The genuine article

Moody's report, based on the interview, was quoted 172 times by media organizations across the world. The Daily Mail in the UK wrote: "Speaking to China Daily News in late February, Dr Levitt said he believed the rate of the growth had already reached its peak (in the country)…"

Moody's works have also been cited in books and other published research by global academics, such as Rethinking the Silk Road: China's Belt and Road Initiative and Emerging Eurasian Relations by Maximilian Mayer, junior-professor of international relations at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Deborah Brautigam, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University in the US, used Moody's on-site interview with a Chinese agricultural product processing company in Africa. "We are confident that Mozambique will overcome its food problems," the president of the company told Moody. Brautigam used the president's words, together with other parts of the interview in her book Will Africa Feed China?

Quotes from Moody's book reviews have also been used to promote later editions of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford University, and China's War With Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival, by Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University.

Moody interviewed leading world politicians such as former UK prime minister Tony Blair, and George Osborne, who served as chancellor of the exchequer in the cabinet of former prime minister David Cameron. He also wrote more than 150 profiles of leading thinkers such as Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, and Edmund Phelps, the Nobel Prize winner for economics.

Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, said Moody was "committed to communication, to being open-minded and presenting ideas and issues about China in English clearly, so that a wider audience could … engage with them, even if they didn't agree".

The professor added, "He will be a huge loss to those who are working hard on the dialogue between China and the outside world."