When David Wilson was appointed editor, one of the best-known American sinological professors who knew both of us wrote to congratulate me, saying I had the ideal qualifications for the job. But I was surprised all the same when my name was put forward to succeed David in the editorial chair. He had made it such a distinctively academic journal, with far more footnotes and those more abstruse, than Roderick MacFarquar ever provided. The idea seemed to me a bit out of character. I had some good degrees, it was true, and I had in early days produced a few learned legal articles with all those footnotes. But I had used my degrees to stray from the legal path into journalism and writing books about East Asia.