Kerry Brown

War & Peace

The City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China

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Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 370pp £22 order from our bookshop

China: A History

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HarperPress 566pp £25 order from our bookshop

This month, Beijing will be a global star. For three weeks during the Olympics, billions of TV viewers, and millions of visitors, will see a city remade at the cost of £20 billion. The capital will be the face of China, inspiring the complex mixture of apprehension and admiration that the whole country now seems to provoke in much of the rest of the world.

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