The American socialite Wallis Simpson is best known as the wife of former British king Edward VIII. When they announced their intention to marry, her status as a divorcée (and an American) caused a constitutional crisis that led to Edward’s abdication in 1936. But long before that, Simpson’s adventures had led her to spend a year in interwar China, from 1924-25, while fleeing her abusive first husband and possibly also transporting U.S. diplomatic documents. Later maligned by the British press for this “lotus year,” the truth of Simpson’s China sojourn reveals much about the chaotic state of the nation in the 1920s, and prejudiced attitudes toward it — and foreigners living there — from outside.

Our guest on the podcast this month is Paul French, a British writer who lived in Shanghai in the 1990s and 2000s, where he ran a market research firm. He is the author of several books on modern Chinese history, including the bestselling Midnight in Peking (Viking, 2012) and City of Devils (Picador, 2018). His latest title, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St Martin’s Press, 2024), tells the full story of Simpson’s China year, long before her tryst with King Edward VIII caused a scandal worthy of Harry and Megan. French talked to us about the political backdrop to this personal drama, how the perspective of expats can be a unique prism, and the state of the “China book” in general.

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There was a document circulated in 1936 called the “China Dossier.” This contained all sorts of rumor and innuendo about what Wallis Simpson had done in her year in China, and none of it ever rang true to me looking at Shanghai history.

Paul French

Guest

Read the transcript:

ALEC ASH: Hello and welcome to the China Books Podcast, a monthly interview series on all things China and bookish, brought to you by chinabooksreview.com. I’m Alec Ash, editor of China Books Review. Our guest this month is Paul French, a British author of many books on modern Chinese history, including the best selling Midnight in Peking, City of Devils, and, fresh off the press, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson, which tells the little-known story of the American socialite’s sojourn in China in the 1920s, long before her tryst with King Edward VIII of Britain that caused a scandal worthy of Harry and Meghan. French talked to us about this tall tale, but also about his other writings on China and the state of the China book in general. 

So, Paul, welcome. It’s great to have you on the pod. I think I first met you in 2010, and you walked me around Shanghai where you had been living since the 1990s, pointing out all the old buildings and telling me stories about them. So, I thought you could start by telling us the story of how you first came to China and how you got interested in researching its early 20th century history. 

(01:18) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah, great. I remember that day. We went around the old Jewish ghetto, which has been somewhat slimmed down since then, unfortunately, despite lots of preservation orders, but it’s still basically there and intact.

I suppose my journey to China is similar to lots of people’s, particularly British people’s. It starts at university, with studying China, history, culture, some language, and then, well, in the 1990s, things were a lot more open and free – for those that maybe aren’t so old as me who won’t remember this – and you used to be able to sort of pitch up in somewhere like Shanghai or Beijing and come up with an idea for a company, and start it up as a rep office or a WFOE, wholly foreign owned enterprise. 

We started a company called Access Asia, which was a market research company, and we decided we’d look at retail and consumer. And of course, China became the retail superpower of the world and all of the foreign retailers, the supermarkets and the luxury brands and everyone else flooded in. And I did that based in Shanghai from the ‘90s through to about… I think someone walked in the door and wanted to buy in 2013… and we were all in the mood for doing something different, so we sold it.

(02:32) ALEC ASH: And those were the go-go years of the ‘90s and 2000s, much like the ‘20s and the ‘30s, the period you keep returning to. 

(02:39) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah, I mean, we really were living in the go-go years. I mean, I think the ‘90s and the early 2000s were a particularly wild, free kind of time. Whenever I’m in China now, I always talk with journalists and book reviewers now and they tend to be younger people. And the question they ask off mic is, you know, “What was Shanghai like in the ‘90s? Was it really as wild as we hear it was?”

And I was like, yeah, it pretty much was. I mean, things that would be sort of almost unthinkable now, like, kind of raves in half built shopping malls, you know, everyone taking over boats on the Huangpu River and going up and down… bar streets, both salubrious and less salubrious types… people opening restaurants all the time, opening little hole in the wall places. It was a really exciting time for foreigners to be in Shanghai. And it was a very exciting time for the Shanghainese themselves. They had this intrinsic sense that their city was back, that they were back at the center of the world, which is where they felt they’d been, not wholly unjustified in the sort of interwar years.

(03:43) ALEC ASH: Right. And so is that why after you sold your company and left China, why you then turned towards writing about that previous period of the blooming of Shanghai and the ‘20s and the ‘30s? What caught your eye about that? 

(03:55) PAUL FRENCH: Well, I’d already been writing about Shanghai in that period. I did a biography of the American advertising man, Carl Crow, who was one of the people that brought modern advertising techniques to China. That fascinated me. He wrote a book called Four Hundred Million Customers, which was really about how your expectations of China will never quite be lived up to. 

I also wrote about history of foreign correspondence in China from the opium wars to 1949, and that was interesting because it was also a golden age for foreign correspondence. I’m one of those strange people who finds journalists quite interesting people.

When I think of the number of people who came and were based in China at the time who produced incredible books – you know, Leslie Chung’s Factory Girls, James King’s China Shapes the World,  Jonathan Watts’ When a Billion People Jump, I mean, I could go on listing them – it felt like almost every month another really good book on China was coming out from a foreign correspondent and was being bought. People were reading and discussing these books. They weren’t just being reviewed within select circles. They were in Barnes and Noble. They were in WH Smith’s and everyone was buying them. People were fascinated. People were signing up for Chinese courses. People were coming out on trips. Visas were much easier to get. People could turn up and sort of establish themselves as freelance journalists, which again was something that was a very big thing in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

So I’d been doing that. I then got more sort of interested in the foreigners. Well, obviously being in Shanghai, foreigners were intrinsic to the development and the history of that city, both in good ways and bad, and I just found that that was an interesting way to connect with China.

Once I’d sold the company and sort of had to think about what to do next, I really wanted to find stories about China that would use what I thought was my quite good knowledge of Chinese late-Qing, Republican-era history, but would be able to take those stories to a much, much wider audience. And I thought that one of the things about that was to be able to see China through the eyes of people that maybe feel more familiar to you than a Chinese peasant or something like that, which is not impossible to do.  But you know yourself from writing books, from Chinese people’s perspective, it can be quite difficult to sell.

Chinese history in itself can be problematic because there’s a lot of it. It’s very complicated and we don’t do any of it at school in the West, so it really helps to sort of lure people in. So I started looking for stories like the Pamela Werner unsolved murder of 1937. That was an unsolved murder, which is a great tale; everyone likes true crime. It was also really about China in 1937, the year that Japan invaded, the year that old China ended, if you like. And I thought that was a good way to do things. 

When I did City of Devils, I found these stories of the foreign gangsters trapped in Shanghai during the Gudao, or “solitary island” period. And I thought, this is a really good way to explain that unique position Shanghai found itself in after the Japanese attack when it was sort of surrounded.  And again, now with Her Lotus Year, It’s about 1924, 1925, which I think is an absolutely pivotal year for China. It’s when everything could have blown up and gone to pieces, but I’m not sure that that’s enough to bring in a big readership. What there was, though, was this story of Wallis Simpson, who throughout that period, travels from Hong Kong across to Guangzhou, to Shanghai, to Tianjin, to Beijing. And she sees it all through her eyes. And we get her story as well.

(07:16) ALEC ASH: So is that the thread which connected those books you mentioned? Your first breakout success, Midnight in Peking in 2012, told the story about the murder of the 19-year-old daughter of a British diplomat and the American expats in wartime Shanghai, and City of Devils and, now, Wallis Simpson, the common thread – is it that through the foreign perspective, you get to kind of shed light on what China was like then through the perspective of a foreigner, just as the person reading the book has that same shared foreign perspective?

(07:46) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah, and hopefully it’s a kind of a, you know, hidden history lesson that you’re drawn in by the murder or the gangsters or Wallis Simpson, but you learn a lot about China at that time, and if I can write it well enough, then it will draw you in. And I think that’s the real trick that I’ve managed to do quite well a few times now, but of course, you’re always looking for another story that does that.

(08:07) ALEC ASH: You sure do. It’s always very gripping. A new Paul French book, they often read like thrillers. So tell us about the story of Wallis Simpson, the American-born socialite who later became the Duchess of Windsor, how did she end up coming to China in 1925?

(08:25) PAUL FRENCH: Well, I think everybody knows the later story of Wallis Simpson, 12 years after she’s been in China, when she goes to London, meets the Prince of Wales, becomes his mistress, then he becomes King Edward VIII, and he’s forced into making a decision to abdicate if he wants to marry her. It’s caused the biggest constitutional crisis in British monarchical history. 

One of the things about that that always dogged me when I was in Shanghai was there was a supposed document that was circulated in 1936 called the “China Dossier.” And this contained all sorts of rumor and innuendo about what Wallis Simpson had done in her year in China, and none of it ever rang true to me looking at Shanghai history, it didn’t really work. You know, there was supposed to have been, perhaps naked pornographic pictures; she was supposed to have perhaps worked for opium runners; she was maybe running for a gambling ring; she maybe had had an affair with Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, and had perhaps had an abortion. None of this stacked up, but all of those stories were true about other people.

So, I thought this was quite interesting. And this was circulated, not among the people, it wasn’t like the Daily Mail sidebar would be now. This was just circulated among sort of Mayfair lunches and country estate weekends. The idea was to turn the Royal family and the aristocracy, and then, by turn, Edward VIII, against Wallis and realize that it would be impossible for him to marry her. Twice divorced and American hadn’t done it as an argument, so the fact that she had had this supposedly salacious year in China would maybe do it. 

What’s interesting, of course, is when we’re in 1936, we’re also in an era when, there’s very much two versions of China going on in Europe and America at that time. One is the Yellow Peril: a white woman on her own in China must have lost her moral compass. What does she think she’s doing? It’s a place where people go bad. It brings out the bad in people. But on the other hand, a great love of the aesthetics, the art, the style, calligraphy, ceramics, you know, jade, jewelry, whatever.

And these two sort of exist side by side. And she ends up representing both. So I thought, well, as I knew that she’d arrived in September 1924, which is really- from September 1924 to September 1925 is really one of the maddest years in China’s history.

(10:47) ALEC ASH: How so? Just lay some of the context here.

(10:49) PAUL FRENCH: Okay, so let’s have a look at that. Well, in September 1924, Hong Kong is seeing the worst ever strikes it’s ever seen. Guangzhou is seeing massive labor strikes. plus also political faction fighting. China has two governments: Sun Yat-sen’s republican southern government and the ever changing warlord government in the north in Beijing.

(11:09) ALEC ASH: And this is the warlord era after the Qing government fell in 1911.

(11:14) PAUL FRENCH): Yeah, and the power vacuums that existed after that. So, that’s going on. In November, Puyi is finally expelled from the Forbidden City by the warlord that takes over, the last emperor. Then when we get into the new year, it is a year of incredible rainfall, which destroys vast amounts of crops and also helps spark some of the worst epidemics that China’s seen in its history: particularly typhoid, but also cholera and tuberculosis.

Warlord battles are raging, not just in the north where most people think of the warlords, but in places like Zhejiang and Anhui around Shanghai, where it’s not so often thought of as being warlord territory. The whole place is in absolute chaos. The trains aren’t running, the coastal steamers aren’t running, the system is breaking down. There is an attempt to try and bring the two sides together, the warlords and Sun Yat-sen, but by this point, of course, it is too late; Sun Yat-sen has advanced liver cancer, and he dies in March 1925, creating another massive power vacuum just over a decade into a new republic. 

The foreign powers are sniffing around. Britain and France are looking to increase their territory. The Japanese, of course, are eyeing up the whole of northern China. And then the final sort of nail in the coffin, at least for Wallis’ time there, was the May 30th incident in Shanghai when a British police officer ordered the international police to fire into a crowd of Chinese. And this led to massive anti-foreign riots across the country, which also became quite violent and brutal as well.

So it’s a year when the China that we imagine as some sort of unitary whole, you know, that’s sort of held together as this monolithic country, is very much in question and could have just blown up into something more like Central Asia or Central Europe, with warlords who control areas the size of Belgium with private armies in one end and a Republican government in another, the foreign powers in their various treaty ports and so on.

I mean, China could have become, you know, not China. It could have become half-dozen, eight, nine different places.

(13:19) ALEC ASH: So how, so how did Wallis Simpson or then, Mrs. Spencer get plopped into the middle of this tinderbox? 

(13:26) PAUL FRENCH: Well, she’s in a not very successful marriage with a U.S. Navy officer called Win Spencer, and he gets posted to Hong Kong. But there wasn’t much for them to do because, of course, Southern China was Royal Navy territory. So the Royal Navy had 15 battleships and everything, right? So there wasn’t much for the Americans to do.

Win wasn’t very happy doing it anyway, because although he was in the Navy, He was in the Naval Air Force originally, and was one of America’s first Top Guns. But he was a drinker, and so he’d missed out on the First World War. Then he’d been sent to Hong Kong and stuck on a boat, which he wasn’t very happy about. But he wrote to Wallis and he swore to her that he was off the drink and she should come and join him. She had not in her life given Hong Kong, China or Asia one jot of thought.

You know, she had grown up in Baltimore, lived on the base at Coronado down in the Mexican border, and this was it, but she decides she’s going to do it, she’s going to try and reboot the marriage and she goes on a U.S. Navy transport out to Hong Kong and she gets there in September 1924. And that’s when she first sets foot in Asia and in Hong Kong on the edge of China, obviously.

(14:31) ALEC ASH: She called this year her “Lotus Year,” which I think was a reference to Homer’s Lotus Eaters in this dreamy, disconnected, bliss. So tell us more about, what her “Lotus Year” involved and, and how does it tell us more broadly about the life of expats in China at that time and what Shanghai and Beijing meant to them, and to what extent was she connected to all of the politics of the time, or was she in a world apart?

(14:57) PAUL FRENCH: Well, her “Lotus Year” starts off very badly, because Win, in Hong Kong, starts drinking again, and he becomes abusive. He becomes physically abusive. I mean, he beats her up. This is not a picture of Wallis Simpson that many of us have as a physically abused woman. But she was, and she made the decision to run, and to run to Shanghai because she had been told in the international settlement in Shanghai, where there was an American court, she would be able to get a divorce.

It wasn’t an unrealistic expectation. It turned out not to be true, but she thought maybe she could do it. She went to Shanghai on a coastal steamer, checked into the Palace Hotel. In Hong Kong, she had had a fairly grim time of it, not only the abuse, but just there weren’t many Americans. There weren’t any other real U.S. Navy wives, and she found, not surprisingly, the British colonial rigidities and hierarchies just virtually impossible to penetrate.

She wasn’t invited to anything. She wasn’t seen as anyone important. There was no reason to know her. So she was very much on the outside and that was dreary and lonely. When she got to Shanghai, which of course is also quite British dominated, but in a very different way. It’s a much flatter social structure there.

And the kind of roaring ‘20s of Shanghai and into the ‘30s are just getting going, and she finds that this is a place where she gets invited to salons and dinner parties and the theater and the horse racing club – of course, she was a great fan of horse racing. And she spends a few weeks there. Most of the rumors will tell you she was there for a long time, but she was only there for a few weeks. And she just literally was free for the first time, went shopping, hung out with loads of people, had cocktails, and basically felt like, well, this is not bad. But of course, Shanghai’s a very easy stepping off point into China because, you know, if you’re from Baltimore or London or Paris or whatever, of course, feels very familiar. You can get your bearings very quickly. 

From there, she was offered the opportunity to go to Tianjin. Now this was very strange because if she knew that she couldn’t get the divorce in Shanghai, there was basically two liners a week going from Shanghai to America. Why not just get on one, go back and get the divorce in America? But she didn’t. She gets a boat up to Tianjin. Which is potentially disastrous, because although liners call at Tianjin regularly as well, they only do it at certain times of the year because it’s a port that ices up. So she goes up there and she gets off the boat, and there’s people dying in the streets of typhoid, and there’s soldiers everywhere, and there’s warlord troops.

But she’s met off the boat by a man called Clarence Gauss. This is mentioned in a lot of her biographies, and no one ever asks who was Clarence Gauss. Well, Clarence Gauss was, in the 1920s, the State Department’s really number one Asia hand. He was the guy. He was consul in Jinan. He was down in Tianjin, because the Americans were trying to broker Peace talks between the Northern warlords and Sun Yat-sen.

This was falling apart because the Northern warlords were very difficult to talk to, and were too busy fighting each other. And also Sun Yat-sen was just by this point, really in the late stages of liver cancer, and not really able to pull it together. Plus the whole place is in the grip of typhoid. And then Clarence Gauss, who doesn’t know her or anything, he convinces her to go to Beijing. he secures a seat using the Marines on the train to Beijing. Now-

(18:20) ALEC ASH: And her husband’s still in Hong Kong?

(18:21) PAUL FRENCH: He’s still in Hong Kong. They’ve separated. He’s just had to accept that. That train, as you know, from Tianjin to Beijing is now 31 minutes or something, right? Then it was about six hours. It took her a day and a half because they had to go so slowly because of bandits tearing up the line and so on. It’s freezing cold, even in first class. The staff were so cold they had to cut the chairs and take the horsehair lining out and put it in their uniforms to try and keep warm.

And she gets all the way to Beijing in one piece, although constantly threatened by a bandit attack. And she gets met off the train by Colonel Louis Little. Now, Clarence Gauss had taken her to the Tianjin Aster House Hotel, which is the best hotel in Tianjin. Louis Little meets her at the train station, the old European style station that’s now the train museum by Qianmen, and he takes her to the Grand Hotel de Peking on Chang’an, which is now one part of the Beijing Fandian. But it’s the nice part, with a nice staircase and everything- built in 1915, one of the best hotels in Asia at the time. He gets her a suite. Now, it takes some pull to have got a suite at the Grand Hotel de Peking in late 1924, and that in itself, I think, is fascinating. 

But the main thing is that after she arrives in Peking in November, December 1924- she realizes that this is the China she loves. She just instantly falls in love with the city and decided that she was going to stay in Beijing for, well, the foreseeable future.

(19:54) ALEC ASH: What was she doing and how was she supporting herself?

(19:57) PAUL FRENCH: Well, this is the interesting thing. I mean, I think what we can tell is that at this time, America was really pushing efforts to try and broker peace between the warlords and Sun Yat-sen to keep China together. They were the only foreign power interested in that. Britain and France didn’t particularly care. Japan certainly didn’t care. But America did. There was a sort of a great relationship between two fledgling republics and blah, blah, blah, and they saw advantage for themselves if they could do that with the Open Door Policy and so on. 

The thing was the railway system was in a total state of collapse, the telegraph system was in a total state of collapse, the wires were being cut by bandits all the time, the track was being pulled up, the strikes in the south were ruining the coastal steamers and the other shipping going up and down- so how does America’s embassies and consulates and U.S. Naval intelligence’s offices from Hong Kong to Beijing, Tianjin, so on, talk to each other? How does it move documents around? 

Well, at that time, America didn’t really have a formal intelligence service. They were very late with that. What they used to do was if you were the wife of a naval officer, you were sort of considered cleared; you were considered good, kosher. And so I think that what happened was she was given papers to take to the next place- papers that Clarence Gauss wanted in Tianjin, papers that Naval intelligence wanted in Shanghai. papers that Louis Little wanted at the embassy in Beijing. And in return for that, they used their pool to get [her] a decent hotel for a bit, and maybe a little bit of money.

(21:28) ALEC ASH: But China saw that as essentially spying for the U. S. naval intelligence? 

(21:33) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah, I mean, China was in no position to be worrying about foreign spies at that time. I have to say it was too weak and divided and there was just too much of a mess going on elsewhere. And actually, they probably wouldn’t have been worried about that at the time because Sun Yat-sen wanted the Americans to broker peace. He had a good relationship with them. Some of the Northern warlords wanted the same thing, So it wasn’t necessarily spying. It was more for trying to facilitate a very messy and potentially explosive situation that perhaps the Americans could hold together. So that is how I think she got those kinds of hotel rooms and her introduction to those cities. 

(22:08) ALEC ASH: So it strikes me that she was tangential to these broader political goings on in China and sort of bore witness to some of them, but her personal engagement with them was quite limited. To what extent was, Wallis Simpson a part of the story of China in 1924 and ‘25, or was she just passing through and having a good time?

(22:31) PAUL FRENCH: Well, she’s a sojourner who does spend time there. In her own writings and observations, she’s quite interesting because, although she admits it was her “Lotus Year” – and it was, you know, as in Homer’s soporific sailors, marooned on an island who decide they don’t really want to go home because it’s all too nice – there definitely was an element of that within the Peking foreign colony and so on. She had a certain level of protection. 

On the other hand, she constantly notes throughout her trip what she’s seeing. She stayed on Shamian Island in Guangzhou for a while and she talks about the island being surrounded by barbed wire and lights streaming across from the ships to sort of protect any invasion of it at that time. She stayed in the Victoria Hotel, the only hotel on Shamian at that time, which, a few months before, had been half blown up by Vietnamese independence activists trying to kill the governor of French Indochina, and the banqueting room and ballroom was still a complete mess. 

When she’s in Shanghai, yes, she’s at the race club, yes, she’s seeing all of these things. But she also mentions being at the railway station and seeing trains coming in. It’s soaking wet out at this time, as I mentioned, it’s the rainiest year in Chinese history. And the trains are coming in from the Zhejiang Anhui, battlefront with dead and gangrenous soldiers. And she’s seeing this awful situation, and then she’s seeing new recruits and crates of ammunition made in Germany, made in Great Britain, whatever on the side of them, going out to the battlefront. And she makes the link, you know, who’s keeping this whole thing going for some financial profit. And when she’s in Tianjin, she’s absolutely shocked by the people dying in the road of typhoid- which is not a particularly nice way to go, typhoid.

(24:21) ALEC ASH: To what extent, Is her removal from that suffering on the streets and the political chaos emblematic of that privilege of foreigners, in China, which has endured right through to today?

(24:31) PAUL FRENCH: Oh, definitely it is, but here’s the thing I’d say about a lot of my work, which is, you know, if you read Midnight in Peking, Pamela Werner’s famous last words in 1937 were, “don’t worry about me, Peking is the safest city in the world.” And she cycled off into the darkness out of the legation quarter, and an hour later, she was dead.

In City of Devils, lots of people find sanctuary in Shanghai from European fascism, and hide out there. And what do they end up? They end up getting shot in the back, you know, in a nightclub somewhere, right? Yeah. So my general feeling is, yes, I know it’s said all the time, “Chinese cities are the safest cities in the world,” until they’re not, right? And just about every story I ever come across ends up with everyone having to pack their bags and leave.

(25:18) ALEC ASH: So how did Wallis Simpson pack her bags and get out of both China and her marriage?

(25:19) PAUL FRENCH: Well, she made that decision ultimately. She was enjoying life in Beijing. She was really into Chinese aesthetics. She was going to the markets and the lanes around Shianmen and buying jade and then selling that jade on to tourists for a markup and she became quite an expert, a real expert in picking good bits of jade and other Chinese curios and antiques.

And that was, it was a nice life. She was in the Western Hills on the weekends in temples and so on. She had a love affair with an Italian naval officer, and at that time, one of the privileges the Italians had was to control the old dragon head fort at Shanghai Guan. And she used to go out there on the weekends because her Italian naval lover had the keys, which was quite an amazing place to go apparently at that time, so it was all fantastic. Then the May 30th incident in Shanghai happened, and she got caught up a few times in mobs that were anti-foreign, and it was very scary. She got jostled and she was on a rickshaw once and it got sort of pushed about a bit and she got worried about that.

The other thing is she was about to turn 29 and she realized that this “Lotus Year” thing was okay, but at some point it has to end, and she knew that she had to go back to America to get the divorce. It didn’t look like things were going to get better in China, and there wasn’t a long term solution for her in China, really. So she decided to go home and she got the divorce. 

(26:47) ALEC ASH: Right. So as you said, this year in China was later used against her by the, British government in this “China Dossier” as a sort of character assassination drawing out this idea that foreigners such as herself, especially, young women in China [are] sort of both far removed and privileged and not connected to the nation, but also living this kind of a louche or dissolute lifestyle, like you said, this idea that China turns people bad. Do you think there’s truth to that? Or do you think it’s more a Yellow Peril prism through which people see the lives of these people in China as a reflection on their prejudices against China?

(27:23) PAUL FRENCH: It’s pure Yellow Perilism. And you’ve got to look at the time. People are going to the cinema and seeing Fu Manchu films. They’re also famously in New York and London going to see John Colton’s play The Shanghai Gesture which much later became, well some years later in 1941, became the Joseph von Sternberg film, Shanghai Gesture, which is all about a white woman going off the rails in Shanghai in a casino – opium, and so on. That play was banned in London and New York. So, there was an atmosphere around of Yellow Perilism. I think if Win Spencer had been posted to Portsmouth with the U. S. Navy, I don’t think we’d be talking about the Portsmouth Dossier and the Portsmouth group. 

(28:04) ALEC ASH: I don’t know, Portsmouth’s a pretty rough town.

(28:06) PAUL FRENCH: (chuckling) Yeah.

(28:07) ALEC ASH: So these Westerners in China, whose stories you’ve written in several books, they were also writing books about China. We’ve covered some of their writings in our own column, the China Archive – most recent one was about Emily Hahn, the New Yorker correspondent. How is that tradition of writing about China from a foreigner’s perspective different today from back then, in terms of context, but also approach, and perspective on the nation, which was maybe a bit overly romantic back in the ‘20s and ‘30s?

(28:36) PAUL FRENCH: I think there were certainly many overly romantic renderings of China at that time. I think there were also some that were overly harsh of China as well. What there was, was a lot of them, because there was a lot of interest. China was important to all of us.

If for nothing else, then many of us, particularly in Britain, would have had some sort of family contact with the country, which is not what we have now. So there was a steady churn out of books by journalists, by people who’d been there in the maritime customs or by people who’ve been there as diplomats, scholar diplomats or whatever. And that then died down again, of course, during the war because no one was there. And then there was a little resurgence after the war during the Civil War, but then of course that all closed down again. So it was only in the 1990s that we saw the sort of return of the China book, really, which also, of course, coincides, it’s totally logical, with the surge of interest in China as something to study, somewhere to visit, something that people were interested in.

(29:33) ALEC ASH: So you publish books on China as well as writing them at the Asian Arguments series at Zed. So as someone who follows the China book scene so closely, just as a last question, could you end with a few thoughts on how the China book- itself a pretty nebulous term- Has evolved more recently since the 1990s, to today? Not least because very less journalists and writers on the ground in China now, more of a politics focus in the West, indeed, you could see that as a resurgence of the Yellow Peril narrative too, and also, as I understand it, there’s less of a market for China books than they used to. 

(30:09) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah. I mean, history aside, contemporary China books are not selling anything like the numbers they did. 

(30:15) ALEC ASH: Why do you think that is? 

(30:16) Eh, well, it’s a very toxic atmosphere, particularly between the U.S. and China at the moment.

(30:22) ALEC ASH: Probably going to get more toxic. 

(30:24) PAUL FRENCH: Probably. People are not so interested in it. There’s a younger audience that really doesn’t have a fascination with China and feels quite the opposite about China at the moment. They live their lives on the internet and the idea of going to China and stepping off into this internet black hole is not one that appeals to them in any sort of way.

(30:43) ALEC ASH: Well, there’s still a lot of interest, as in everyone has an opinion on China, but it strikes me that the interest in the story has been flattened somewhat, into a more one-dimensional view on China, given the political changes.

(30:54) PAUL FRENCH: Well, I think that there’s still publishers who are pushing out shouty, bloviating sort of books. Interestingly, you know, you’ll see a lot of them here, but they don’t really get published or imported to Europe and the U.K.

(31:07) ALEC ASH: Yeah. We account the bestselling books on China. We update that list every month on the website. And the number one spot is always some sort of right wing conspiracy theory. You know, RFK was up there for months.

(31:20) PAUL FRENCH: Yeah, you know, I’m not interested in those sort of books. And I think it’s difficult, not only is there less correspondence there, who could write more nuanced and better books, but those authors may have before got quite sizable deals with quite sizable publishers, and those deals aren’t really around now. So you’re going to have to trade down to find deals, which is good for someone like me who does a small series with Bloomsbury Press, Asian Arguments, but I can snap up people who wouldn’t have been affordable to me, you know, back in the heyday, though I still have to really think about whether or not anyone will buy the book, whether or not there are enough people interested in what’s going on out there. 

So it’s kind of interesting. Now, I think that publishers are generally down on China. Agents are really down on China. You know, they think it’s a really hard sell. The correspondents have a tougher time because they’re in the newspapers- if they’re even able to be there- they’re in the newspaper less, or they’re on television less. So their name recognition is lower than it was before. It is possible that we can have a kind of a discussion among a small group of people, but the group of people talking sensibly about China is somewhat smaller significantly than it used to be. It’s getting very, very hard.

I mean, I think there are a couple of ways that we can look to overcome this, but it is a bleak time in the China book business. What I think is that we have also got ourselves too much into what I call the sort of “Anglo-Sino sphere,” right? Where lots of people in the Anglo world – the U.S., the U.K., Australia – are writing and swapping around books and reviewing each other’s books and they’re going on sale. If they’re too shouty and bloviating for the European market, they’re just going to be stuck in America. And anything that isn’t anti-China, the American publishers don’t want to buy the rights to.

So I’ve been looking for works in third languages. You know, there are lots of works out there. I’ve just bought a book recently on Hong Kong by an Italian, and it’s a very different perspective on Hong Kong. And that sort of interests me. I’m looking at a book at the moment about Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping comparisons and so on by a French author. There are other voices that we can bring in. Also, there’s no reason why we in Europe shouldn’t also be shouty and bloviating in our own way. You know, one of the missing analysis of China in books about China is the sort of socialist or liberal social Democrat position.

We don’t see many books by liberal social Democrats, you know, on contemporary China. I’m not a Tory or a Republican, so I would like to see China analyzed from more Left perspective. Now, that’s not gonna fly over here because China is now the devil incarnate.. but there are lots of people sitting around in Europe thinking: how do we engage with China? How do we build a relationship with them? What are we going to do? You know, similarly, that’s the thinking in the Labor government in Britain at the moment. It still remains so in Macron’s France, whoever it is at the moment’s Germany, and so I think there’s always been this missing analysis that, you know, because we don’t have a tradition of such politically partisan books, but I’d like to find writers that can do that as well. 

(34:35) ALEC ASH: And of course, we need to tap more into Chinese voices and, it’s just a fraction of books, literature. and nonfiction translated from Chinese and so many interesting titles published in the Chinese language, which we like to review at China Books Review, but just don’t get much air time.

(34:50) That’s a tricky one. I see lots of things I’d really like to do and translate, but there are often chain of ownership issues which make things quite difficult. We can’t always quite establish who owns the copyright. You know, Chinese authors for various reasons often go through lawyers and companies and associations and things, and that makes life a bit tricky. A lot of the Chinese fiction that’s being published now, which is great, is being done by very small independent houses who are doing a fantastic job, but hard for them to get the book out there above the kind of cacophony of everything else that’s being published at the moment. And so, you know, unless they can get, the world of applying for grants and applying for funding from elsewhere for translations and so on, and that’s a very time consuming, occupation. and often sales can be quite minuscule.

(35:38) ALEC ASH: It’s a real shame and it’s the sort of paradox, as I see it, of China writing, now that China is a more important story than ever and everyone has an opinion about it. But oddly, there’s less writing being published about it than there was 10 or 20 years ago.

Thank you so much for your time, Paul, today. 

(35:58) PAUL FRENCH: Thank you.

(35:59) ALEC ASH: Her Lotus Year by Paul French is out now from St. Martin’s Press. It’s a terrific read, everyone should go buy it. Thanks for coming on the pod.

(36:07) PAUL FRENCH: Pleasure.

(36:08) ALEC ASH: This has been an episode of the China Books podcast. Do subscribe and share wherever you listen to your podcasts. China Books Review is a project of Asia Society’s Center on U. S. China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes thewirechina.com. I’m Alec Ash, wishing you absorbing reads this coming month. See you next time. ∎

A Q&A with Paul French is also available at our sister site The Wire China.