Move Fast and Break Things

Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour of 1992 has been heralded as the unofficial act that kick-started China’s economic miracle. But other voices were also calling for reform, even as Deng’s enemies in the Party resisted it. A new book separates myth from reality.

How a Chinese Student Turned Marxist

Intellectual young Chinese — once the socialist vanguard, now struggling to get by in a capitalist economy — are turning left once more. But when an ostensibly Marxist nation cracks down on labor activism, where is an idealist left to turn?

From the Archive

The Martyrdom of Liu Xiaobo

China’s dissident writer was an exemplar of iconoclastic intellectual spirit, pursuing a more humane society despite state repression. A new biography draws the arc of his rebellion and untimely death.