London | In the late 1990s, when a teenager named Keyu Jin arrived in New York from China for a high-school exchange program, she found that although Americans were keenly interested in her fast-emerging country they knew remarkably little about it.

“I was very surprised by how narrow the view on China was, and there were only a selected few things that seemed to represent China, when we were doing so many amazing things transforming the country,” she says.