周黎明 (Raymond Zhou's bilingual blog) 用中文写娱评，用英文写时评

这两本书进了外文书店，也许亚马逊网店也会进货。想省钱的读者，《透视中国》的多数文章在中国日报网站的专栏库中能找到。

X-Ray: Examining the China Enigma is a collection of 99 columns Raymond Zhou wrote for China Daily in the past few years. It is one man’s adventure into the murky world of mostly mundane changes – progress and frustration that make up the tableau of a country in breakneck growth.

Zhou shies away from the big issues that everyone is familiar with; instead, he focuses on controversies that cannot be explained away with broad black-and-white strokes. His keen insight, sometimes infused with biting humor, adds a multi-dimensional hue to what would otherwise be regular issues of the week. 

What makes Zhou stand out is his unique perspective and his acute rationality. He refuses to join in crowd-pleasing choruses, and he does not take any preconceived stands. He appreciates complexity and encourages the reader to do the same.
Vast and sweeping changes are made up of many smaller ones – some expected, others more difficult to digest. By dissecting some of the befuddling happenings of the past few years, Zhou has put a personal mark on cracking the codes – cultural and otherwise – that run the emerging power that is China.

封底 (海外媒体同仁的评语)


China the Beautiful is Raymond Zhou’s paean to his motherland, written after returning home following a long absence, which provided him with new perspectives and new opportunities to travel to places he had previously only read about. It is anything but a guidebook for roughly half of the country’s provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. 

Zhou takes a multifaceted approach to each place he writes about. His real interest is always in ordinary people – their joys, concerns and anxieties, the breath-taking beauty of the sceneries, and the quandaries between economic growth and ecological preservation.

The book is a kaleidoscopic view of a country on the cusp of change – a country always yearning for something new, yet constantly reminded of its past glory; a country caught between the need for improving living standards for all and the hard decisions of what has to be given up in the process; a country where everything is happening so fast it’s a blur and capturing it with words and images amount to sculpting in time.

Besides portraying everyday lives on the ground and up close, Zhou makes one exception by examining the Great Wall from in an international space station. With the help of an astronaut, he busted, once and for all, he urban myth about the Wall as the only man-made structure visible from outer space.

封面


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