At China Books Review, we occasionally carry videos of book talks held at Asia Society in New York, our co-publisher. Previous talks include Yasheng Huang on autocracy vs. creativity, and our launch event on three generations of China watchers. Below is the latest event, on March 11, with editor Alec Ash discussing his own newly published title.
What is it like to radically change your life? Burnt out by urbanization and its discontents, some Chinese are doing just this, “reverse migrating” from the bustling cities to the countryside of southwest China in Dali, Yunnan province — seeking an alternative way of life in the quest to “lie flat” in “Dalifornia.”
The Mountains Are High is a reported memoir of a year living in a quiet mountain village in Dali in 2020, after leaving the honk and buzz of Beijing. Originally home to the Bai people, Dali has become a richly diverse community of internal migrants of all ages and backgrounds, disillusioned with China’s high-pressure urban life (and authoritarian politics), instead seeking personal freedoms and an escape from the polis, be it in spirituality, environmentalism, psychedelic raves or just the simple life — hiding away from the state, and from modernity, where “the mountains are high, the emperor far away.”
In this book talk, Ash discusses his first year of life in Dali among these neighbors — from hippies to dissidents, lucid dreamers to Buddhist monks — and delves into the social trends of tangping (lying flat), how life priorities have shifted in China post-Covid, and the many meanings of freedom. He was joined in conversation with Barbara Demick, award-winning author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha:
Speakers
Alec Ash is a writer focused on China, and editor of China Books Review. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (2016), following the lives of young Chinese in Beijing, and The Mountains Are High (2024) about city escapees in Dali, Yunnan. His articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic and elsewhere. Born and educated in Oxford, England, he lived in China from 2008-2022, and is now based in New York.
Barbara Demick is an author and foreign correspondent, who was based in Beijing for The Los Angeles Times from 2007-14, and in previous postings covered Korea, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Nothing to Envy (2010), which won the Baillie Gifford Award, Eat the Buddha (2020) and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove (2025). Her work has also won the Overseas Press Club’s human rights reporting award.
A significant minority are leaving the cities … dissatisfied with the promise as much of capitalism as of the communist state. They are burnt out, overworked, don’t see social mobility, and want to opt out.
Alec Ash
A video of this talk was also published at Asia Society. ∎
