The book – In the year of the great pandemic, the author offers his personal diary of a quarantine in Beijing and the story of a trip to one of the poorest counties in China, alternated with stories collected by a reporter who has frequented this country for fifteen years and has lived there for ten.

Moving between narration and analysis, geographical and temporal leaps, cities and countryside, the book highlights those “Chinese characteristics” so difficult to understand from the outside: mass mobilization as a solution to emergencies, control and escape routes, the Developmental state, Xi Jinping’s Party and local officials.

The author – Gabriele Battaglia was born in Milan in 1966 and has lived in Beijing since 2011, where he works for the Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana (RSI) and collaborates with other Italian and foreign newspapers. He is the author of “Buonanotte Signor Mao” (Milieu, 2017) and “Fucili contro Burma” (Informant, 2014).