Jonathan Fenby's latest book Tiger Head Snake Tails is his sixth with a China theme. [Wang Jing / China Daily]

Author believes China's growth spurt may have been the easiest part, Andrew Moody reports.

Jonathan Fenby says it is very easy to have one opinion about China in the morning and then an opposing one in the afternoon.

The 69-year-old was back in Beijing to promote his new book Tiger Head Snake Tails: China Today, How It Got There and Where It Is Heading.

It wrestles with many of the current issues facing the world's second-largest economy that continue to confound China experts.

"I have a couple of pages which may not make me very popular with eminent commentators who write about China when I say that the China bulls and bears are both right and wrong at the same time," he says.

Fenby, tanned from lecturing on a cruise that took in Vietnam and Singapore is a man of prodigious energy.

The former editor of the South China Morning Post and The Observer in the UK, has written 12 books in 14 years, and Tiger Head Snake Tails is his sixth with a China theme.

Since coming out with the Penguin History of Modern China in 2008, he has polished off a comprehensive biography of Charles de Gaulle and produced his latest 400-page one volume state-of-the-China-nation account.

Apart from this, he works three weeks each month in his day job as China director of Trusted Sources, an emerging-market research body, which also takes him all round the world.

"People say that I must do without sleep like Margaret Thatcher. I actually sleep quite a lot. Last night I slept for 10 hours," he says.

He says the key to his prolific writing is to work on weekends from early Saturday to Sunday evening, with stops for his regular sessions of the French card game Belote with neighbors in his London mansion apartment.

"If you get up at 7 am on a Saturday, you can do an awful lot. You need to resist going on the Internet. That is the greatest problem. If you want to check the spelling of a name, you often ask yourself whether you should go into Hotmail as well and the answer has to be 'No, no, no' because it is too dangerous," he laughs.

What compelled him to write Tiger Head Snake Tails?

"There have been a number of good books on specific aspects of China, political, social and economic, regional and environmental but it suddenly occurred to me there was no one book that brought all this together," he says.

The book presents the many challenges of China and argues that the next 30 years are going to be far more difficult than the period since reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.

"We are getting into a position where labor rates are going up so a low-cost wage economy becomes more difficult, capital is becoming less easy for a lot of entrepreneurs and external markets are becoming much less welcoming, partly because of the recession in Europe and soggy growth in America. There is also this political push back from the French and others, saying that all our jobs are going to China and that this is wrong."

Fenby insists, however, that whatever the difficulties China might encounter, it is not going to go off the rails.

"No, it can't. Because of this," he says, as he points to the 21st-century ambience around us as we sip morning coffee.

Fenby believes the reforms put in place by Deng Xiaoping run very deep. While Mao Zedong changed China, he writes in the book, Deng changed the world.

"At the end of the day, you have got a system - as Deng set it up in the 1970s - that has the resources and ambition to keep it all going whatever," he says.

Fenby, who has the distinction of being both a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the UK and also the Chevalier of the French Order of Merit. The son of a distinguished regional newspaper journalist, he began his career at Reuters in Paris after leaving New College, Oxford.

With that international news agency, he covered the Vietnam War, before going on to be deputy editor of The Guardian and then editor of The Observer.

It was his sudden dismissal from the world's oldest Sunday newspaper that led him to China. He was headhunted by the South China Morning Post to be its editor in 1995.

"I was 53 and had never been to China before I went to Hong Kong then," he says.

Fenby says it is very difficult to make predictions about China, adding that many are too simplistic.

"Of course China's effect on the world will be very important, but the more important question is perhaps the impact of China's rise on China itself," he says.

He also dismisses the notion that China is unique among nations in that it is a Confucian civilization state rather than a nation state.

"China is a Confucian state much in the same way as Britain is still a Christian nation. I think the society has become so disparate, so international and so fragmented," he says.

Fenby's next project is to write a biography of Ferdinand Lesseps, the French diplomat behind the Suez Canal, which will take him to Egypt and northern France to do research.

Meanwhile, he will keep a close eye on developments.

"I think whether the glass is half full or empty depends on your mindset. I had a conference call with a Latin American client recently who said my outlook for China in 2012 was bearish," he recalls.

"I gave the same analysis to someone later in the day, and he said it was the most bullish analysis he had heard in a long time."

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn.