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Adam
HOME > PAST ISSUE > REPORTS [Premium content] > Regional FocusDecember 2003
One of the China trade's bestknown players, Jardines chief China rep Adam Williams, has just published his first novel, <i>The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure<i>. It is an adventure yarn set during the Boxer Rebellion when a deadly mixture of Manchu decadence, western arrogance, peasant superstition and Christian holier-than-thouness led to an uprising aimed at killing or driving from China all the Foreign Devils. CER asked Adam what parallels and differences he sees between that time of intense Chinese-Westerner confrontation a century ago, and today:
Both were times when Western ideas were challenging established Chinese orthodoxies, railways against feudalism in the 1890s, stock markets and IT against communism in the 1990s. In both eras, undreamed of wealth and stimulating new reforms and ideas materialized; the GDP rose, but at the cost of change to a conservative society which many found disrupting, even damaging and certainly traumatic. The reaction to this change in our day hasn't produced the bloodbath that slaughtered missionaries ...
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