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Liao Yiwu: The Storyteller

Since the 1990s, Liao Yiwu has been gathering oral histories of Chinese experience, from the everyday to the extraordinary. Then in 2011, harangued by the state, he left China. How does a storyteller find new voice as a dissident?

Dancing To Prison

1983’s Strike Hard Against Crime Campaign led to the arrests of many innocent victims, caught up in a culture of fear. One of them was imprisoned for organizing an unofficial dance party — until he broke out in a daring escape.

How Little We Knew

Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn were the sole New York Times correspondents in Beijing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his memoirs, he reflects on what they got right — and wrong.

From the Archive

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?