The higher-fidelity viewing options came in-flight – the only time I pay much attention to Hollywood’s latest releases. In one movie, the actor from The Truman Show plays a New York City-dwelling recipient of a penguin; fast-forwarding revealed that the character is soon housing dozens of the beasts in his apartment. Twenty minutes of the 12-hour journey vanish. In another film, three men commiserate with one another about their hellish bosses. I am guessing that, if I had watched more than a third of an hour of it, they would have found intriguing and entertaining ways to dispatch the tyrants.

Two things were worth viewing in full. Yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre, complete not only with all the costumes, windswept moorland and darkness you could want, but an extremely watchable, indeed mesmerizing, lady called Mia Wasikowska in the lead role. This is more post-feminism than girly love story. And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which somehow recreates the seediness of the period more effectively than the classic late-70s made-for-TV version. (It’s all about atmosphere, which makes me wonder why cinema-world doesn’t do more Graham Greene.)

But it’s back home where things get really interesting, delving and foraging in the less-visited bits of YouTube where the picture is grainy and the sound possibly out-of-synch; people accustomed to 75-inch plasma, high-definition and 3D don’t know what they’re missing.

Behold Left Behind (seven parts), the movie of the novel of the apocalyptic belief known as dispensational premillenialism, in which the second coming of Christ is preceded by the rapture – a scenario that millions of fundamentalist Christians (let’s be blunt: Americans) believe is already underway. This has everything a bad movie should have, including cheap sets and effects, jarringly inappropriate scoring and of course corny dialogue. But what’s really riveting about it is the straight-faced portrayal of this parallel universe. After a bearded and polyglot God thwarts an Arab attack on Israel on live television, all the faithful suddenly vanish (leaving little piles of clothes on airline seats and elsewhere) and the antichrist appears in the form of a United Nations leader pushing global currency union. How many films have this?

But truth is stranger than fiction, and the Found Small Screen Experience of the Year Award must go to Adam Curtis’s It Felt Like a Kiss (2009). Curtis – a sort of adults’ version of TV journalist John Pilger – describes this work as “the story of an enchanted world that was built by American power as it became supreme … and how those living in that dream world responded to it.”

What you get here is HIV, Lee Harvey Oswald, chimps in space, attempts to cure Lou Reed of homosexuality, Saddam Hussein, a Carole King song about a girl whose boyfriend beats her, the Congo, the Manson Family, and a thousand other things from the late 50s-60s, all to a soundtrack of contemporary pop from West Side Story to the Velvet Underground. Thanks to painstaking and inspired footage/sound research and editing, you are bombarded with juxtapositions that reveal connections you had barely thought about. If you are acquainted with the subject matter, this is surely the nearest a TV documentary has come to art; for the benighted, it’s the most elaborate music video ever.

(Parts 2, 3, 5 and 6 in 10-minute segments; part 4 seems to have been swept up into the heavens, but given the stream-of-consciousness nature of the work, you can glide past it.)

Click to hear ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’ by the Crystals!

The capital letter, ‘R’, also stands for RUBBISH! 

And that, in TARGET’s opinion, is, exactly, what one gets at ROKA Restaurant

What would Sacklyn make of the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop in Austin Road, Tsimshatsui? Stroll too fast, and you would go straight past it – except anyone with a modicum of alertness will automatically stop to admire the lamb pancakes in the window. They will squeeze their way in and find somewhere to sit. The place has four four-person booths and a little folding table with three stools. On my visit, an appropriately severe Hard Stare convinced the book-reading intellectual hogging an entire booth to himself to retreat to the latter.

The button mushrooms [at Ole Spanish restaurant, Ice House Street] were, clearly, sautéed, either by a Chinese or a Filipina/Filipino cook who determined not to prostitute his/her art by bowing to the requirements of Spanish cuisine …

Lastly, this had to have been the oiliest paella in the history of Spain.

From left to right here: pork and pickled cabbage dumplings (made in the corner by the Beijinger owner); two variants of lamb pancake (one with leek), lamb of course being an abhorrence to the Cantonese; and seaweed soup perched behind hot and sour soup with congealed pig’s blood, perhaps to help Hongkongers get the taste of wooly ruminant out of their mouths… 

If this restaurant [Manzo Italian Steak House, Times Squae] continues to sell half-rotten meat, even USDA Prime beef that smells and tastes as though it were fermented bean curd (腐乳), it will not last the season.

The lamb pancakes are the main reason to come to the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop. Generous amounts of tasty, tender meat in a fairly light pastry. Maybe half of the output goes out the door in the form of take-away. Like all good, tiny, hole-in-the-wall food places, the cheerful owner has covered a wall with photos of himself posing with hundreds of celebrities you’ve never heard of (plus the inevitable tiresome TV culinary genius who claims to have tried human meat – his picture is in every diner in the Pearl River Delta). Order recklessly enough and two ultimately very stuffed people can rack up a bill for HK$150, and leave with leftover dumplings to take back home to fry, as recommended by Mrs Owner.

Or we can follow the action-packed gastronomic trail blazed by Raymonde Sacklyn and savour not the food but the reviewing skills…

The location of The Pawn Restaurant, at Number 62, Johnston Road, Wanchai, the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is perfect. It faces a very large rubbish dump which abuts a concrete playground and the sounds of Wanchai, with its drunks, pimps and prostitutes lend colour to the listed building that houses The Pawn …

The risotto resembled Scottish porridge, made of rice instead of oats.

Helmut Sohmen, the businessman who married shipping tycoon YK Pao’s daughter and who ranted so much against democracy back in the 1980s (for which, perhaps being Austrian-born, he was largely excused) writes to the Standard with a charming idea: name the exciting but unsightly new multibillion-dollar government palace at Tamar after Sir Bow-Tie.

Critics will dismiss Sohmen’s proposal as a shabby little bit of shoe-shining, but is there not something exquisitely appropriate about it? Of all the overpriced and unnecessary construction projects Donald Tsang has strewn around Hong Kong, one needs to be named for him. We owe it to our grandchildren to immortalize the visionary who spent so lavishly on these curiously peaceful and uncrowded concrete adornments to our city. We could have the Donald Tsang Bridge, gateway to exotic Zhuhai, the distant town of which we know little and care even less. Or the Donald Tsang Express Rail Line, with its empty trains gliding between the West Kowloon Contemporary Cantonese Opera Hub and that Guangzhou suburb we can never remember the name of.

But no. The new government palace it must be. Extravagant in style, occupying an inappropriately prominent position and by all accounts publicly inaccessible: The Donald Tsang Government Centre – a big building for small people trying their best.

Just a stone’s throw away across over the Standard’s daily Sudoku for people who find the Telegraph crossword too hard, the loving awareness that permeates the Big Lychee continues. Sing Tao editor Siu Sai-wo crafts a touching and adulatory column singing the praises of Shirley Yuen, the 17-year-old former civil servant who has just taken over as Chief Executive. Of the HK General Chamber of Commerce, that is.

Malcontents and nitpickers would ask why a business lobby group is appointing a former bureaucrat to its number-two position when it needs to be a stern critic of much government policy if it is to promote the interests of commerce. They might add that the chamber already enjoys strong public-sector links via its chairman Anthony Wu, a big friend of Donald and a sitter on numerous government, quasi-government and pro-government committees and boards. Luckily, the Sing Tao Group’s mission in the world is to banish such negativism and surround us with tenderness and nice thoughts. The fewer people running the chamber of commerce who have any real business experience, the sweeter and calmer life will be for us all.

And, as the ever-vivacious Administrative Officer Winky Ip will confirm, more than a few of the more fragile and sensitive AOs are fleeing the civil service these days in search of calmer climes where no Legislative Council committees will eat them alive and no media will mutilate them whatever they do. I think it’s most generous of a chamber of commerce to open its doors to one of these refugees from the cruel world of government.

According to the press release, Shirley was involved in the ‘formulation’ of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, or CEPA, the so-called free-trade agreement between Hong Kong and the Mainland. In practice, CEPA was a PR gimmick; perhaps it was Shirley who, in conjunction with Mainland officials, drew up a lengthy list of tariff reductions on goods Hong Kong was in no danger of exporting across the border (the highly protected Mainland market obviously couldn’t be opened up to a free port). Harder work than it sounds.

She was also administrative assistant to Henry Tang when he was Financial Secretary. I’m not sure what an administrative assistant does exactly, but I do recall that Henry had an eager young lady working with him at the time who would churn out ‘Lines-to-Take’ – soundbites to talk up government policy when public opinion was too dense to comprehend its wondrousness.

Since I may be wrong, I will confine my thoughts to one that presumably could not have been hers, could it? How can anyone not feel snug, secure and loved on reading such positive, life-affirming bullet points?

Click to hear ‘Government Center’ by the Modern Lovers!

Other than the eye-catching title, the book cover does the novel no favours by omitting any meaningful blurb about the content. It helps to know that Neil Diamond is one of the uncoolest of the great Sixties-era songwriters, penning a string of major catchy hits for various artists and becoming ever-less trendy with age while still performing to his loyal and mature easy-listening audience.

Aside from serving as a refreshingly seedy setting for a bizarre romp, Hong Kong’s contribution to the story is the theme of self-reinvention. Antihero Neil Atherton is a British former folk musician pushing 50 who has come here when his wife gets a high-flying job. While he bums around singing classics like Sweet Caroline in karaoke bars, she eagerly embraces a new identity and corporate lifestyle. When he dyes his hair after grubby empresario Elbert Chan offers him a job impersonating Diamond in clubs, she kicks him out. Like his namesake standing by the side of the road troubadour-style on an album cover, Neil trudges off with his guitar from the comforts of Shatin to find cheap lodgings in Tsimshatsui.

Chan – a finely drawn shyster we’ve all met before – entices the penniless Neil with his vision of an award-winning show comprising multiple acts covering yesteryear’s major stars; a faux Petula Clark has already been lined up. But Chan is clearly an untrustworthy huckster. After a first, promising gig at the Mariners Club, disaster strikes when a genuine, highly accomplished, professional Neil Diamond impersonator of repute from Los Angeles turns up in town and tells Neil to beat it. Outrageous chaos ensues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is Tom Sharpe’s output since the 1990s and 10 is his early 70s satires of South Africa, The Ghost of Neil Diamond probably comes in at around a 5 or 6 – decently crafted, unpretentious fun with a dash of black humour, and worth grabbing if you see it. It warrants extra marks for its cliché-free depiction of an unglamorous and squalid Hong Kong, exemplified by the pitiful Chan and his grubby office. The HK Tourism Board won’t be handing out copies of this book. Is there any higher praise?

Among the books I read in 2010 stacked up at my bedside waiting to be transplanted to shelves are: Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews; Neal Stephenson’s Anathem; Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution; Simon Singh’s Big Bang; Ali Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; Antony Beevor’s Paris After the Liberation; and on and on. In the lull before the next package from Amazon, I take a quick look at what Santa left me from Hong Kong’s Blacksmith Books and have a brief Kevin Bloody Wilson moment. These volumes aren’t really my thing. But what else is there? Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is sitting there, lying open halfway through after being started before last summer; I have all of 2011 to finish that. So here goes…

A quick glance at The Great Walk of China: Travels on foot from Shanghai to Tibet by Graham Earnshaw is a bit misleading. The author (an ex-Reuters man living in Shanghai) does not walk the route in the title in one go and has not, as of the final page, reached western Sichuan. Instead, he indulges in a sort of token, nine-to-five version of roughing it, doing the trip in stages and flying/taxiing in and out each time, including to hotels at night where necessary. But no matter. He pretty much skips this process (nor does he say who pays for this logistical extravagance, which would be interesting since the endeavour is apparently for charity) so the reader gets an impression of accompanying him on a steady uninterrupted plod, with some disjointed seasonal changes, through the rural back roads of middle China.

And very pleasant it is. At every dusty village we stop for a bottle of water and a chat with the storekeeper and hear what the locals have to say (cuts in taxes on farmers are a big hit). We are accosted by school kids who share with us their dreams for the future. We take photos of labourers planting and digging, and we make their day by helping out a bit. We hand our address out, plus invitations to visit, to a worrying number of friendly strangers. We admire the scenery on the plains and up in the mountains and valleys of the Three Gorges. We bump into the occasional outcast with a sad tale to tell. We enjoy the political slogans painted on the walls of old buildings. We run the risk of being a bit boorish by insisting on vegetarian food everywhere. And we have a bit of cheeky fun with cops who think it’s still the 1970s and ask for our IDs. Finally, turning a corner on a hillside one afternoon, we find, before we’ve even realized it, that we’ve reached page 341 and call a halt – though the great walk apparently continues/d.

In sum, an antidote to the media onslaught of modern China: after all the disasters, the new billionaires, the uprisings, the growing military might, the pollution, the corruption and the neon skyscrapers, here are the comfortingly mundane bits in between, coming across as almost exotic.

Most of us look the other way when we see children with extreme physical and mental disabilities. Some, if we are to be honest, do the same with books about them. I really did not want to read Wordjazz for Stevie: How a profoundly handicapped girl gave her father the gifts of pain and love by Jonathan Chamberlain.

The title didn’t help (wordjazz?), but maybe that’s just an excuse. You know it’s going to be icky, and I’ve never even changed a diaper for God’s sake. You know it’s going to be depressing. The author and his wife live on Cheung Chau. They have a baby. The baby, they are soon told, has Down syndrome. That comes with a hole in the heart. This needs an operation to fix. But the operation leaves the kid blind and semi-paralyzed as well. Everyone’s lives are going to be wrecked and wretched, and you’re going to catch yourself wondering why they didn’t just have an abortion, and then you’re going to feel rotten. If you’re in a really nasty mood, you might even ask why the author couldn’t just keep it to himself.

However, the book is a lot more welcoming – for want of a better word – than that. It is written in the form of a letter to the daughter who survived up to age eight before finally dying of pneumonia. It is nowhere near as mawkish as it could be. To the extent there is self-pity, it is blunt and concise. The details about doctors, hospitals and treatments, which do not always come out looking good, are dispassionate. Reflections on getting through to a child essentially trapped in a distant world are often intriguing; it comes down to touch, movement and music. If you want to be moved to tears you probably can be, but it’s not compulsory and the author shows no sign of wanting it. He celebrates the fact that the experience, which is to say Stevie’s existence, led him to found two charities that have benefited numerous lives. He discusses feelings, but he is a tough man who can get through it. As he needs to be: next thing, almost as an afterword at the end, his wife succumbs to cancer and dies, leaving him and one healthy kid.

After that, you might think that Lama of the Gobi: How Mongolia’s mystic monk spread Tibetan Buddhism in the world’s harshest desert by Michael Kohn would be light relief. But no.

Danzan Ravjaa was the fifth incarnation of Gobi Noyon Hutgat and as such he was (more or less) to 19th Century Mongolia what today’s Dalai Lama is to Tibet. By all accounts he was a character: part living God, part Robin Hood, part Omar Khayyam, knocking back fermented mare’s milk and hiding from Qing enemies in friendly yurts.

The problem is that the author knows his subject in depth, and the reader doesn’t. Certainly not this one. This is a (perhaps denser-than-average) example…

People who are really into this sort of thing rave about it, and apparently this book has sold well in California.

Is the world getting over mysterious traditions and creeds from desolate regions? One of Earnshaw’s closing comments is “I am not really very interested in Tibetan culture,” which tempted me to punch the air in delight. An introduction to the hero of Mongolian Buddhism for those of us who have never heard of him might be fascinating. But then, maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, this isn’t it. I resign myself to leaving this blank spot in my knowledge unfilled and reach with renewed eagerness to Gravity’s Rainbow.

The main beneficiaries of this tortuous sacrificial ritual (that’s hard-earned cash you’re handing over) are the manufacturers of Ferrero Rocher, the spherical chocolate sweet that tells the recipient you consider him or her a total bore unworthy of even a shred of respect more than it takes to step into a 7-Eleven for 20 seconds at the last minute. (An interesting PhD thesis would involve sampling a cross-section of the million boxes of these things changing hands at Christmas to see what percentage have gone stale. My own taste-tests suggest large-scale recycling is going on.)

Other big winners from the seasonal lunacy inevitably include our local friendly landlords, renting out precious parcels of the Big Lychee’s scarce space to such contributors to human progress and happiness as Papyrus, a store in IFC Mall selling an ‘exceptional collection of social expression products from the very best resources’ – ugly and overpriced stationery, in plain English. (Presumably, this being 2010-11, people use the embossed, lavender-scented, Regent Blue Ecruwhite (‘a stunning frame for your words’) for shopping lists.

There is, however, an alternative. It is Sleeping Chinese by Bernd Hagemann – a book full of photos of PRC citizens indulging in extreme napping. Sensitive types might feel slightly dubious about this work on the grounds that it could cause offence: it contains, after all, nothing but noble sons of the Yellow Emperor being caught looking ridiculous on camera by a German. The author maintains that he took up his hobby to provide a juxtaposition to the image of the Middle Kingdom as an awakening, and even threatening, mighty superpower.

I tested it over the weekend on a Beijing native who laughed out loud throughout. It also gets a stamp of approval from the primary organ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which would not look kindly on anything that might hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Maybe it is an exceptionally subtle bit of ‘soft-power’ propaganda to counteract Beijing’s recent string of foreign relations lapses from the Diaoyu-Senkakus to the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if they build an aircraft carrier, they’ll all be slumped on the flight deck, snoring.

The book doesn’t answer the question of why (let alone how) so many people in China snooze in the open during daylight hours. Were all of the photos taken during the early afternoon, post-lunch siesta that even some Hong Kong office workers still enjoy – a hangover from schooldays when it was compulsory? Is it extreme overwork? Or a complete lack of employment?

More to chew over than a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate hazelnut, at least.

1 Now here’s something you don’t often see in Canto-land: lamb. From Beijing to Kashmir to Ireland, people have found delectable ways to cook baby sheep. The southern Chinese, on the other hand, don’t even like the stuff, considering it to have a gamey quality like that of unseasoned fish. In this case it is stewed with sheets of tofu in a surprisingly spicy gravy (perhaps to disguise its shocking taste from the delicate local palate), but not well enough to be truly tender and with the thick rubbery skin intact. So this will not go down as one of the great moments in the preparation of small-ruminant flesh – but under the circumstances it is a commendable effort.

2 Perhaps not surprisingly, the cooked meat stall fronts a gastronomically eccentric store. Along one wall are shelves displaying big packs of spice and jars of sauces, including curry preparations from India, no less. It is not a great range, but again it is surprising to see it here at all – suspicions that there is little demand for such ingredients in this district are confirmed by the general dustiness of the packages. On the opposite wall, across long freezers full of ice-hard chops and fishballs, the shop offers quasi-medical tonics made from extracts of various mammals and reptiles, including bottles of liquid Viagra courtesy of our friend the deer. So that’s what it’s made of.

3 A few doors along we have a fresh sesame- and almond-drink place. This is something new, hip and modern and could be seen as threat to the traditional griminess of the local environment, but it is pleasingly low-tech and smells nice. Electric mills grind up the seeds and nuts and deposit the mushy pulp into containers, which a girl takes behind the counter, where they dilute it and serve it. Needless to say it is good for health, especially the skin. This plus the price of MOP10 a cup seems to guarantee a long line of customers.

4 Many of the stalls on the side streets and alleyways sell the usual fresh food you find in similar markets anywhere in this part of the world. Crowds thicken in early evening, when vendors start to reduce prices, typically by offering them on a generous per-piece basis rather than by weight. You also get the planet’s cheapest clothing (a pair of jeans for MOP10?), and all sorts of dry foodstuffs. Among these are the various fungus-moss life-forms much prized in Guangdong for their nasty sliminess and complete lack of flavour. For a quick hit of the undoubted nutritional benefits offered by these commodities, you can always take a swig of this delicious-looking mushroom juice. This business hasn’t been the same since the sesame milk-shake joint opened. Progress is not always a bad thing.

5 A few hours later, back in Hong Kong, and the already much-prostituted, processed and sanitized Lan Kwai Fong counts down the weeks to the opening of the Hard Rock Café. This next episode of the long, dismal descent of the bar district into a carbuncle full of tourism-pus aimed at emerging markets’ eager new travellers is hardly unique around the Pearl River Delta. Macau now has a Playboy Club, complete with bunnies, where fat nouveau-riche peasants can sit around, smugly wallowing in their extreme coolness as bimbettes with floppy ears light their cigars and pour their burgundy.

Three Lamps is more than just a welcome relief from the ever-encroaching tackiness. It is a step into the past – a place out of the 1980s, when ordinary people could afford the rents to sell ordinary or not-so-ordinary things to other ordinary people at affordable prices. And plastic bags were still legal. The ultimate twinge of nostalgia comes at the sight of cheap clothing emblazoned in mangled English. I though this stuff died out ages ago, and here it still is in the backstreets of grimiest Macau. It is hard to believe that the Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger bulldozers are not rumbling in the distance.

Dikotter starts with the local and international political background, then the decision-making, and the implementation before getting to the gory results: a minimum of 45 million deaths (out of a population of 650 million) due mostly to starvation, but also disease, persecution, murder, accidents and suicides, plus mass-destruction of housing stock and wrecking of the natural environment.

The story starts after Mao lures opposition into the open in the ‘100 flowers’ campaign. Rather than rely on the intellectuals, he decides the muscle power of the rural masses is the best bet for dynamic economic progress. Envious of Sputnik-launching Khrushchev’s vow to surpass the USA’s economic production in 15 years, Mao declares that China will overtake Britain in the same period, notably in steel production.

The Great Leap Forward requires top-down central planning and a degree of mobilization possible only through collectivization. As ever-higher targets come down the chain of command, local officials turn much of rural China into little more than vast slave labour camps. People are stripped of possessions and land, forced away from homes to build dams, then forced back to communes to meet impossible food production targets, using disastrous agricultural methods and sacrificing their own housing materials and even hair as fertilizer. The state appropriates food and other commodities to ramp up exports as a show of economic strength – rice becomes a staple in East Germany – leaving the beaten masses to starve, often naked, by the roadside. (The book contains full, vivid details: not for those squeamish about clubbings-to-death, child-selling, the digging up of human remains for food and what happens when animal survival instincts displace the last shreds of morality.)

The economy collapses. Shaken by the eventual failure of the project and the dissent it provokes among his deputies, Mao goes back on the offensive and launches the country into 10 more years of lunacy in the form of the Cultural Revolution. Official history downplays the ‘years of difficulty’ and blames the weather and/or the USSR.

Although it is hardly the first, this book is probably one of the most damning indictments yet of Mao. This mass-killing was his doing, and he is therefore clearly a monster every bit as evil as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. And yet there he is today, on banknotes, on a portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square, in a glass case in his mausoleum, on T-shirts, in millions of people’s hazy nostalgic feelings and as a national icon. With its ideology mangled as it places its aristocracy atop a corporatist state, the Communist Party relies on Mao for its claim to legitimacy. China may have overtaken the UK now – by feeding people more rather than less – but the government is built on a myth, which this book exposes.

There is a local angle here. Dikotter is Chair Professor of Humanities at Hong Kong University. Hong Kong U, like many of our educational institutions, is keen on expanding over the border and forging closer links with the Mainland, where colleges and academics exist to toe political lines and serve political ends. To patriots, HKU is a disgrace for having someone on the faculty who dares write such heretical nonsense as Mao’s Great Famine. The university’s top management are apparently hoping the whole issue will vanish. Dikotter’s supporters are half-jokingly referring to the professor as Hong Kong’s best chance of having a Salman Rushdie.  It would be required reading anyway, but all this makes the book that much more essential.

After recent months of mouth-frothing, hair-tearing, screeching and ranting about the South China Sea, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, Beijing freaks out about being accused of freaking out.

This phenomenon of a grim, insecure and overly defensive Middle Kingdom throwing a temper tantrum at the slightest provocation has been given the name ‘Sino-spite’. The phrase comes from a hefty polemic I am just finishing called Fault Lines on the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never be Great, by Karl Lacroix and David Marriot (the infamous Chinabounder). ‘Sino-spite’ is the title of one of the book’s more enlightening chapters.

Hyper-sensitivity over territorial claims largely based on fanciful or irrelevant historical records (coming soon: Arunachal Pradesh) is but one spark for such entertaining ructions. Another, of course, is the dreaded interference in internal affairs that takes place at the shake of the Dalai Lama’s hand, unauthorized hosting of an independent film-maker, or merest uncomplimentary comment about the world’s next superpower. And then there’s the closely related hurting of the Chinese people’s feelings that often follows such slights. Let slip that Taiwan looked pretty independent last time you visited, use the more conservative estimated number of victims of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, or insist too strongly that Genghis Khan was not Chinese, and you will find yourself committing similar – or in time, maybe, brand new – sins against the glorious and invariably correct People’s Republic.

The Fault Lines chapter on Sino-spite also examines Mainland officials’ even less attractive habit of treating complaints about the country’s products as personal insults motivated by evil, bullying foreigners’ desire to keep China down. The indignant and aggressive outbursts in response to concerns about tainted toothpaste and dangerous children’s toys are not so much entertaining as disturbing. Rather than follow simple basics of public relations and expressing at least a hint of concern for overseas consumers’ well-being – let alone a dash of contrition – these statements denounce product withdrawals and bans as hostile and unfriendly acts intended to smear or unfairly discriminate. There is a way of avoiding headlines like ‘China is Trying to Poison Our Babies’, but this isn’t it.

The other 49 chapters (‘reasons’) in Fault Lines tend towards successions of horror stories on everything you would expect: sex ratios, single kids, censorship, migrant workers, pollution, fakes, schooling, corruption and every other systemic failure and injustice in China (the authors whittled them down from over 70). You could pull together a similar litany of unpleasantness for any country (5 Reasons Why Botswana Sucks, or 10 Reasons Why Denmark’s a Dud), but of course it’s much more fun when it’s a place with at least its 22% share of the world’s human tragedy and bad governance. It goes without saying that the authors have a grudge or 10.

In sum, the book is of curiosity rather than academic value (the Japanese like it, apparently). It would be numbing to read straight through. But for the starry-eyed or nervous who see China’s rise to international might as a given, it’s a good antidote to dip into. If nothing else, we now have a phrase for all that over-the-top indignant fury that brightens up our days so frequently.

The place is the far-northern city of Chongjin. The story starts in the early 1990s, around the time Kim Il-sung died and gave way to his son Kim Jong-il and economic collapse. Welcome to the world of: Mi-ran, the demure teacher of officially suspect ancestry who sees her young class fade away; Jun-sang, the high-flying student with whom she has a secret, decade-long, relationship; Mrs Song, the devoutly pro-regime housewife; Oak-hee, her rebellious daughter; Kim Hyuck the stunted, street-urchin survivor; and Dr Kim, the idealistic physician whose hospital patients have to bring their own beer bottles for IV drips.

Their world, long deteriorating, falls apart. Salaries dry up, electricity fails, food rations dwindle to nothing, relationships and families disintegrate. By the late 1990s, over 10% of North Koreans have perished, and a whole generation of kids are permanently damaged. The decent and law-abiding die first. In order to get through it alive, the author writes, “one had to suppress any impulse to share food.” The athletic and tall, needing more calories to function, go next.

This oral history based on interviews with defectors in the South during the 2000s is a work of heart-tugging journalism. The author herself concedes that she has no way of verifying the accounts, though attempts to cross-reference and fact-check suggest they are accurate. People pick through animal droppings for kernels of corn; workers with carts do a daily round at the train station for corpses; those with the presence of mind, resources and (rare) opportunity, try to get out.

The ethnic-Korean region across the border in China is the only hope. By the 2000s, enough desperate and hungry people have done it that a risky but lucrative business exists in trading plundered scrap or smuggling people to the other side. One by one, our six anti-heroes find themselves wading across the frozen Tumen River in the pitch dark with no idea what awaits them. For Dr Kim, the first revelation is that everything she has been told about the supremacy of her homeland is a lie: she swings open the gate to someone’s courtyard, sees – for the first time in years –a dish of white rice and meat before her, and then realizes it is for a dog.

Eventually, after various adventures, we see them emerging from a debriefing and resettlement centre near Seoul with a cash handout and lessons in how to use an ATM and read the Roman alphabet. Do they live happily ever after in prosperous, free, democratic South Korea? It seems not.

Oak-hee, for example, gets by as a mama-san in an industrial town, running (Northern) bargirls. Jun-sang finally catches up with his sweetheart Mi-ran – who, like everyone, left without a word – to find she is already married and has a baby. These refugees suffer terrible guilt. Flight is an act of desperate selfishness: you not only abandon children, spouses and parents, you condemn them to prison camp or worse. The author writes of Mi-ran: “Her sisters had paid the ultimate price so she could drive a Hyundai.” Kim Hyuck, on the other hand, has nowhere to go but up, and widow Mrs Song gets into leather pants and has her eyelids done. But Northern qualifications are useless and prospects are limited.

An epilogue brings us up to the sinking of the Cheonan last March and the latest reports from a decayed Chongjin. When they fled, the six characters mostly assumed the regime was approaching final collapse, and they would soon be able to return, maybe get relatives out of detention and help rebuild their country. Now they are stuck in the South. Demick has been careful not to overdo the emotion and keep the narrative gripping yet worthy of the LA Times, where the book has its origins. But, as the Granta edition’s cover hints, this could be a real tear-jerker of a movie.