INSIDE CHINA: Multilayered Look at the Land, People and History of China and Its Emergence on the World Stage Published by National Geographic

Business Wire, Oct 10, 2007

WASHINGTON -- China's potential for breathtaking success and unmitigated disaster is transfixing. In a new book, an unprecedented visual tour de force, National Geographic chronicles China's astonishing ascent through some of the most eye-opening, evocative and extraordinary pictures ever recorded of the enigmatic nation, past and present. INSIDE CHINA (National Geographic Books; Oct. 16, 2007; $50; 271 pages) unveils a portrait unseen by all but the most perceptive observers and all the more mesmerizing for its unusual nuance.

For more than a century, many great photographers have turned their eyes on the ever changing China, and the 193 images collected here are superlative. INSIDE CHINA reveals fascinating archival images rarely made public: Photographic luminaries Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud portray the old order and the ascendancy of Chairman Mao; Chinese news photographer Li Zhensheng gives new insight into the harsh Cultural Revolution. Today's China is captured by such contemporary photographers as Mark Leong, Sebastiao Salgado, Edward Burtynsky, Paolo Pellegrin, Samuel Bollendorff and Olivier Pin Fat. With privileged access, they reveal the nation on the move in all its complexity. Alongside traditional religion and rural life, they depict fashionable youth and glamour, the development of mega-industry, and new materialism.

In INSIDE CHINA, intimate family images of births, dance lessons, weddings, funerals and life around the supper table are juxtaposed with electric scenes of modernization -- fashion shows, an "X games" demonstration in a Shanghai park, one of the country's best-known contemporary artists at work in his loft studio in Beijing, and a Chinese Michael Jackson look-alike performing in Tiananmen Square.

The introduction to the book is written by Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, while five renowned experts on China -- Joseph Fewsmith, James C.Y. Watt, James McGregor, Elizabeth Economy and Minxin Pei -- narrate and enrich the story with informative, thought-provoking essays on the unexpectedness of China's landscape, its history, tradition, modernization and its monumental workforce.

In his introduction, Spence writes that the book "jolts us out of our complacency, reveals the gaps in our understanding, challenges cliches, pushes us to disentangle the truly elegant from the crass, the surface texture from the deeper message."

INSIDE CHINA, offering an extraordinary, insider's look into this intriguing nation, is an integral part of the National Geographic Society's initiative on China. The book is one of several on China that National Geographic is publishing this fall, including "Dragon Rising: An Inside Look at China Today," by Jasper Becker, "National Geographic Atlas of China," and "National Geographic Traveler: Shanghai."

SPOKESPERSONS:

Elizabeth Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Minxin Pei, senior associate and the director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.