Jonathan Fenby believes there are only two men who can get the world out of the current economic crisis. The 66-year-old, who was in Beijing for the Bookworm Literary Festival, said how United States president Barack Obama and China president Hu Jintao get on at the London G20 Summit could prove pivotal to the fate of us all. "I think the relationship between Hu and Obama is undoubtedly the most important relationship for the world right now."
Having breakfast in the new boutique Hotel G in Sanlitun, Fenby, dressed casually in a polo shirt, has the genial affability of someone about to go and play a round of golf, rather than that of an astute political commentator.
As a former editor of The Observer in the UK and of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP), before becoming a leading authority on China, he has his own front row view of many of the world's major political events.
Fenby, as he splutters on a croissant, believes the success or otherwise of the G20 will boil down to what the leaders of the two big players, China and the United States - the so-called G2 - decide upon.
"How they are going to work everything out will be vitally important in term of how we get out of the current downturn," he says.
Fenby was in Beijing to promote the paperback edition of The Penguin History of Modern China, which covers the history of the country from 1850 to 2009, as part of a 3-week tour of Asia, which has taken in a Queen Mary 2 cruise and appearances and lectures in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
He has been impressed by the venue of the festival, the Bookworm, the bookstore cum eatery, in Sanlitun.
"I think the Bookworm is great. It reminds me of Greenwich Village in the 1960s when I first went to America. You have eating, drinking and books and a community which grows out of that," he says.
The Penguin History, which runs to nearly 700 pages, is Fenby's sixth book on China in less than a decade.
While now regarded as one of the West's leading authorities on China, he sees himself as something of an accidental Sinologist.
Most of his early career was in Europe, mainly in Paris, with Reuters, which he joined after Oxford, and although he had experience of Asia with a stint as a war correspondent in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China did not come into his orbit until he was dismissed as editor of The Observer in 1995.
"My editing of The Observer, how should I put it, fell to bits on a Thursday afternoon," he says.
"I then got a call, asking: 'Have you ever thought about going to Hong Kong?'
"For me, it was a push-pull thing. I didn't know what I would do if I stayed in England and this part of the world was interesting and something new to get to know."
He was offered the position of editor of the SCMP, recently taken over by Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok, within three hours of getting off the plane and stewarded the paper through the territory's handover back to China.
It was as editor in Hong Kong, that his second career as an author began but it was a book about the problems facing late 20th century France, On the Brink: The Trouble With France, a publisher wanted.
"There is something in the Hong Kong air that makes you work twice as hard and I sat down and wrote it while editing the Post," he says.
His first book about China issues was Dealing with the Dragon: A Year in the New Hong Kong, a journal charting the first year post-handover, was, in fact, a commercial failure.
"It got decent reviews but died a death because everyone had lost interest in Hong Kong by then," he says.
Undaunted, publishers Little Brown wanted him to do another book on China.
"They were like a university career adviser. 'Young man, you should do this,' they said. They wanted me to do a biography. I said, 'Who? I haven't got anybody in mind.'"
The subject they wanted was the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and the book was called Generalissimo, which Fenby partly researched in the library of David Tang's China Club in Hong Kong.
Other books followed, most notably, Dragon Throne: China's Emperors from the Qin to the Manchu, and the Penguin History, which sold out almost immediately in hardback, and has just been launched in paperback.
Despite worldwide interest in the subject, it is one of the few general history books covering this period from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the early 21st century
"I agreed to do it but said there were probably a thousand academics who are probably longing to do it," he says.
"They said they wanted a generalist who would put it all together."
It has been criticized for not including interviews with Chinese people or not using new Chinese source material.
"I read Chinese very badly. You could spend years in some of the Chinese archives and come up with little nuggets but it would be just a few paragraphs and it wasn't that kind of book. If you found an undiscovered letter from the Dowager Empress about gardening or something, it would only be of interest to historians."
Fenby is, in fact, an avid researcher and spends hours in the School of Oriental Studies, where he has a research fellowship and which is just round the corner from where he lives in Bloomsbury, London.
He spends four days a week working for the political research institute, Trusted Sources, of which he is a founder director, and writes on weekends.
"I get up at 7 or 8 on Saturday mornings and work right through to Sunday evenings when I will take a bath," he says.
"I avoid walks to freshen the mind since you end up dropping into your local bookshop and other displacement activity."
He is taking a break from China for his next book, which will be a biography of the great French leader Charles de Gaulle.
He is depressed about Europe's current mood of protectionism and its attitude towards China.
"I don't think Europe knows what to do about China. I go to conferences in Europe about China and nobody seems to have a clearer idea beyond let's sell them some more Airbuses," he says.
He senses Obama is much more enlightened and is building a workable Sino-American relationship.
"America is working it out under Obama," he says.
As for China, he believes that although there have been 30 years of reform since 1978, the next 30 years will be an even bigger challenge.
"You have got a sizeable middle class now to fit in somehow and there is still a rural/urban disparity," he says.
"Underlying this, there is a need to sustain growth. The leadership has to cushion the effects of the downturn, while at the same time deal with very long term fundamental challenges. It is a hell of an ask."
(China Daily March 24, 2009)