You’d keep talking to constructing why is or is not a good idea and constructing the of if it’s a good idea or not. That’s how it works right? You ask different why something is or isn’t a good idea and then you start to construct if it is or not.

Lily Kuo