There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the appearance in Chinese publications of faked interviews with Western China scholars, so I’m going to read any quotations from Westerners more carefully now. Here’s an extract from an interview I happened across some months ago, which had some details that amused me. It sounded authentic, but I wouldn’t refer to it in a book without checking with Tony Saich (I am more casual on the blog, and trying to be clear about the provenance):

As an Englishman, Saich does not have a typical British accent; while as a foreigner, he speaks ‘Mandarin with tune’ (The tune in Mandarin is the most difficult part for Westerners when learning oral Chinese). This interview was conducted in English according to this reporter’s request, however, during the conversation Chinese special terms such as ‘ bao chan dao hu’ and ‘xiu zheng ji hui zhu yi lu xian’ kept running out from his lips. (Note: ‘Bao chang dao hu’ means ‘contracting output quotas to households with the production team’, and ‘xiu zheng ji hui zhu yi lu xian’ means ‘revise the political course of opportunism’).

From “Interview with Harvard Professor Anthony Saich: Optimistic and Pessimistic about China.”