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From Our Own Correspondent: Twenty years of change in China

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Twenty years of change in China

30/12/2023 GMT

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Twenty years of change in China

How the public face of Beijing - and the character of the nation - have been transformed

How the public face of Beijing has been transformed over two decades; Louisiana's many land losses; and fishing for paiche - the Amazonian monster that's devouring Bolivia

Pascale Harter introduces insights, analysis and experience from correspondents and reporters around the world. 

It's been twenty years since the BBC Beijing correspondent Stephen McDonnell first set foot in China to begin studying Mandarin. Back then, the city was still full of smokestack factories, old-fashioned neighbourhoods and noisy dive bars. Today, everything is far more developed - but have all the changes been positive? He reflects on the many ways in which Chinese life has been transformed - everywhere from academic institutions to long-distance trains. 

The bayous or wetlands of Louisiana are no strangers to climate disaster or environmental damage - but now they're eroding away at a frightening rate. Beth Timmins travels the waterways with a member of the Pointe-au-Cheine Native American group, to see the impact that storms, pollution and land loss are having on homesteads and ancestral sites.

And in Bolivia, the streams and lakes are alive with a different kind of concern - over a invasive species from the Peruvian Amazon which is gobbling up everything in its path. The paiche is a huge, voracious and wily fish, whose flesh and skin can be made into everything from croquettes to curtains - and for some communities, that makes it a valuable new resource. Jane Chambers goes on her own hunt for a river giant.  

Producer: Polly Hope
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Production Co-Ordinator: Gemma Ashman

(Image: A man takes a photograph of buildings at night in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, China. Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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