Ep. 23: Mark Kitto on Shanghai in the 2000s

The author and former media mogul explains why he chose fiction as the best way to capture Shanghai’s go-go years in his new novel.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Transcript

Shanghai, with its cosmopolitanism and freewheeling spirit, is a siren that has lured foreigners seeking their fortune or just an adventure for over a century. While Shanghai over the 1920s gets a lot of play, the go-go years of the 1990s and early 2000s feature less in fiction about China, but that era was even more formative for the city as it is today, and is ripe with material for satire and romance. That period is the setting for China Running Dog, a new novel by our guest this month, the writer and actor, Mark Kitto.

Mark lived in China from 1996 to 2013, much of it in Shanghai where he founded the That's City magazine series before it was taken over by the government in 2004. He’s the author of That's China, which tells that tale and China Cuckoo, about his rural retreat following it. His novel, which takes the reader back to the millennium era in Shanghai, follows the travails of blue blooded Brit Felix Fawcett-Smith, a new arrival in Shanghai who gets caught up in scandal in the belly of the beast. The book is by turns a peon to and an indictment of expat life of that period. And we're pleased to be joined by Mark Kitto on the podcast to talk us through it all.

Alec Ash: So Mark, thank you for coming on the pod. 

Mark Kitto: Great to be here, Alec.

Thank you having me. Before we get into your new novel, let's lay a little groundwork here. Can you tell us why you were in Shanghai yourself in 1998? What brought you there? And paint us a picture of the city and the buzz around it back then. 

Sure. Well, before we, before I say anything, can I just pull you up on terminology and correct, if I may, the use of the word expat and replace it with international community.

So tell us why you don't like the word expat.

I don't like the word expat because it's got four letters. I went, the reason I, well, what I went to Shanghai to do and did was to build this magazine business, English language for the, very much the international community. They were not for expats. And you know, Shanghai is and was becoming them in the, in the late nineties, a proper international city, and our readership, eventually it was over half of them were local Shanghainese. Also the magazines, when we launched them, the whole point of them was, we are not writing for expats. We're not here to help you get through this troublesome time that you've – to face for the next few years on your posting to China.

We were all about, we are here to help you get the best out of it, to make the most of it, to enjoy it, to get involved. And hence, you know, international and community are the words we much preferred to use.

Got it. And expat is sort of coded with whiteness as well a little bit? It's a bit of a gringo.

I'm afraid it is, although of course in Shanghai there's a vast Japanese expat community, you could call it.

Okay, so tell us about the international community and the vibes and the buzz of Shanghai in this period. Why is it worthy of a novel?

Because it was mind blowing. I mean, there are certain periods in history in certain places where sort of everything just happened all at once. Things just went off, often, no, not always in a good direction. I'm thinking perhaps Berlin before the Second World War, New York in the twenties, perhaps before the depression. Where else? Let's go back to, I don't know, Rome, when the Empire, you know, everything was going well. Britain, London, in the Industrial Revolution. It just boom. Absolute boom.

And that's what was happening in Shanghai at the end of the nineties. And in the early noughties, the doors had been thrown wide open by the government of China. Shanghai, which had, I don't think people quite appreciate how neglected Shanghai was until that moment. Deng Xiaoping had started opening up China, as you know, down south with his southern tour and setting up Shenzhen and the free trade zones.

And Shanghai had been very deliberately bypassed by the government because of its difficult and rather embarrassing foreign past. You know, there is a quite a, rivalry or a mutual suspicion and dislike between Beijing and Shanghai. You know, one is political, one is very commercial, Shanghai obviously, in fact Shanghai and the rest of China, you could almost say that the Shanghainese are rather like the Parisians to the French. There's a very them and us sort of thing. And because it had been sidelined and then suddenly was given the go ahead by the Party and the government to become this conduit for foreign investment, companies, technology markets, everything, that only added to this sense of boom. I mean, it was a supercharged boom.

And you were there originally as a metals trader and then got into the media business?

Well remembered. I arrived in China as a metals trader in Beijing, and then went to run an office for the company I was working for down in Guangzhou. And that's where I stepped off, I'd done my MBA on the job. The metal trade is a tough place to learn and it was very useful. And I spent a couple of weeks as a correspondent or freelancer for the London Metal Bulletin because I wanted to be a journalist, and a few weeks later I was editing and then publishing an English-language magazine in Guangzhou. That was the training ground for the “That’s” stable, which we went to Shanghai to launch in May of ‘98. 

Right. Yes. Well, I remember when arrived in China in 2008 those magazines were a pretty big thing. That's Guangzhou, That's Shanghai, That's Beijing. So you've written this story up already as a memoir, in That's China, of your “mini media mogul years” as you put it. So why did you want to revisit this period and why choose fiction for it this time around? 

Oh, first of all, it's a brief media, mini media mogul, is what the Financial Times called me. It wasn't, I wasn't a very long lasting one. Why in a novel? Because I've written two memoirs. One is the one you've referenced, That's China. The other, oh, and you mentioned the other as well, China Cuckoo up on the mountain. Why a novel? Because this is the real story. 

Oh, I see. Um, you had to couch in the nonfiction version, did you? 

Well, there was too much that I couldn't fit in here in my memoir. I'm afraid to say it's the nature of memoirs. It's mainly about me and my business and, Moganshan, the mountain where we ended up, that features very strongly. And my magazine business that we've just talked a little bit about, but there was, as I was saying just a moment ago, there was so much going on in Shanghai in those days. And so what I've done in the novel is expand and fictionalize, of course, the characters and the actual story, but they are very much inspired by real people and real events and what happens in the plot is absolutely that something could have happened and probably did. 

So, that segues very nicely to my next question. As I was reading I couldn't help but think, is this a roman à clef? The protagonist is a posh-presenting Brit who gets embroiled in the shadowy world of doing business in China. The narrator is more working class, also doing business there. There's a cast of secondary characters from Americans and Aussies to rich Chinese kids who seem very familiar. Obviously the plot is pure fiction, but for the characters in it, how much of this is just you and Paul French and Graham Earnshaw, and the rest of your stories repackaged with new names and professions?

I am glad you can't hear me smiling. You kind of nailed it, but I'm not gonna admit it.

Well, you just did.

But you know, was a question. My characters are made up of elements of many, real people. I wouldn't say any character…well, there's one perhaps who is a very good character, I stress, who is very much inspired by one person. Uh, but I'm not gonna say, definitely not gonna say who that is. I expect they'll work it out for themselves and there's a lot of me in there too, of course. I mean, I remember I say, so Felix turns up and he wears a pinstripe suit. I mean, I used to do that in Beijing. I mean, it was an absolute look like a twit, but, um, it's what young idiot Englishmen do when they go abroad for the first time. I know a chap who hitchhiked through Tibet wearing a bowler hat.

Well, you trade off it, right? 

I'm afraid so. With the benefit of hindsight in a few more years, it's, I don't think I would behave like that again myself.

So let's trace this arc of the novel with listeners from this excitement to disillusionment. To begin with, the first half of a novel we're really sharing in your protagonist's excitement to be in Shanghai at this time. All of the opportunities to make money, all of the privileges that they have as foreigners for fun to be had, booze, sex, drugs, and the comedy of it all. Like Felix's faux upper class development, Royal Buckingham Park, which is being planned in the outskirts of the city. Did you buy into this view of Felix’s that Shanghai, China was the future and the suckers back home were stuck in the past? 

I think that was very much the mood of Shanghai at the time. I would say that I was not quite so gullible as to be swept up in it like Felix, my character, is or was. In fact, as a magazine publisher, you know, I was constantly trying to look behind everything and see what was driving it. And I couldn't see much there. And one of the things that we kept reading in all sorts of guides and foreign papers, was this incredible jazz revival in Shanghai. That was a massive thing. Do you remember that? You know, “jazz has started again. Jazz has returned to this or jazz capsule of the Far East.” The jazz in Shanghai was rubbish in the modern day and in the old days too, these myths of this fantastic sort of pre-war, pre communist Shanghai, I as a magazine writer, an editor and publisher, wanted to sort of temper those and just say, Hey guys, come on. It was great, I was very pro-Shanghai, but I didn't drink all the Kool-Aid. 

The Shanghai 1920s, as presented to us through movies and restaurants, sometimes it seems like an abstraction, a sort of, a romance, which has lost touch with the reality of what it would've been.

Absolutely. And I, one of the reasons I want Felix to believe it, is so that when he gets his wake-up call, it's a radical one. It's an alarming one. And the mood change, the darkness is all the darker, because he's fallen for that gloss.

Hmm. How much of you is in Felix? Is it that sort of naivete of new arrivals that you are satirizing through his character? 

Certainly. I was naive. I think everybody who arrives in China is naive to some degree. I think Felix is, he's not going to look too deep until of course it comes and slaps him in the face, when everything turns. Yes, he is naive and I played that up a bit. He's probably one of the most naïve.

And like everyone else in the book, he's running away from something and in his case it’s family, his relationship with his brother in the narrator Johnny Trent's case, a legal bit of trouble he got into back home. And that remains the case in my view, for many migrants, foreign migrants who end up in China. A lot of them have something back home that they're trying to get away from.

Yes. And so did I. 

What was it for you?

That's personal. 

It's funny how the road to business and successful business in China has been paved with body bags ever since the days of Carl Crow and, you know, even Venetian merchants. So sometimes reading a story like this reminds us how things change, but things stay the same. 

Absolutely. What's that very good book, To Change China? Do you remember that one? 

Yes. Jonathan Spence. 

Yes. Uh, it's not so much about the trade, but just recently, I think I saw on your website you, uh, you ran a review of a relaunch of Beijing Jeep? And that's, that's a classic.

That's in our column, The China Archive, by Jeremiah Jenne, who dusts off these old titles. So by the end of a book, as we've alluded to, things fall apart, the tone and the feel of the book becomes almost comically cynical. Zhou Jianguo, this real estate magnate delivers a screed about China being “a country where people only care about themselves.” Charlie, your wise old China hand character has an extended bit about how the CCP is similar to the Nazis. Your protagonist gets into all sorts of legal trouble. And your narrator, I don't think this is a spoiler, ends up leaving with little to show for it.

Sure.

Is this indictment of China in the book reflective of your own views? Was it really that bleak, in your view and, and how much of this was infected by your own negative experience doing business there in the same period?

Well, in my experience at one point, at one level, was extremely bleak. I built a multimillion-dollar business and I lost everything, absolutely everything. I knew I was gonna have to sacrifice some of it, but I was hoping I would hold onto something somewhere. I got completely destroyed and it was very personal. So yes, that affected me. I don't think that, however, inspired the rather bleak ending to China Running Dog because, first of all, wait till you hear the sequel that I'm planning.

Oh, for the novel?

I would absolutely love to write a sequel and a third, I've got the arc already very clear and it will end on a high, but it's gotta get, I think it's gotta get worse first. So as you say, the characters are pretty negative. Uh, there in the sort of final words in the book, the narrator leaves, but at the same time, there is a ray of light, a ray of hope, because one of the characters, and let’s leave him unnamed, who might have been perceived to have been the rather sinister one, turns out to be remarkably wise and human and kind. And what I'm trying to say there, I mean, it's pretty obvious that character is a Chinese one, is t hat, you know, we tend to, certainly in the West tend to, you know, there's still that Fu Manchu thing going on. You know, the evil Chinaman, deep, deep down. 

I do this in my, sorry, I'm gonna segue sideways into this one man show I do about the Boxer Rebellion, where I describe how the Chinese actually protected the foreigners. Likewise, at the end of China Running Dog, a Chinese character, turns out to be benevolent and kind and taking care of people.

And much of the book explores these bubbles, separate bubbles that the foreign community and the Chinese community occupy and how they overlap and clash at times. 

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And some of the circles that Felix slips into those, the fuerdai, the rich second-generation spoil brats, who again are not all bad people, and I hope I reflect that.

Is part of what you're trying to say or suggest is that there is no place for foreigners in this, there's no place for outsiders in Chinese business. Like your Prospect article right before you left. “You'll never be Chinese”, and your novel reminded me of that idea that maybe we're wasting our time there. Maybe there was never a space for an outsider to sneak in there and get a slice of the pie.

Well, funny enough, I went to see a friend of mine last weekend in England, who seriously did very, very well in China and is incredibly positive about it actually. We sat up late into the night drinking whiskey and he was really positive and actually was quite angry with me. And he still is. We are very good friends. And I think a great sign of friendship is when you can shout at each other and say what an idiot each other are being.

Whiskey helps.

Whiskey helps, yes. It was 55%, Jesus. So that friend has now withdrawn entirely from China, sold, you know, he's sold out. One point he did make, however, was that of all his staff the new Chinese ownership is now laying them all off, getting rid of them.

There can be that sense that China is back in the doldrums economically a little bit and closing off to foreign investment and so forth. So perhaps your novel is a snapshot of this anomaly or this period where it was open.

I'm afraid that is absolutely true from what I hear. I haven't been back to China now for eight years, but everything I hear from friends who are still there, and you'll see, I'm sure, well you will find out for yourself when you go there soon, that the mood, the atmosphere, international community has changed, has been vastly reduced in size. And then the engagement, the foreign engagement of China has also decreased.

Mm-hmm. Do you think it's too easy to fall into a trap of becoming cynical about China after putting your time in and getting burnt? I've certainly felt that way myself, but what do you feel about your character's cynicism at the end of a book? Is it justified or is it just another long-term foreigner in China who ends up complaining about the place? 

I think it is justified. One of the people who states it most clearly and reasonably, I hope, is the Chinese character. And he's not talking though about China, of course, he's talking about the Party and the system. I wouldn't call them cynical. Sound cynical, of course. Disappointed is what I would prefer. I personally was very disappointed because I went to China to try and do something useful for China and knew the challenges, accepted them, but was, you know, shut out. And my characters, likewise, they're very similar of my foreign characters, apart from, of course, Felix, who is gonna hang around and get into even more trouble.

I hope that we're enticing readers to pick up a book and read it for themselves as we don't want to issue any spoilers. I did want to invite you to read a little excerpt from the book, on the theme of the topic we're talking about. I thought you could read for us a poem that one of your characters, Charlie Thurrold, the old China hand, wrote as a parody of the Philip Larkin This Be the Verse, “they fuck you up, your mom and dad,” but for China, would you mind reading that for us?

Of course. And then we'll come to the positive stuff.

“Charlie drew a breath, shut his eyes and recited, the pleasant lilt to his gravity voice. 

‘It fucks you up, the China dream.
You don't believe it, but it will. With all your dollars in you stream.
And walk away with nothing, nil.
But it was fucked up in its turn
by old style fools with books and drugs
who half the time were soppy stern and the other half behaved like thugs.
Man passes on his dreams to man
they fool us like a cheap made fake.
So wise up early, if you can.
And give the China Dream a break.’”

Thank you. The old style fools with books and drugs. Who are you talking about there? 

The missionaries and the opium traders. Good old jardines and, and all that lot. I'm saying it's just as Larkin said, it's not their fault. 'Cause they, they've been, you know, like our parents, they were fucked up by their parents. Tthis China dream that the Party has created, and is trying to sell so hard, it's not entirely their fault.

So have you given up on the China Dream?

I really miss China. I still believe in China and the Chinese people, the society, the culture, the principles that they do have, which are many. I used to say, I'll go back after the revolution.

I'll see you in post-revolution Shanghai. So you left China in 2013, was it? 

Yes.

Mostly for your kids' education. You wrote a piece in Prospect Magazine about leaving in August 2008, which was right when I was arriving. Last time we were on a podcast together was right after I left, which was, you know, November, 2022. after serving my own time, and also writing a book about getting burnt out and going to the countryside. So we've both completed the arc of a China migrant. But between when you left China 12 years ago and now I want to ask how your feelings about your time there and the nation has changed and how do you feel that the nation itself has changed? Has time softened or hardened your views?

It's softened me in that I don't bear any resentment for what happened to me with my business. It's softened in that I was incredibly lucky that I had a place to go and live and a life to lead. That was so therapeutic, for want of a better word, on the mountain. Yes. You went to live on the mountain too so you know. That really helped. And Moganshan is an incredible spot. One of my favorite things about it was that because it was actually really built by foreigners, not like Shanghai, it wasn't sort of Chinese and then became foreign. There was nothing there. The foreigners built the village, the locals came to work for them, and the community there were so open. It was, oh, a foreign has come back, isn't that nice? It's just like when we were kids sort of thing. It was a genuinely international community. It really was. So that softened me on the spot.

Sorry, I'm, I'm slightly dodging the question as, what do I feel about China? Has my view softened or hardened? I think China has hardened, I think, the political direction it's going is getting harder and more negative to the outside world and quite threatening, which is a shame because one of the things I praise China for is the way that it is a non-confrontational society and the way people work, relate in business and private anywhere in China, the way they fight wars for God's sake, look at Sun-zi. It's avoiding confrontation. But what I do enjoy very much is seeing all the Chinese coming to Britain and elsewhere in the world. You know, I just, I love to see them out and about, to put it that way.

Well, you've written a record of that time in your life in this novel, that captures it in that way, that sometimes fiction only can. This kind of book, uh, novels set in China, but written in English. Or specifically expat literature if you like, uh, although you don't like that term, books fiction written by the international community who's lived in China. This isn't a category that we've covered much before at CBR, which is one reason why I wanted to include it. Um, we mostly covered translated Chinese fiction, but there are a lot of books, novels written by foreigners who lived in China. Uh, it can be a mixed bag, this genre, uh, and I wanted to get your opinion on it. And maybe you could give us some recommendations or point us to some examples from a genre that you've particularly enjoyed or particularly didn't enjoy.

Are there that many though? I don't think there are.

I suppose not. They are thin and few between and increasingly rare.

What, what do you think? Gimme an example.

Well, uh, for the, for cynicism in your book that we were talking about, it reminded me of a book by the Pseudonymous, Arthur Meaursault called Party Members (2016), uh, where there's this ineffectual milquetoast, Chinese bureaucrat who rises up the ranks by transforming, uh, literally into an enormous prick, uh, which was sort of a fun read, but can come across kind of bitter.

Oh my God, was it? I read it. It was quite a struggle to get to the end. Yeah, indeed. It's very negative. It is a brilliant premise. But I think, yeah.

Could be a bit, a bit, bit too much. Um, I do very much enjoy the work of Quincy Carroll, who was an American who lived in China a number of years and has written a couple of novels, uh, about it, which I thought hit the nail on the head. Um, uh, of course, there's another kind of expat tale common about time is the sexpat book, such as a book I did a hatchet job review of back in the day, Tom Olden's Shanghai Cocktales.

I haven't read it.

Well, I would save yourself for trouble, um, though it delisted a rather amusing video response from the author. So what are the traps that you think that you want to avoid falling into in this sort of book?

Well, the first one is try to avoid, speaking like a, an expat staying in or out of a goldfish bowl. So write it. Although I've written about, yes, I must, you know, they are called expats, my characters, I've tried to write about them. Well, certainly with through my narrator with a very much more open-minded, flexible, adaptable, unprejudiced, unbiased view, of the difference between, uh, Chinese and foreigners.

I actually banned the word expat from my magazines. Oh, no. I banned the word Chinese. I beg your pardon. I banned all reference to anyone, any nationality. You just couldn't say. You had just had to say a bloke or a girl. You weren't allowed to say a Chinese man and I tried to maintain that with China Running Dog.

Just as a last question, tell us a little bit more about your other work now. I went to see your one man play in London, The Chinese Boxers. But you're also doing other acting work. Are you still engaging with China through that?

I'm still engaging with China in that, so I'm still doing Chinese Boxing and, I'm still standing up on stage afterwards and trying to explain, well, I do it in the show and then afterwards, uh, trying to explain China to people and I think it's getting across. I have been, yeah, doing other acting. Right now I'm in Bath in Somerset because I'm an understudy in a production of Hedda Gabler with Lily Allen playing the title role, and I'm hoping very much I'll get on, who knows. And last year I played a variety of roles in a production of 1984. We did it at the Hackney Town Hall. I mean the star of the show was the venue and it was kind of immersive, very gently immersive. I played O'Brien, I was his understudy and then used to step in on a regular basis and play him. I thoroughly enjoyed that, but I was also in the ensemble, and we used to mix with the crowd beforehand. In 1984, it's all about Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia fighting each other the whole time. And there were Chinese audience members. Quite, there's a lot of Chinese audience members and I would very gently explain to them that once, when we were allies, I used to be the liaison officer and I'd say to them in Chinese, you know, what are you doing here? 'Cause we're not fighting you, you just got outta prison, are you a spy? Are you this or that? And I had quite a lot of fun. It was a little bit mischievous. The producer asked me to rein it back at one point, but –

We've always been at war with Oceania. 

Quite. So yeah, no, the acting's going well and I am working on more books, more fiction and I'd actually rather like to write, well, I've, I've researched and started work, it’s a sort of ongoing project, a book about Xinjiang. I spent some time there and I've written about Xinjiang for Prospect as well, actually.

And you crossed the Taklamakan Desert on your way into China? 

I did, I did. It was a long time ago now, but rather, you know, inspired by the fact that quite a few travel writers don't get to sit down and write their stories until many years later, I thought. And with the benefit of hindsight and the bigger picture, what I'd like to do is retell the story of that expedition I did walking through the desert, but use it as an avenue to throw in lots of history of Xinjiang. And there's the, gosh is there's some fun and interesting and horrific history. All sorts, and I think people need to know about Xinjiang.

Terrific. Well, we'll look forward to that. And I'm looking forward to books two and three of the trilogy to see what happened to Felix. Mark Kitto, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

Thank you for having me, Alec.

That was Mark Kitto talking about China Running Dog. There's so much we didn't get to cover here. So do buy and read the book yourself. You can also read a transcript of this conversation@chinabooksreview.com alongside reviews, essays, excerpts, book lists, and much more. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials to not miss a beat. This has been an episode of the China Books Podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and drop us a rating if you enjoyed this. China Books Review is a project of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China relations and The Wire China. Write to us anytime at editor@chinabooksreview.com. I'm Alec Ash wishing you absorbing reads this coming month. See you next time.