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In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, \\u2018Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me\\u2026/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?\\u2019 Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces Du Fu\\u2019s journeys across China. He lived through war and famine, but his poetry found beauty and grandeur in the minutiae of everyday life and the natural world. Michael Wood tells Tom Sutcliffe how Du Fu\\u2019s poetry has the timeless quality of Shakespeare or Dante.

The travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa goes on a different journey into China, finding out about the lives of Africans living there today. In Black Ghosts she traces the waves of immigration from the 1950s onwards, which benefitted African students and economic migrants who found Europe closed to them. As she meets those from all walks of life \\u2013 from visa-overstayers to top surgeons \\u2013 she considers the precarity of their lives, and the ultimate power imbalance in Sino-African relations.

China is Africa's largest trading partner and in the past China has lent huge sums for infrastructure in its Belt and Road project. But as China\\u2019s economy begins to falter, the economist and China specialist George Magnus looks at the implications. Abroad many African countries are deeply indebted, and at home after 40 years of China\\u2019s seemingly irrepressible rise, the country is now facing a surge in urban youth unemployment and signs of deflation.

Producer: Katy Hickman