New Book on Beijing by JMSC Alum Published

Beijing: The City of Changes (Swedish title: Peking- Förändringarnas stad), a book by JMSC alumnus Jojje Olsson (MJ, 2010), was released on September 3 by the Stockholm-based publishing house Laurella & Wallin förlag.

The book Beijing: The City of Changes by JMSC alumni Jojje Olsson (MJ, 2010) has been released today by Laurella & Wallin förlag, a publishing house based in Stockholm.

The book, which is initially being published in Swedish, is a combination of personal journal, travelogue, oral history, and architecture book.  It contains interviews with Beijingers from various walks of life.

“Very few cities have been changing as fast as Beijing has in the past 30 or 40 years,” Olsson said. “I wanted to try to see the change of Beijing from the Beijingers point of view.”

Olsson, a freelance writer, has been based in Beijing since 2007, and is currently crowd-funding a book on the city’s vanishing hutongs.

“There used to be 9,000 hutongs in Beijing,” Olsson said. “Now there are only 800 left…Only in the past three to five years have people started to take measures to protect them.”