SOURCE: Fairbank, John K. “Keeping Up with the New China.” New York Review of Books 36, no. 4 (16 March 1989): 17-20.

In the following excerpt, Fairbank discusses Thubron's first-person account of his travels through China in Behind the Wall.

Another approach to China's current transformation is to go and poke about in it, registering one's personal impressions. First-person travel accounts, naturally limited in scope, give us what truth the writer can offer. David Kidd's sometimes charming reminiscences [in Peking Story] recall the Peking so loved by foreign aesthetes before Mao destroyed it. Kidd, age twenty, taught English and studied art in Peking universities between 1946 and 1950, fascinated by the remnants of the old China. Foreigners were still privileged people and as a young man of artistic interests and cultural sensitivity, he was able to get the use of a room at the back gate of the Summer Palace complex, where the Empress...