For those seriously interested in what a BBC News correspondent based in Beijing recorded and reported during Deng Xiaoping’s pre-Tiananmen years of Jingji Gaige and Dui Wai Kaifang (Economic Reform and Opening Up), here’s a full list of raw cassettes collected during my time in China. The cassettes have all been digitised, and listed in … Read more …
As this website has been updated, in April 2025, I’m now making accessible literally ALL the raw cassettes I recorded first as BBC World Service Central Europe Correspondent based in Vienna (1981-84), then as BBC Radio China Correspondent (1984-1987), and on to BBC World Service Diplomatic Correspondent (1988-1992) as I covered the end of the … Read more …
Click the button below to be taken to 600 hours of raw cassette recordings from Mark’s work as BBC China and then WS Diplomatic Correspondent, 1984-1992. I’ve renamed them with year and country, and given the substantial size of the archive, they’re hosted online on OneDrive rather than here on the WordPress blog. If you … Read more …
It was tremendous fun discussing with Ian Sanders of Cold War Conversations my years first as student in East Germany and the Soviet Union in 1971/72, and then covering the communist world for the next 20 years for Reuters and the BBC. Click the screenshots below for the recordings – first covering my student days … Read more …
I’m not quite sure how this post will unfold, other than to know that a) like my despatches from Beijing or the Cold War’s diplomatic frontline it will probably be too long, and that b) some old BBC friends and colleagues may already be sighing, “Oh dear, there he goes again.” Prompted by Fergal Keane … Read more …
Isn’t Google amazing. I have all my photos from all time (approaching 40,000 now, including all the old ones scanned in) on my Google Drive, and just typing bicycle in the search box brought up hundreds of two-wheeler images from the very earliest days. Right back to my first trike at Duckshole farm near Holt in … Read more …
A good 20 years ago now, a clumsy au pair in London dropped the detachable head of our elegant Tianjin clay figurine lady, and her face smashed into unattractive pieces. Now, after her owners’ own marital journey of breakage and reconstruction, our Lady of Tianjin has finally been returned to amazing beauty by the National … Read more …
So, Raven is readied, panniers, tent and bags test-mounted and photographs taken for an article on the pending adventure scheduled for next Thursday’s local Standard newspaper in the Cotswolds. Fame at last… Below right is how my study looked with everything piled up in one great heap before being packed. (Note that Myshkin, aka Wussum … Read more …
On this page, I’ll list clickable links to a selection of serious, heavyweight, and very much less so, radio features from the first couple of years in Beijing, when I was trying to capture the normality of Chinese life. It all went down rather well with Radio Four, and especially the Today Programme, which – … Read more …
In reviewing and posting radio pieces from my time as BBC Correspondent in Beijing, I am realising/being reminded just how much of my feature reporting was about ordinary Chinese life – not the heavy politics and economics and social issues of my straight despatches, but more personal, perhaps a touch naive too. For these were … Read more …