![]() ![]() Written in the form of a fable in which life in Beijing is seen from the points of view of two cats, Soyabean and Tofu, it is a touching, pastel-coloured close-up of urban China inhabited by its citizens. Pallavi Aiyar, a former Beijing correspondent for The Hindu and The Indian Express, follows up her insightful collection of despatches, Smoke and Mirrors, with Chinese Whiskers. And this is where two journalists, both waiguo Ren - foreigners - in China, provide two very different pictures from the inside of an emergent world power in their books. ![]() For all its steroid-driven ability to turn a post-industrial marathon into a 100-metre dash, China’s ‘developing country’ mark, however, remains like stubborn oil stain on a wok.Īnd it is this underplayed aspect of controlled chaos and Confucian confusion that should be of special interest to readers of a country who share much of these traits, however apart China and India may have grown in the last 30 years on the (important) surface. ![]() In our obsession to figure out how India can play catch-up with China, we seem to have ignored one thing: wanting to know China beyond our points of dispute and envy. ![]()
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