China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Author talks
British writer Simon Winchester fell under the country’s spell 30 years ago, and that passion endures, as Hu Haiyan discovers.
New York Times best-selling author Simon Winchester is writing a trilogy about the Pacific and one of his favorite places on Earth — China.
China could one day have as great and important a presence in the world’s oceans as the United States does today, says Simon Winchester, a veteran British writer, journalist and broadcaster.
“No one, least of all the United States, can doubt the growing and very visible importance of China in all of the western Pacific,” he says.
Winchester, 70, who has written 26 books, including several New York Times best-sellers, says it is a matter of geographic logic that the world’s most populous country should wield influence west of the international dateline.
“There are some who cannot imagine this influence ever extending to the ocean’s east to the coast of Canada and Chile, Peru and Panama, and of course to the littoral of the US itself. But I can entirely imagine this, though perhaps not inmy lifetime.”
Winchester is now working on another project, a trilogy on the Pacific Ocean.
“My current book will necessarily involve China, because of her growing interest in and influence on the Pacific.”
He is unsure what the implications for the geopolitical balance of power may be or may be perceived to be, he says, adding that it depends largely on what China’s ambitions are.
“Certainly Chinese history would suggest a peaceful intent, and I would hope most nations would accept and welcome such an approach. To have other aims would be most troublesome,” he says.
On current conflicts in the AsiaPacific region, he says that discussion, negotiation and binding third-party arbitration would seem like the best solution.
“The League of Nations arbitrated the Aland Islands dispute; the Vatican arbitrated the Beagle Channel dispute; some neutral party, Norway, perhaps, or Canada might take on the current island arguments between China and her most vexed neighbors.”
From early in his journalistic career, Winchester was a globetrotter, and his traveling days are still far from over.
He graduated from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, with a degree in geology in 1966. He then worked for a Canadian mining company in Uganda, and while there, after reading a copy of Coronation Everest by journalist Jan Morris, decided that he, too, wanted to be a journalist.
The book, Winchester wrote in a review many years later, “offers a breathtakingly intimate evocation of the most famous of all mountaineering exploits and of perhaps the last great old-fashioned Fleet Street scoop”.
After being rebuffed in his attempts to find work with various newspapers because of a lack of experience, he eventually landed a job as a junior reporter with a newspaper called The Journal in northern England. Since then he has worked on the staff of, or has been a freelancer for, many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian.
While working for The Guardian he covered several major events, such as the Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland in 1972 in which British Army soldiers fired on protesters and bystanders, resulting in the deaths of 14 people, and the Watergate scandal in the US that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
While working as a journalist, he began writing books on geography, history, politics, travel and other areas.
His first book, In Holy Terror, published in 1975, documents his experiences during the ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland.
When his book The Professor and the Madman, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, was published in 1998, it made it to The New York Times best-seller list.
Winchester employed the same narrative nonfiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman in his travel writing, and has produced several best-sellers, such as The Map that Changed the World, which explored the work of geologist William Smith.
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006, in recognition of his services to journalism and literature.
In 1982, when he worked as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, he was held in prison in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, for about three months when the Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentine forces. “Every experience counts,” he says. His third book, Prison Diary, recounts his time in custody.
His best-known book among Chinese people is probably The Man Who Loved China, published in 2008, about the life of Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped project China to the Western world.
When Winchester wrote the book, he used Chongqing, then in Sichuan province, as a base and traveled to places Needham had visited in the 1940s, including Dunhuang in Gansu province and Xiamen in Fujian province.
Some academics argue that many Chinese writers well-known in the West now live outside China and wrote their books long ago, and that this hinders Western understanding of China. But Winchester thinks too much is made of the academic view of China.
“I am a great believer in a bootson-the-ground approach to recording life in China and feel more academics should leave their ivory
The changes in modern China are obvious, and very fast — maybe too fast for the comfort of all. Were I to use three words to describe my feelings about today’s China, I would say: headstrong, forgetful and careless.” SIMON WINCHESTER BRITISH WRITER, JOURNALIST AND BROADCASTER
towers and head for the streets and the villages.”
His first visit to China was a little more than 30 years ago as a reporter, when the then British foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, traveled to the country to take part in preliminary talks on the future of Hong Kong.
“I was struck back then by the dusty quietness of the city we called Peking,” Winchester says. “Of the tens of thousands of cyclists, all pedaling as one along the great streets of the capital, and the monochrome nature of the city, gray skies and blue clothes.”
Two friends working in Beijing as translators and interpreters, Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, introduced him to hutong life and some of the hidden delights of the capital.
He soon fell under China’s spell, and it is a passion that endures to date, he says.
For 12 years from 1985 he worked in Hong Kong and in those years he visited every corner of China, including Mohe in Heilongjiang province, Weihai in Shandong province, Hainan island and the Kashgar area of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
In 1997, he traveled the length of the Yangtze River, from Shanghai to Mount Gelan Dandong in the Tibet autonomous region, for a book called The River at the Center of the World, published that year, and which, he says, is the book he has drawn the most satisfaction from writing.
Like many others, he is struck by the huge changes in China in recent years.
“The changes in modern China are obvious, and very fast — maybe too fast for the comfort of all. Were I to use three words to describe my feelings about today’s China, I would say: headstrong, forgetful and careless.”
Winchester, who now lives in the US, plans to visit China in August to research his current book on the Pacific Ocean, and says he plans to write more books on China.
His next book will probably be about the history of precision, and on mankind’s adoration of things that are precise, such as machines.
“China, by contrast, still has some residual veneration for imprecise materials — bamboo, for example. I aminterested in the contrast between societies that have become slaves to precision and to those that still have some respect for the fuzzy imprecisions of nature.”