SOURCE: Gittings, John. Review of Behind the Wall, by Colin Thubron. Third World Quarterly 12, nos. 3-4 (1990-91): 173-75.

In the following review, Gittings compares Behind the Wall with Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster.

Even a good travel book about China—and [Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron and Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux] are much more than travel books—now has to be measured against the grim standard of Tiananmen Square. Did Colin Thubron, or Paul Theroux, both exploring from north to south two or three years before the Beijing massacre, somehow grasp the key in one of their casual but profound conversations on night trains and day buses? Was it there, but too subtly concealed? The two writers are very different, one from England and the other from the USA; Thubron carefully selective, Theroux with a deceptively careless tendency to list everything down to...