A Tale of Two Chinas: A Fifteen-Year Odyssey Through China's Cultural Heartlands

by Hugh Battye

"Du wan juan shu, xing wan li lu"
"Read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand miles"
- Traditional Chinese saying

A Tale of Two Chinas is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the People’s Republic in the early-mid twenty-first century. Based on Hugh Battye’s own compelling fifteen-year China journey, the book takes the reader on a topical odyssey, covering a number of the major economic, political and cultural themes of the later Reform years, as well as of Xi Jinping’s current New Era. Through his vividly contrasting, yet complementary, descriptions of the “two Chinas” he experienced – the sophisticated society of the Chinese urban mainstream on the one hand, and the vibrant Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist minority cultures on the other – the author provides a fresh, holistic and accessible account of a country that, despite its superpower status, still remains largely opaque to many in the international community.

384 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 17, 2026

About the author

A graduate from the London School of Economics, Hugh Battye spent fifteen years living in mainland China, where he studied Mandarin and taught English, before embarking on a master’s and then a doctorate degree in ethnology at Lanzhou University, Gansu Province. He attained his PhD in the summer of 2020, and continues to write and speak on China’s minorities.

Reviews

[Fiza Pathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are books about China, and then there are books that come from it; the latter, in my own modest reading life of 37 years, are far rarer than the former, and Hugh Battye’s ‘A Tale of Two Chinas’ belongs unambiguously to the second category. That fact alone, were there nothing else to commend it, would be sufficient reason for me to give it 5 unhesitating stars. There is, however, a great deal else to commend it, and the present review is my small attempt to do it justice.

Pardon that I took a really long time to read this book, but since I teach senior 11th and 12th grade students Global Politics and Chinese History at the IBDP level among other subjects (I teach 25 subjects at the IBDP and AS & A Level), I found myself many times during the reading of the book by Battye to be mulling over the various perspectives related to the narratives contained therein. I was often caught leaving my fourth cup of South-Indian brewed milky coffee with jaggery cold on my side table while reading and analysing this non-fiction book on my tablet.

I came to the book partly out of teacherly necessity in any case. As an IBDP Global Politics teacher working through the units on power, sovereignty, legitimacy, and human rights, I find that the People’s Republic of China is unavoidable, and yet it is also perhaps the single most difficult contemporary state to teach about with any genuine sense of fairness. The literature divides almost violently between two camps - on one hand, breathless triumphalist accounts of ‘China’s rise’ as it were frequently penned by businesspeople and futurologists for whom the country is essentially a market with characteristics; on the other, equally breathless human-rights polemics that, however well-founded their concerns may be, are too often written from a great altitude, treating the lived texture of 1.4 billion lives as a footnote to a thesis.

Battye’s book does neither (Thanks be to God Alleluia!), and for that reason alone it deserves a place on every Global Politics teacher’s shelf, alongside Susan Shirk, Rana Mitter, and Frank Pieke – some of my favourite non-fiction authors regarding the topic of China.

Battye spent fifteen years in mainland China, beginning in Tianjin in 2005 (I graduated from high school that year!) as a Mandarin language student, and culminating in 2020, when the early Wuhan outbreak and a nervous Lanzhou University Party Secretary together pushed him on to a London-bound aircraft just before the borders closed. In between, he learned the language properly, taught English in Lanzhou, and undertook a master’s and doctorate in ethnology at a Chinese university, conducting fieldwork in Mandarin among Hui, Bonan, Salar, Dongxiang and Tibetan Buddhist communities in the Gansu–Qinghai borderlands. The book’s structure mirrors the breadth of that immersion.

Part One, ‘Mainstream Urban China’ moves from ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ through chapters on language, history, marriage customs, food, sport, religion, and the slowly tightening political weather of the Xi Jinping years. Part Two, ‘Minority Rural China’ (my favorite in any book on History or Geopolitics or Global Perspectives or Geography et al!) takes us into Xunhua, Jishishan, Liuji, and Rebgong, where the call to prayer wakes the village before the school loudspeakers, and where the ‘Sixth Month Festival’, the Wutu tiger dance, and the Losar New Year unfold under the watchful, paradoxical eye of an officially atheist Communist Party that has nonetheless become, in Rebgong at least, a master patron of Tibetan thangka painting. Nice!

Battye himself is too modest (he is a sweet chap, read the book to see so!) to claim that ‘two Chinas’ exhaust the country; he disclaims as much in his prologue, observing wryly that hundreds of millions of Han still live in the countryside, and that no two-part division can do justice to the variegation of 1.4 billion lives. What he does claim is that these are the two Chinas he experienced, and that in straddling the major fault lines of Han and minority, urban and rural, his account paints ‘a fairly holistic picture of life in the early 21st century Chinese mainland, at least from the perspective of this one particular European laowai.’ It is a generous, properly humble framing, and it sets the tone for the whole book.

Why This Book Earns Its 5 Stars from me you say?

The first virtue of ‘A Tale of Two Chinas’ is its sheer linguistic and cultural depth of access. Battye is one of those increasingly rare Western Sinologists who works fluently in Mandarin and reads classical Chinese well enough to handle a Confucian aphorism, a Tang chengyu, and a contemporary Party slogan within the space of a single page, with all three properly transliterated in pinyin and rendered in the original characters. His treatment of the phrase -‘dangjuzhe mi, pangguanzhe qing’ or ‘the spectators see the game better than the players’ is gently apologetic for his own outsider status, but it also encodes an implicit ethnographic ethic - the book wants to see clearly without claiming to belong. Something my IBDP and AS & A Level students need to learn big time in their exam papers and projects!

The second virtue is the prose itself. Battye writes in a register I can only describe as ‘literate Anglican country-house’ which means - relaxed, comic, faintly self-deprecating, and capable of moving without strain from a stolen bicycle in Tianjin to a Confucian passage in ‘The Great Learning’, or from a long evening of huoguo and Jian Quan’s suspicious medicinal liquor to a careful exposition of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ and the paradoxical emergence of the ‘Hundred Years of Humiliation’ discourse in the early 1990s. All ‘intellectually yum worthy for my IBDP kids’. He has the late Patrick Leigh Fermor’s gift for easy erudition; the chapter on ‘One Hundred Years’ is, in particular, one of the finest short summaries of how a national grievance becomes a state instrument that I have encountered in any genre. Fantastic! Totally never seen this before in any non-fiction book about and on China that I’ve read since the TYBA (third year of my BA degree as a double major in History and Sociology).

The third virtue is texture. Few foreign accounts of contemporary China give us such a deep sense of what it is to be hosted by ordinary mainlanders — to be enrolled, half-protesting (LOL worthy those portions!), as the best man at a Christian-Chinese wedding in Gansu, drafted on the spot to play the piano at the naodongfang afterwards; to drink endless rounds of baijiu on a kang in a Tu Buddhist siheyuan in Rebgong on Christmas night; to sit through a Public Security officer’s tea-and-dumplings inspection with the dawning realisation that one will probably not, after all, be moving in. All totally engrossing and yet bookishly delicious parts of the book which made my many coffee breaks in between tuitions classes great periods of time.

The named friendships - Wang Jing and Jian Quan in Tianjin, Ayyub and Nainai and Sophia in Liuji, the thangka painters Sangjie and Kuantaijia in Rebgong, they all give the book its moral weight. These are not subjects observed from a discreet anthropological distance, mind you, but real people who appear and reappear across hundreds of pages, and whose welfare we genuinely come to care about. By the time the 2023 Jishishan earthquake strikes in the epilogue and topples Battye’s old siheyuan in Liuji, one feels, with him, an almost physical anxiety to know what has happened to Sophia and her sons.

A fourth virtue (you can make out by this point that I am really enjoying this! Now these are the kind of books I love to read!), and one I cannot resist particularly applauding given my own abiding interest in comparative theology, is Battye’s treatment of religion. Again ‘intellectually yum-yum worthy’ for my IBDP students or kids and my TOK (Theory of Knowledge) kiddies from the IBDP yet again globally! He writes with manifest respect about Chinese folk religion, Taoism, Confucian piety, Mahayana Buddhism, Hui Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, and the various Sufi menhuan of the central northwest, and he draws subtle, instructive distinctions between them - including the lovely observation that in the Gansu–Qinghai context, ‘Hui’ still means ‘Muslim’ at village level, even when the official ethnic paradigm has rebranded the term as one specific minority among nine. The acknowledgements close with three gentle Latin-Mandarin words — Rongyao gui yu Shangdi, Soli Deo Gloria — by which the careful reader will know that this is a book written by a man of Christian formation, although that conviction is held with extraordinary discretion throughout. The faith is the lens; it never becomes the subject. AS & A Level Theology students of mine – take note!

A fifth virtue, finally, is the book’s most original conceptual contribution - the notion of the ‘minority minorities’ those small communities (the Bonan in Jishishan; the Rebgong Tu) who are subject to a ‘double assimilation’ - pulled outwardly toward Sinicization and inwardly toward ‘Huiification’ or ‘Tibetanisation’ by a more dominant neighbouring minority. This formulation, which Battye borrows and extends from a phrase used of the Soviet Union, is a small gift to the comparative study of indigeneity, and one that I expect to find genuinely useful in my own teaching. Eruditely Yum-Yum!

But now – ‘A Tale of Two Chinas’ in the IBDP Global Politics Classroom!

It is here, however, that I must put on my teacher’s hat and say something that the book itself, in its admirable modesty, does not quite say loudly enough. Any text on contemporary China taught in the IBDP Global Politics classroom must be read alongside other voices, because the discipline rightly demands that students be able to engage with a question from multiple, often incompatible, perspectives. Battye’s book is one perspective - a marvellously rich, ground-level, ethnographic one, but it is not the only one, and the responsible teacher will set it in conversation with at least the following.

First, the liberal-democratic and human-rights perspective, which begins with the late Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08, and continues through the Xinjiang scholarship of Adrian Zenz, Darren Byler, and the Uyghur Tribunal, the Hong Kong reportage of Louisa Lim, the Tibet work of Robert Barnett and Tsering Shakya, and the analyses produced by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the OHCHR. Battye is honest about the existence of the Xinjiang internment camps; he places a small, careful footnote in his ‘Hanzu or Huizu?’ chapter acknowledging that many of his observations predate the public emergence of detailed information about them. But that footnote is, I think, almost too gentle for what it carries. A teacher introducing students to ‘A Tale of Two Chinas’ should make sure that students also read at least one substantive account of mass arbitrary detention, the Strike Hard campaigns, and the systematic dismantling of the Uyghur religious and linguistic ecosystem. Without that counterweight, Battye’s gentle Han-Hui harmony in Liuji could be misread as the whole picture.

Second, the realist international-relations perspective, associated with John Mearsheimer, Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ (IBDP History students remember guys!?) and the recent work of Aaron Friedberg and Elizabeth Economy. From this vantage, the most consequential fact about Battye’s narrative is not the texture of village life in Rebgong but the steady tightening of Xi Jinping’s grip on the world stage - the Belt and Road Initiative, the militarisation of the South China Sea, the Air Defence Identification Zone incursions over Taiwan, and the rare-earth processing chokehold of which Battye himself reminds us in his epilogue. Battye gives Taiwan only a brief two-paragraph treatment; the realist would reasonably want considerably more.

Third, the civilisational-state perspective, argued most forcefully by Martin Jacques in ‘When China Rules the World’, and developed in different registers by Kishore Mahbubani, Wang Hui, and the late Lucian Pye. On this view, China is fundamentally not a Westphalian nation-state at all but a continuous civilisational order whose contemporary political form is merely the latest dynasty, and whose people are therefore unlikely to converge on Western liberal norms regardless of how prosperous they become. Battye is nearly sympathetic to this view in places I have noted with my blue highlighter on my tablet, like his treatment of tianxia, of the Confucian concentric realm of ‘individual propriety, familial propriety, regional propriety, universal propriety,’ and of the Qing emperor Qianlong’s 1793 dismissal of George III’s ambassador, all gesture in this direction - but he never quite endorses it. A teacher should make the gesture explicit and let students argue with it.

Fourth, the postcolonial and Global South perspective, associated with figures such as Vijay Prashad, Pankaj Mishra, and the more sympathetic strands of Indian, African, and Latin American commentary on Chinese development. From this vantage, the ‘Hundred Years of Humiliation’ is not merely a manufactured discourse for domestic legitimation but a genuinely held memory of opium, gunboats, and unequal treaties, and the BRI is read more sympathetically than in most Western accounts. Battye gives this perspective a respectful hearing in his ‘One Hundred Years’ chapter, but it is worth pairing his treatment with at least one full-length text from a Global South author, lest students assume that Western liberal worry is the only morally serious response to a rising China. Etc, etc – etc.

Battye closes his epilogue with a Dickensian flourish that I cannot resist quoting, because it captures the book’s spirit so exactly – ‘It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.’ That is not equivocation; it is the considered moral verdict of a man who has watched extreme poverty all but eradicated in the villages of Gansu and has watched journalists, lawyers, and house-church pastors imprisoned in the same decade. To hold both halves of that sentence in a single mind is to do what every honest student of contemporary China must learn to do, and what too few writers in either of the breathless camps I described at the outset are willing to do. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, what the Catholic and the Confucian intellectual traditions have been training their adherents to do for several thousand years. Brillaint – expansive – rich -erudite and highly worth the read. This book is a winner in every way possible!

I shall be recommending ‘A Tale of Two Chinas’ to my IBDP Global Politics and History students, to my friends and MTS colleagues in comparative theology, to my fellow educators on the PGCITE circuit, and to the general reader who simply wants to understand what it has actually been like to live in the Middle Kingdom during the long, ambiguous arc that runs from the Tianjin of ‘nine million bicycles’ to the Jishishan of post-earthquake reconstruction. Hugh Battye has given us a humane, erudite, scrupulously honest, and at times genuinely funny book (LOL and LMAO worthy indeed!), and he has given it to us in prose that, in its quiet British way, will outlast a great deal of louder writing on the same subject. Definitely and 100% on that one!

My 5 stars, given gladly, with my warmest recommendation. Soli Deo Gloria.

Pardon if there are any spelling errors of major figures in this 5 star book review or any other careless typos, my eye doctor has put a lot of steroids in my left eye and it is so big right now and full of anti-biotics that I cannot really focus my eyes correctly on anything and everything. My left eye is thereby bigger and more uncomfortably wide open than my otherwise normal right eye – that I am looking a lot like the old man with the huge eagle eye in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

I hope my cat Lopez (16 years old and going stronger than me! That is because she is convinced since birth that she is a corgi or a mountain goat and not a cat!) does not now think of doing me in for the same. She has been staring at me suspiciously and in a maniacal manner since yesterday. I can almost hear her saying – ‘True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am’ – LOL!

I hope to convince Battye for an interview on his book on my website teaching portfolio for PGCITE fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com – hope he gives me a ‘yes’ for the same. Would love to discuss his book in depth on camera.

[Andrew Roderick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having myself been teaching in China through the Reform and Opening-up period, I was fascinated with how many of Hugh Battye's experiences as a foreigner in China rang true with my own - and so vividly described! I was impressed with how in Part 1 he manages to cover so many aspects of Chinese culture, from morning exercises and sports days to unlucky numbers and undifferentiated re-cycling bins and communicates these with insight and humour. His active engagement in the society, whether through sport, music or voluntary service along with his facility with the language and clever linking to Chinese idioms enliven the observations and deepen the insights. I was also interested in how things have changed during the New Era. Altogether this is a very readable overview of key themes in contemporary Chinese culture and how they impinge on the life of a foreigner in China.

The second section, on the Bonan minorities in the rural north west opened up an unfamiliar area of Chinese life and I learned a lot about the range of varieties of Islam and Buddhism and how they linked with ethnicity, language, history and geography in the areas where Hugh Battye lived. The vivid descriptions of rituals, ceremonies, festivals and everyday farming and family life give unique insights which have probably been accessed by few other Westerners or even many Chinese.

The whole book not only encourages a warm empathy with the author but also with the range of Chinese people described and takes one far beyond a superficial judgement of the state and future prospects of the Chinese nation.

There are some things I would have liked to see added. Although I think the strength of the first part is in the interface between the foreigner and Chinese culture, as it does also stray into generalisations about the urban Han majority, it needs to be balanced with more pointers towards some of the potential problems of modern China - e.g. the economic and psychological pressures of a competitive materialistic culture. Also, given the sensitivity to variety in the analysis of the Bonan, how much more should there be an indication of variation across the vast Han population - working conditions, unemployment, health worries, age and gender differences, religious perspectives, political privileges, etc.

Part 2, I think could move more quickly from the foreigner's personal experience perspective to a more thorough and systematic ethnographic study. Religious activities are vividly described, but there could be more detail on how are everyday thinking and relationships are affected by their beliefs. I would like to hear more of the people's own voices. However, this is a a most enjoyable and enlightening book that I would recommend to anyone interested in China.

[Kuu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The first part was, quite frankly. boring, because it really didn't include anything new about China, and the only new things I learned were about the author himself. I genuinely thought this would be a net-zero book, and was close to DNF'ing it, because I don't need the author to tell me the same stuff I've already heard a bazillion times, and do so with an air of exoticism around the whole Being In China thing that I frankly find obnoxious, as I did several of his writing choices, such as the use of random Chinese terms when this really isn't necessary because a nearly identical concept exists in English and you don't need to hit me with a sentence that includes three italicised terms just for the fun of it.

So I really wasn't feeling too gracious. But I decided to skim the next few chapters just in case, because we really hadn't gotten to the "second" China yet, we were, again, still just regurgitating the same information that anyone with a slight interest in China already knows. And it was luck that I was very close to where part 2 starts, because then I decided that I wouldn't DNF it after all.

The second part was a lot more interesting, though I still don't think the claim of "two Chinas" is entirely justified just from reading this book (though I do think it is justified based on the actual circumstances. I just don't think the author conveyed it very well). The author gave interesting insights into the lives of Muslim ethnic minority groups on the border of Tibet, and THIS is the kind of stuff I'm looking for in a book. Finally some new information.

I continued to find the author and his self-framing somewhat obnoxious, which is a pity in a largely biographical kind of work, but the second part of the book DID include a lot of very interesting information about these ethnic groups and also the Tibetans, so that saved the book for me and I did end up finishing the entire thing, despite my original worries.

It's still not GREAT, but it's decent.

[East West Notes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugh Battye’s A Tale of Two Chinas is primarily a personal memoir of his years living, working, and studying in China. Evolving around this story is a general overview of the cultural and historical forces that shaped contemporary political, economic, and social issues. Through this is the additional presentation of minority cultures and rural life, and how these peoples have experienced China’s rapid changes. Much of these insights are based on the author’s postgraduate fieldwork in Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities in the central northwest. The book contains many themes but advances few arguments. Rather it is a collection of experiences, reflections and observations about how things are and have been. Some might find a lack of a firm argument to be a bit wandering, but to be honest my China book shelf is packed with China-related arguments, case studies and warnings, and it was rather refreshing to read something more descriptive than prescriptive.

Each chapter provides a historical overview, which covers a range of topics such as conflicts between Imperial China and the Western Nations, political developments and major key players, the one-child policy, and economic development. Although the author does not shy away from unpleasant points in history, it is the sort of explanations which would suit a dinner party. He doesn’t obscure the harsher realities, yet readers seeking detailed accounts of, for example, the implementation of the one-child policy, will need to look elsewhere. The section on air pollution counter measures felt like rare good news, and I hope this is an area where perhaps China could inspire other nations to take improving their air quality seriously. The discussions do occasionally ramble, but the chapters are short and sweet and generally revolve around a certain theme. It’s sort of like listening to a friend reminiscence and then get side tracked with a historical explanation to provide context and orientation.

The later chapters on minority cultures adopt a more academic tone, detailing subsistence practices, daily hardships, and local religious and cultural customs. The discussion of “the major fault lines of Chinese society the Han and the minorities, the urban and the rural” is well presented. Battye continues to interlace these analyses with his own amusements and misadventures, which makes the transitions between memoir and scholarship less jarring. He recalls, for instance, how “And, of course, with copious amounts of green tea , accompanied , on occasion, with a humungous lump of rock sugar to teach you the true meaning of the expression ‘bittersweet’. The art of sitting cross-legged on the kang for long periods during mealtimes took me a while to get used to, as, too, did the rules around bread consumption.” The book is at its strongest when probing the complexities of identity. He describes confusion over who counts as a minority, how sub-minorities exist within Tibetan culture, and how individuals may present different identities depending on context or bureaucratic categorisation. This encourages him to briefly reflect on his own identity and beliefs. Ethnicity and religion blur at the edges, and language barriers and cultural assumptions further complicate the picture.

The section on ethnic tourism is fantastic, particularly for readers who have encountered only the social media version of the phenomenon. I was keen to read what someone with a PhD in minority cultures of China had to say about the benefits and dangers of packaging minority culture up for the consumption of tourists. This includes “song and dance troupes, architectural replicas, even whole ‘ethnic villages’,” all designed for the tourist gaze. As he notes, communities often have little choice but to participate, though this doesn’t mean they are totally without benefit or agency. Many individuals have built careers as artists, entrepreneurs, or officials thanks to an increasing flow of tourists. Tourist money is often greatly desired in these rural areas. Yet the combined pressures of modernisation and Party ideology have reshaped both traditions and the people who perform them. Battye acknowledges that conditions have grown more restrictive for many minority groups in recent years and the experience of one group doesn’t necessarily mean other groups have similarly benefited.

The author’s years in China are similar to my own, so many of his experiences, troubles and moments of culture shock were very familiar. He mentioned many major China events of the 2000s, so this made for nostalgic reading. If you’re a long time China watcher who is familiar with most of the general historical information, I think these recollections will keep you interested. During the early 2000s, many Westerners in China cycled through English teaching, entrepreneurial ventures, modelling, or enrolment at local universities whenever visas or finances demanded it. I read with amusement that the author “… having been living in a state of denial for far too long, I resorted to the job that, in all fairness, I was probably the most suited to anyway: teaching English.”

Although Battye keeps his personal anecdotes lightly sprinkled through this book, I wish he had lingered more on how it was to live and study there. He wrote about his identity as a Christian who found more common ground with local Muslims than with many Han Chinese, yet the text offers little about his own tastes and interests. The PhD application process, his program, his supervisors, and the institutions themselves are mainly absent. Flat hunting adventures are a reoccurring event in this book, which comes with all manner of negotiations, misunderstandings and disappointments. I especially enjoyed the moment when he was looking for a flat and found that his prospective host family was of “the Public Security Bureau specifically responsible for overseeing the foreigners of the city, and while that revelation did manage to explain the quality of his English, for me the more important result was that living in that house suddenly didn’t make for the most relaxing of prospects.”

Battye is open about the art of seeking permission from authorities, or rather, seeking forgiveness after. He writes, “The logic followed that trying to get official permission for something – even if it was quite legal and straight-forward – would probably cause the powers that be to worry that something underhand was going on, and to thereby refuse the request; while, conversely, in the event that an apology for over-stepping the boundary was required, nothing much more would likely be said, as the relevant authorities would not want to draw undue attention to any problems occurring under their watch…. For the police it was mainly pragmatic: having a foreigner in the area was serious ‘mafan’, a common term which also regularly found its way into foreigners’ English conversations, and was used to sum up any situation that was less than convenient. If anything went wrong, they did not want to be the ones to take the blame. As a Westerner, I demanded a simple answer as to whether they would give me a stamp or not, and, if not, a logical reason why. From the Chinese perspective, however, the main aim would be to avoid a conflict.” His attempts to secure permissions to live and research in these areas are both exasperating and amusing. I was reminded of bringing nearly transparent sheets of delicate paper and booklets full of stamps to my local Chinese police station and hoping for the best. Against the popular image of corrupt, petty, obstructive officials, he notes that many officers are in fact warm, pragmatic, and willing to warn foreigners of potential issues before the fact. Most people are just trying move along with minimal risk to their own careers and avoid anything too horribly ‘mafan.’

Unlike many other travel memoirs, Battye’s personal life is largely absent. I wish this book had given more space to the tension between being a member of these communities, while maintaining distance. This is touched on when he chooses new, local names to go by, but how did that feel? These sections had the strongest impact when the author reflected on his own identity and religion, and what similarities it shared with these groups. Given that the book did discuss individuals, and not the group generally, I wondered at how it was to remain objective as a researcher while forming these emotional connections. Additionally, since so little was written about the author’s own background and personality, aside from a very slim introduction at the start of the book, I wondered if he had to overcome any biases or preconceptions. Were these reflections incorporated into his academic methodology, or did he consider such introspection too personal for inclusion? Did he experience isolation and loneliness while conducting this research in such remote areas, using languages / dialects that weren’t as strong as his skills in Standard Mandarin? Finally, he mentioned assisting people when they needed medical help or were experiencing legal troubles. What is the ethics of this? I would’ve loved it if the author had been encouraged to outline the personal risks and struggles of conducting this research. Not to sensationalise the experience, but rather so much seems to have been left unsaid, and a closer examination author’s own position within the community would have strengthened an already captivating book.

This book felt guarded, but true. For readers seeking an accessible overview of modern Chinese history, interwoven with glimpses of life in agricultural regions, it offers a worthwhile introduction. If you lived in China in the early 2000s to 2010s, you will recognise the author’s sincerity. The descriptions of a “land juxtaposed between Beijing, Mecca and Lhasa” with humility, admiration and grace. Travel writing can often inadvertently come off as overly romantic or whinging, but Battye’s work here is full of patience, understanding and concern. He notes that living and working in China taught him patience, and how to wait, and those lessons seems visible in his writing, which elevates this travel memoir to something which encourages understanding across a number of cultures. A Tale of Two Chinas is a sensitive engagement with the many Chinas that coexist within the nation’s borders.

This book was provided by Hugh Battye for review.

[Megan Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the author and netgalley for the ARC!

This is a little dry and pretty slow paced but, at the same time, pretty interesting! It focused on religion more than I would be interested in (which makes sense considering his studies) but I liked learning about Chinese life and culture and how everything works!

If you’re looking for a travel book, I wouldn’t pick this up, but if you want to learn about life in china with occasional travel bits, it’s perfect!

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

It's a little difficult to review this book, because I'm not really sure what the book was about. It is essentially a collection of anecdotes from the author's time living in China, but these short snippets don't build towards any over-arching narrative. There's no message or point the author is trying to make and I didn't feel like I learned too much about China. As a result the book feels like unfocused ramblings that don't really go anywhere.

There are some interesting details about China, but unfortunately I felt like these only scratched the surface and I would have liked a more in-depth discussion. The author spent time living and studying minority groups but I got disappointingly little insight into what their lives are like. Some parts of the book are written in a travelogue style, but these stories weren't really interesting.

Overall, I found the book to be a bit dull. There were a few interesting tidbits, but not enough to make reading the book worthwhile.

[Jeni · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "A Tale of Two Chinas", Battye shares his experiences in both urban and rural China as he studies in China. It read as a journal of his day to day life in each area, sharing how varied life experiences are in such a large and populous country. One aspect that was especially interesting was Battye's focus on the lives of minority groups in China. He focuses on how the minority cultures are not only being assimilated into the larger Han culture, but also how many smaller minorities are being assimilated into the largest minority group in their realm - such as Muslim groups being assimilated in Hui culture and multiple Tibetan groups' traditions being blended together until they slowly become one group. I wouldn't describe this as a deep dive into assimilation or even into living in China as a foreigner. Rather, it is more a diary or journal like peek into day to day life.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Hugh Battye for providing me this ebook in exchange for an honest review. I found this novel as a journal of Battye’s travels while studying and working in China. I enjoyed the author’s personal experiences and historical connections for all the areas whether urban or rural that he called home. The most thought provoking parts of his book was the discussions and descriptions of the minority muslim communities. I had no idea there were around 20 million muslims living in China or that in order to visit/study religion you needed special permission. The information regarding the everyday life and celebrations of the muslim community for intriguing. I found this book to be a great way to begin my journey into learning more about China.

[Jeanette Durkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book; I would actually call it a journal. It's about the author, Hugh Battye and his 15 years studying and living in China. I did feel like I was his traveling buddy because he uses a lot of imagery. He also wrote a lot of facts about the different people and religions, some of which I never knew about.

I really enjoyed the maps, the glossary and the various Chinese sayings!!

I won a complimentary copy of the book from LibraryThing. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Marina Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this as an anthropologist, also shows the fast pace of change in both urban and rural China.