“My China – Living Inside the Dragon”

About the Book

My China – Living inside the Dragon is a compelling memoir that details the author’s fifteen years of living, working, and travelling in China at a pivotal time in the country’s development. Readers will find this work to be as insightful as it is entertaining. Living in China away from large expatriate communities, both through business activities, in private life and supplemented by travel around much of the country, the author was exposed to the wide-ranging variety of Chinese culture and its differing geographical influences. These included the ways and the lifestyle of the Chinese people, with those personal observations and opinions reflected in this book. This critique is widely varied in content from daily routines to a view on the more sophisticated aspects of society with all its complexities, seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Containing credible personal views including extracts from detailed personal diary notes written during this extraordinary period of China’s truly historic growth and evolution. This transformation period during the early part of this century (2002-2017) laid the foundations for its current wealth, successes, and a platform for its continual drive towards achieving its future ambitions.

About the Author

Jeremy Bazley was born in England, later studying in Aberdeen, Scotland, and London Business School. A former national league basketball player, he entered the paper industry and progressed to senior executive positions in the UK industry, working for international companies serving global speciality markets. As such he has traveled to nearly 50 countries. In 2002 he went to work in China on behalf of a UK based entrepreneur managing a joint venture with a state-controlled company making high quality cigarette paper for the huge Chinese market. His responsibilities were to be expanded to include directorships in a variety of companies in four different Provinces. These activities brought him in contact with all aspects of life from the brushes with corridors of power in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, local government powerbases, the modern mega cities and to the starkly comparatively less affluent rural countryside.

He was awarded China’s Friendship Gold Medal in 2005, “the highest award that China was able to bestow upon a foreigner” for “outstanding contribution to China” in the presence of Premier Wen Jia Bao. He was to remain living and working in China until early 2017 when he returned to the UK to live.