In the twenty years since I wrote the first edition, the imagery of Chairman Mao has gained new currency in modern China, sometimes literally. In 2012, I found two ladies selling trinkets on a street corner in Xi’an. Their baskets included stacks of ‘ghost money’ – counterfeit cash for filial Chinese to burn on pyres in order to send gifts to their ancestors in the afterlife. It was designed in a reasonable facsimile of real-life 100-yuan notes, printed in red ink and bearing the image of Chairman Mao. Each promised to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten million yuan, redeemable at the ‘Bank of Hell’. I found it ironic that the man who had once tried to ban both money and superstition should endure as the figurehead on cash for use in the spirit world.

I bought a supposed fortune in ghost money for a knockdown price, since the women were trying to offload their Mao notes as fast as possible. Such realistic ghost money had recently been declared illegal, in a re-establishment of respect for Mao that would see a new edition of his Selected Quotations (the famous Little Red Book) republished a few months later. The following October, when I went looking for ghost money again, I could only buy notes bearing the face of the King of Hell. I would keep my Mao money for a decade, until I was persuaded to burn it on camera for William Shatner’s The UnXplained to demonstrate how to turn my ancestors into millionaires.

Only two months after I bought the last of the Mao ghost money on the street, China’s new president Xi Jinping delivered a stirring speech about his plans for the nation during what would turn out to be his lifelong term in office. He was determined, he said, for the Chinese Communist Party to celebrate its centenary in 2021 without any slanders or smears committed against it by hostile forces peddling an incorrect version of history. In doing so, he used the phrase ‘historical nihilism’ (lishi xuwuzhuyi), a term that has come to colour huge areas in subsequent discourse.

Thereafter, if I described myself as a historian, people became noticeably jumpy. There was, after all, now a hotline for concerned citizens to call if they encountered anyone suspected of harming the reputation of the Communist Party and its role in creating the new China. History was now whatever the Party said it was, which has effectively criminalised anyone who dares to question it.

From the introduction to the new edition of Mao by Jonathan Clements.

“The set outside looks unfamiliar. By which I mean that we are used to seeing the same buildings dressed, and redressed and reused in multiple movies shot on the Shaw Brothers backlot, but this is not a film by Shaw Brothers. Where are they getting that village from? If it’s not somewhere in Hong Kong, where is it?

“Well, the answer is supplied as we ride off, because right there you can see a very distinctive gorge with a road that’s been cut into the side of it. And that is not in Hong Kong at all. That is Taroko Gorge in eastern Taiwan, now known as Taroko National Park, one of a few river valleys to be cut through marble, and the sacred territory of the Truku people.

“So really it should be called Truku Gorge, but we use the pronunciation first established internationally when the place was a Japanese colony in the early 20th century. The thing about Taroko Gorge, is it, like everywhere else in Taiwan, has been subjected to a feverish renovation and rebuilding project since 1949, as the Kuomintang, the ruling Nationalist party, try to establish that Taiwan has always been part of China.

“So if anywhere is going to get little lion statues, and intricately carved fairy tale bridges, and little pagodas, shoved up in the 20 years before the film crew showed up, it’s Taroko Gorge, which is great. Because Lo Wei wants to make a film in a place that looks like China, and here we have the KMT shovelling as much cement as they can to oblige.”

From my commentary track to Arrow Films’ forthcoming Blu-ray release of Golden Harvest’s The Hurricane, drawing on the materials I used for my Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan.

“Some scholars have argued that far from clinging to the past until they were overwhelmed, the Qing dynasty created modern China in 1644, by establishing a previously unseen level of centralized control, and by wiping out the northern border problem. The Qing dynasty is hence, in the words of William T. Rowe, ‘a constantly moving target,’ only passing from living memory in the twenty-first century.

“We might equally argue that the period of ‘humiliation’ began not in the 1840s, but two hundred years earlier, in 1644, when the first and most successful foreign element, the Manchus themselves, swept in from the north-east to form a lasting, exploitative aristocracy.

“Or, if we accept, as all modern Chinese books do, that the Manchus were simply another sector of the Chinese world, and that they were hence not really foreign, then surely their regime, with its wars of conquest in Central Asia, its self-assurance of its racial and cultural superiority, and a military mission that doubled the size of Chinese territory in the space of 150 years, was an immensely successful imperialist power, not all that different in attitude from the outsiders that would bring it down.”

From A Brief History of China by Jonathan Clements, and hopefully shedding a little light on the politicised arguments behind the shelving of The Battle for Penghu.

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I update my entry on China with details of the relatively new sub-genre of stories in which time-travelling boffins try to make China great again.

My voice sneaks onto the Lost Rivers documentary by my old Route Awakening cohorts in Singapore. I pop up on a couple of occasions, and sadly they didn’t use the takes where I tried to perform in the voice of David Bowie.

“One gets the sense with The Art of War that Sun Tzu saw it as a vital part of his own strategy for personal survival, offering dire warnings to belligerent princelings that war was never to be taken lightly, and only considered as the last possible resort. There is an entire chapter on ‘Espionage’, not merely in a tactical sense for reconnaissance, but in terms of embedded assets within rival kingdoms, misinformation campaigns and double agents. Sun Tzu would do literally anything to prevent a war, and is not above sending a suicide mission to off an enemy leader before trouble begins. It will, he notes, save lives elsewhere.”

From my chapter on Sun Tzu, which opens Iain Dale’s just-published volume on military leaders, and draws, of course, on my own translation of The Art of War.