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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Meet Mr. China!

By James Fallows

Feb 6 2009, 6:14 AM ET

Several times I've written in the Atlantic about the Irish businessman Liam Casey, who in the past few years has built an outsourcing empire in the southern Chinese manufacturing center of Shenzhen. (Original Atlantic article here. Slideshow including snapshots of Casey here.)

In these articles I gave Casey the jokey honorific "Mr. China," derived from Tim Clissold's hilarious book of the same name. The title is a campy way of indicating the person most in touch with the Chinese trends of this exact moment.



BBC Radio 4 has just posted a 28-minute interview with Casey, called "The Remarkable Mr. China."  They make you work to get at the interview: at least from outside the UK, you have to listen within the next seven days, before it disappears, and it is compatible only with RealPlayer.* Nonetheless, if you've been asking yourself, "Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to talk with Mr. China down in Shenzhen," you now have a chance to satisfy your curiosity. Thanks to Hillel Schwartz for tip.

Mr. China (right) shopping for art in Shenzhen's famed Dafen factory art district last year:

http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r96/jfallows/DSCN0043.jpg

* You can download RealPlayer free from links at the BBC site, but as anyone who has tried it knows, its installation is very aggressive and can easily make RP more of an in-your-face presence in your life than you intend. With careful configuration you can tame it and hear this interview.

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