It was official business that brought Zhou Qiang, Communist Party chief of Hunan province, to Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this year, but it was a personal passion that prompted his sole request as a tourist to this southern United States city. With only four hours of free time before he had to leave, Zhou asked to see the home of Margaret Mitchell, a local author with just one novel to her name. That book, published 75 years ago this week, was Gone With the Wind, or, as it is known in China, Luan Shi Jia Ren.
A tour of Mitchell's house was hastily arranged and followed a ceremony involving Sany Heavy Industry, the largest heavy-equipment manufacturer in China, which has its North American headquarters in Georgia.
Gone With the Wind was published 75 years after the start of the American civil war, when the scars of the conflict were still raw.
'I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn't,' Mitchell said of her book.
Mitchell's mother had taken her to see mansions that were ruined during the war. She explained how the wealthy owners of these former plantations had seen their world explode under them and that her daughter's world would explode, too, unless she learned how to use her wits.
Gone With the Wind appeals to people who believe adversity can be overcome. Few of us will ever have to toil in cotton fields or shoot a looting soldier, but what's sustained the book as a much-loved piece of fiction - the second most popular book in the US, behind the Bible, according to a recent poll - is the belief that we could, under similar circumstances, endure what Scarlett endured.
'[Zhou] knew the book very well,' says Brandi Wigley, senior manager of community initiatives for the Atlanta History Centre and Margaret Mitchell House. 'He told me that he wished more younger people would read the novel. He said he has always loved the story.'