Under the gaze of the awake dragon, by Mavi Doñate

Being a reporter validates all the points in considering yourself someone traveled. Because to narrate what happens anywhere in the world you have to have that fundamental knowledge to convey what is happening with credibility. The result may well be, as in this case, a kind of travel literature to fully discover everything that is cooked far beyond appearances and clichés.

Mavi Doñate spent several years telling us what was happening in China. A time when we were able to discover how the hackneyed "Asian giant" became the new epicenter of the world. But beyond that ethnocentric vision with which everything alien is observed, a reporter like Mavi Doñate Herranz was also in charge of bringing us that other inner China. The China where its cultural essence rests, its customs.

Because although it is true that China stands out for offering the world more shadows than lights in its economic and social development, it is necessary to have a complete overview to park prejudices that can extend to everything related to this country.

China is far away. It is the first thing a journalist stationed at an end of the world learns to which we have never paid much attention. When Mavi Doñate arrived in Beijing in the Summer 2015 With vertigo nestled in her stomach, she fulfilled a dream that had accompanied her since she was a child: to be a correspondent. What I couldn't imagine then is that I was about to star in one of the most informative stages of this first stretch of the century.

Mavi Doñate has an innate gift, a mixture of intuition and subtlety, to tell stories. His personal account of the six years that he lived in the Asian giant, made from the memories and voices that were left out of the daily information, offers us a valuable portrait of today's China. These pages run through the contrasts of a country in constant reinvention and take us from international politics to everyday life; from unbridled modernity to the most deeply rooted traditions; from the bustle in the streets for the New Year celebrations to the silence of the worst days of the pandemic, and they remind us that, for decades, we have lived with our backs to that thousand-year-old dragon that waited for its moment to wake up.

You can now buy the book "Under the gaze of the awake dragon", by Mavi Doñate, here: