The Barter Trade

It is 1983 and we are in Beijing. China has just started to re-open to Western trade after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. A young Englishman finds himself caught in a dilemma: will his desire for a Chinese girl make him willing to source forbidden technology for her father? And will their relationship be used to lure him into espionage? In this part-love story, part-thriller, Chris Ruffle reveals a China now vanished beneath the veneer of modernization.

Born in Yorkshire, Chris has spent over 30 years working in Asia. He studied Chinese at Oxford University and Japanese at Sheffield. After graduation, he sold soap in Newcastle, before moving to China with a metal trading company in 1983. He has subsequently worked in finance in Tokyo, Taipei, Edinburgh and Hong Kong and planted a vineyard, with a Scottish castle in Shandong. This experience was described in his earlier memoir A Decent Bottle of Wine in China (Earnshaw Books, 2015). His play about the burning of the Summer Palace, Before the Wall, was performed at the National Museum of Scotland in 2019. Chris is married with four children.