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Shortlist: 2025 Nonfiction Award
Announcing the jury’s shortlist of five books for the Baifang Schell Book Prize: Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China or the Sinophone World.
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Shortlist: 2025 Literature Award
Presenting the jury’s shortlist of five books for the Baifang Schell Book Prize: Award for Outstanding Literature from or on China or the Sinophone World.
Keeping The Party Going
A French-language biography shows how Hua Guofeng, the oft-maligned successor to Mao, was pivotal in bridging the Party from the madness of the Cultural Revolution...
Human Literature
In the age of artificial intelligence, with publishers turning to AI translation tools, it is more meaningful than ever to read human translations of literature....
A Chinese Intellectual in Oxford
In the 1930s Chiang Yee, a Chinese writer and artist, moved to England. His work, and that of his wartime circle of Chinese literati, deserve...
Liang Hong on Youth Depression in China
An author famous for her observations on China's village life turns her attention to the mental health of its adolescents.
How Communism Won China
The CCP presents its victory in 1949 as historical inevitability, hard-won after years of struggle. A new book suggests it had more to do with...
Chinese Comedy with Jesse Appell
The bilingual comedian talks us through the traditional “xiangsheng” form of Chinese comic repartee, and explains whether Beijing can take a joke.
The Totalitarian Gene
A new theory of China’s political DNA advances a dark thesis: that totalitarianism is institutionally encoded in the nation-state, and cannot be reformed.
Writing from the Margins
From Tibet to Taiwan, Yunnan to yonder, we recommend five Spring Festival reads with a focus on the periphery.
Did Peng Zhen Rebel Against Mao?
A startling Chinese-language biography of Mao’s one-time enforcer reveals the folly of hoping that Party officials will break ranks — and the importance of revisionist...
Sir Edmund Backhouse: Decadent Imagination
Historical witnessing or salacious slash fiction? The memoirs of an English eccentric in Beijing during the last days of the Qing remain controversial, but are...
