Oliver August & Guy Delisle

Oliver August and Guy Delisle have wildly different experiences of living in China. August, a Times journalist, learned Mandarin while living in Beijing for seven years. His new book Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s Most Wanted Man is both his own story and that of Lai Changxing, an illiterate peasant who built the largest trading empire in China, importing oil, cars and cigarettes, and bribing thousands of officials all the way to the top. The titular Red Mansion was a seven-storey villa built by Lai to house 100 modern-day concubines who attended to senior Chinese government officials in return for their turning a blind eye to his dealings. Despite August’s fairly casual description of run-ins with a regime that would likely have treated him far less hospitably if he were Chinese, this story is clearly a fascinating one.

Delisle, by contrast, has a far less exciting tale to tell, but nonetheless engaging in its delivery: his graphic novel, Shenzhen, like Pyongyang before it, depicts his time spent working at an animation studio. He doesn’t pontificate about cultural differences, and he’s not interested in beautiful artwork or high-brow literature. Instead, his preference for simple line drawings and simple sentences allows him to focus on telling small stories, and though his experience of these cities may be somewhat sanitised, it nonetheless has universal appeal as a result.