A washed up TV reporter stumbles onto a corruption scandal in Western China. Pursued through the desert by a psychotic spin-doctor and a world-weary cop, he discovers the real China: illegal metal mines, a fashion-crazed gang of girl bikers, a whole commune of Tiananmen Square survivors and the up-market sleaze-joints of Beijing.En route, he clashes with a stellar cast of people-traffickers, prostitutes and TV execs. But then the unquiet dead begin to intervene: ghosts from his own past and the past of Chinese Communism; the'spirits that hover three feet above our heads' of Chinese folklore.Rare Earth is a story about love, journalism, ghosts, metallurgy, vintage militaria and large motorcycles set in the badlands of Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. It is about the west's inability to understand the East; one man's epic journey across a dying landscape, where'thousands of pairs of eyes peer beyond grimy windowpanes into the moonless sky, looking for something better.'

Paul Mason is the award winning economics editor of the BBC current affairs show Newsnight and author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, an account of the 2008 financial crisis.