The secret to truly understanding China

The big picture isn’t always the most revealing one. Sometimes you learn more by concentrating on the small things.

So it is with Rob Schmitz's Street of Eternal Happiness (John Murray, £20), in which an American reporter, charged with explaining the Chinese economy, talks to the people along his road who help to make it tick. The result is educational and entertaining, engaged and dispassionate.

Rob Schmitz first visited China to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer at the turn of the millennium. Fifteen years later, he returned as a correspondent in Shanghai for American Public Media’s Marketplace, a programme with more than 10 million listeners a week. 

Coverage of China, he feels, focuses too much on the government or the economy, which is now the second largest in the world. If you make an effort to understand the hopes, dreams and fears of the people, he argues, you can have a better understanding of the country as a whole.

That’s what he set out to do over four years or so from 2010, among the residents of Changle Lu, or Long Happiness Road, which he took to calling the Street of Eternal Happiness. 

The people he features are not just ciphers, chosen to illustrate some aspect of the economy and identified by name, address and age. They are fully rounded characters, whose stories emerge in chat after chat, chapter after chapter, so we feel we are getting to know them as the writer does. 

The book, which started life as a radio series, is rich with voices. Among them are those of “Uncle Feng” and “Auntie Fu”, who serve up the best scallion pancakes in the district. He’s a man who was conned by party propaganda in his teens and is determined not to be fooled again; she wants to be rich, and falls victim to one investment scam after another. 

Here’s a couple who have been bickering since the days of Mao and, because they can’t even agree on what to watch, have two television sets in their bedroom.

One of the youngest characters is Chen Kai, an entrepreneur in his 30s who likes to be known as “CK”. He survived an abusive childhood in an industrial part of the country to prosper at school, and makes a good living from selling accordions and running a sandwich shop, but he comes to feel that his life is missing a spiritual element and, in common with many of his generation, turns to Buddhism. 

One of the older ones, 61-year-old Xi Guozhen, is preoccupied with the past rather than the future. Her husband was killed when their home was demolished to make way for the high-rise where Schmitz now lives. For 20 years, she has been petitioning the government to investigate his death, and been jailed numerous times for her pains.

Many China-watchers have long argued that, with capitalism flourishing, an independent legal system would gradually evolve alongside it; Xi’s experience suggests they might be overly optimistic.

Schmitz speaks both to those who are prospering under the new economic freedoms and those who, not so long ago, were sent to labour camps for being “capitalist lackeys”. His interviewees, several of whom have clearly become friends rather than just contacts, speak freely and frankly, and only a couple have asked him to conceal their real names and addresses. 

One wonders what some of those who feature will make of his book if they are allowed to read it. One mother says to Schmitz of her daughter-in-law: “If my son were as tall as you are, he wouldn’t have settled for her. She’s not that pretty.”

Schmitz says modestly that the more he learns about the Chinese economy, the less he knows. Readers, though, on closing his book, will feel much wiser about China and the Chinese than when they started.

Street of Eternal Happiness is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £16.99 plus p&p 

Other new travel books

How to Travel Without Seeing by Andrés Neuman

Restless Books, £12.99 

Andrés Neuman travelled through 19 countries one after the other. He had little trouble with immigration officers, but he did arouse the suspicions of a parking attendant. That was in San José, Costa Rica, where the attendant saw him scribbling note after note on the street and thought he must be writing tickets.

He was writing this book – on the spot, if his introduction can be believed. A tour he was sent on after winning a literary prize had him pinballing from place to place, so the writing, he decided, should reflect that; the journal should take the form of the journey. 

The result is not so much a travel book as a travelling one: instant, impressionistic, written from a need “to trap small realities on the go and interpret them in real time”.

Real time, in this case, was from the end of June 2009, when Latin America in general was preoccupied with an epidemic of swine flu and Honduras with the fallout from a coup. The latter event prevented Neuman from writing about that country at first hand, but little else seems to have escaped his notice. 

His preoccupation with dealing with whatever is right in front of him, right now, doesn’t preclude him from looking beyond it; from exploring questions of nationality and identity, immigration and globalisation; from reflecting on both politics and plastic surgery. In Venezuela, he observes, “you cannot not talk about Chávez. That is perhaps his main victory and his greatest act of oppression.” 

In Puerto Rico, a US territory, he notes “an accent with curves. Overflowing and self-fulfilling legs and butts, flaunting the insulting independence that this island will never have.”

Neuman, who was born in Argentina, grew up in Spain and describes himself as a “partial Andalusian”, can pin down a place in a sentence or two.

Of the Bolivian capital, La Paz, he writes: “I contemplate the brick constructions attached to the mountains, ascending organically. These orange dwellings expand, snake and morph as the family gets bigger. First a room, then a patio. Later a second bedroom. They are genealogical houses, casually remodelled, as mutable as the sky that covers them.”

The book was first published, in Spanish, in 2010. It’s a shame it has taken so long for an English-language edition to appear, for its immediacy, its feeling of being up-to-the-minute, is diminished by references to events that are now history rather than current affairs. 

But then an account of Neuman’s trip that was truly in tune with contemporary travel wouldn’t be a book at all, but a blog. Or maybe a Twitter feed. 

How to Travel Without Seeing is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £10.99 plus p&p

This is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah

Picador, £9.99 

I thought I knew the city where I have lived and worked for 40 years, but in This Is London Ben Judah shows me I was wrong. 

Between Victoria Coach Station, from which 2,000 migrants a week set out on a new life, and a mortuary in a mosque in Leyton, where bodies are washed before burial, he leads a tour of a city I’ve never seen; a city where Cockney old London has “shattered into a thousand, dazzling inscrutable shards”. 

At least 55 per cent of the people in this city are not ethnically white British, almost 40 per cent were born abroad and five per cent are living illegally. Who are these new Londoners, Judah wants to know. And what is their London like?

Over 400 pages, and countless conversations, he provides the answers. Or, rather, the new Londoners do. He gets them talking and lets them talk. The results are by turns heartbreaking and heartening, and sometimes both in the space of a page.

He coaxes life stories from Polish tramps and Romanian drug addicts; from an Arab heiress in a gilded prison and Filipina domestics enslaved in mansions. He hears talk of the new London from immigrants who experienced an older one.

Judah, an acclaimed foreign correspondent who was born into a Jewish family in the north of the city, says he can’t rely on others to tell him how things really are. So he beds down with the beggars in a tunnel beneath Hyde Park, and with 15 builders in a two-bedroom dosshouse – the sort of immersive reporting that has led to comparisons with Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Judah’s is an extraordinary book; a fizzing, buzzing, choral account of the 21st-century city.  

This Is London is available from Telegraph Books at £9.99 plus p&p (0844 871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk)