Veteran BBC correspondent John Humphrys is visiting China and contributing daily reports starting tomorrow. His China diary can be read here, and a slideshow of images from his trip is here. From the introduction to his report:
I thought I’d seen it all.
So when Ceri Thomas, my editor at Today, suggested I should spend a couple of weeks in China reporting on how the country has changed I was, to say the least, sceptical.
…I was right when I suggested that you cannot spend a couple of weeks here and even begin to answer the most basic questions: where is this country heading and what are its ambitions?
But that’s not saying much. I’ve been talking to people who have lived here for years, not weeks, and they can’t answer them either.
Where I was spectacularly wrong is that we have not spent our time here being frustrated. Exactly the opposite.