ADAM WILLIAMS knows too much about China to attempt to write about the nation today.
As the chief representative for Jardine Matheson on the mainland, he has a rare view of the transformation of the country his British family have called home since the 1890s. But Williams, 50, found it easier to write a novel about the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 19th century.
'China is a very dynamic, changing place,' he says. 'The China that you think you have come to grips with may not be the same five years on.
'So I wrote about a distant China, a China of a hundred years ago, which has parallels to the present.
'In both times you've got old orthodoxies being challenged by new western ideas. In the 1890s it was the railway, the missionaries and the modern ways of medicine, this great western web of capitalism coming in and really shaking the old feudal ways. Obviously there were great contradictions. Chinese embraced the new ideas and reacted against them. The Boxer Rebellion came out of that,' he says.
'If you look at the 1990s you had another orthodoxy - communism and Marxism - being shaken again by corporate America. It was the idea of getting rich and glorious in the American way, by opening up stock markets and capital markets and getting into real estate, setting up golf clubs and the whole panoply of the west.