Understanding China Today, Jean-Luc DOMENACH

What happens when a sinologist who has traveled extensively in China but never lived there for an extended period finds himself in residence in Beijing? What does he see? Who does he meet? What is his China?

China, both past and present, is Jean-Luc Domenach's "laboratory." For the past five years, he has been able to work there in the open, by walking the streets of Beijing or Shanghai, by having numerous encounters with ordinary people, business leaders, intellectuals, and political officials.

The sinologist of international renown has transformed into a daily chronicler, an explorer of the intricacies of local power, an ethnologist of a society far less exotic than we imagine.

But the scholar and expert in international relations still points out the contradictions of a China that aspires to greatness, achieves it through relentless work, and doubts the present.

One expects to read "things seen"; one discovers the most accurate, as well as striking, film of a painful Renaissance.