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Sinica: One Journalist's Journey through China

This week, Kaiser and Jeremy are pleased to be joined by Isabel Hilton, a longstanding British journalist whose youthful interest in China got her blacklisted by the British security services and the British Broadcasting Corporation and redirected into a career in journalism in Latin America and China, where she has covered the country for publications including the Daily Express, Sunday Times, The Independent and The Guardian among others.

In addition to talking about what China was like for a junior reporter back in the 1980s, we move on to talk about Daniel Ortega and the Falklands Wars, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Gere, water and air pollution, and of course Isabel's work promoting greater knowledge of China abroad first as editor-in-chief of Open Democracy as well as China Dialogue, one of the most longstanding bilingual journals online.

Enjoy Sinica? In addition to listening to our show online, or grabbing it as a standalone mp3 file, please feel yourself warmly welcome to visit the Sinica Facebook page, as well as hooking up iTunes to our dedicated RSS feed. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write us at sinica@popupchinese.com as well.

jeremy

said on

December 1, 2013

Previous Sinica guest Paul French sent me this comment about Christopher Hitchens in China:

Just for the record Christopher Hitchens did come to China - once briefly en route to Pyongyang through Beijing and once on a trip to Shanghai. We set up an evening for him to talk at the Shanghai FCC about his book (that he was about to publish at that moment) on God not being great. What we thought would be a small group above a bar in Shanghai's Xintiandi chatting atheism rather got a bit of a handful as a coachload of very Christian American ex-pats found out about it and all came along to defend Jesus. The discussion ranged from atheism to Northern Ireland, American politics to Iraq. The evening went on late as Hitch declared at the start that he would not leave until he'd answered the last question so it could never be said he walked away from the argument. He really had only a passing interest in China and was never pompous enough to claim any great knowledge (unlike many other pass-through international journalism names over the years!) but was eternally fascinated with North Korea, a subject he had written on quite extensively and hoped to return to.

sinnernerious

said on

December 1, 2013

Isabel mentioned that the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan was written by the British, this is incorrect i believe. The treaty in question was signed in 1960 and it was the World Bank's older organization that helped.

She also mentioned that China now matches Europe in per capita emissions.

Can i have a source for this claim?

The Carbon emission(per capita) is EU-7.4, China 7.1 Tonnes

Acc. to this page, http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/2012s-carbon-emissions-in-five-graphs/

This is the source http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/13/hl-full.htm

which claims EU and China had equal Carbon per person on a 1 yr -1 basis for 2012, at 1.9tC

So what is the 7.4 figure in the other article.

And what about Overall Emissions(all greenhouse) not just Carbon.

And how much of what China is producing is from European companies setting up factories in China. Doesn't that count?

This fudging of facts and painting the facts in a light which makes one side appear in a certain way at the expense of the other in media is precisely the reason why the Developing Nations don't agree with the Developed West.