For most Westerners, China is an enigma. Despite centuries of commentary, it tends to remain elusive, frozen in stereotype. In very different ways, these two books attempt to break the ice: one by attacking the stereotypes themselves; the other by challenging the pernicious typecasting of its last, great imperial ruler, the Empress Dowager Cixi.Ben Chu, the author of Chinese Whispers, is the son of a Chinese immigrant and an English mother. Now the economics editor of The Independent, Chu takes the distorted murmurs of a children’s game as a metaphor for stereotypes of present-day China, attacking each with all the weapons at his disposal: a journalist’s command of recent fact; a childhood of family stories; and two years of residence in Hong Kong as a child, augmented by visi