Essay Archives | China Books Review

Eileen Chang’s ‘Lovable Yet Miserable Times’

Eileen Chang’s fiction has reached almost mythic status, yet not long ago it was nearly forgotten. The story of her publishing history is almost as...

J. G. Ballard’s Dystopian Shanghai

How the English novelist J. G. Ballard’s boyhood in war-torn Shanghai influenced his darkest fiction.

A New World Disorder?

With Pax Americana crumbling, many countries in the Global South are turning to Pax Sinica as an alternative. So what are Chinese thinkers' vision for...

The Missing Pages

Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained...

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...

How China’s Independent Bookstores Survive

Even as restrictions tighten in Beijing, independent bookstores in Chengdu have flourished — showing how offline community and public debate can thrive. But it’s hard.

What Happened to China Travel Guides?

Guidebooks for China boomed from the 1980s to the 2010s. Then the Covid pandemic hit. With fewer visitors, and travel guides going out of print...

Dancing in Chains

Squeezed by both political and commercial pressures, China’s book publishers face an existential crisis. How can the industry survive, let alone publish anything interesting?

Life On a Blacklist

A scholar on China reflects on the moment he was denied access to the country — and the compromises others must make to maintain it.

Pai Hsien-yung’s New York

In “New Yorkers,” fiction writer Pai Hsien-yung captured the in-betweenness of immigrant identity in America. His stories still resonate with those who followed in his...

Is China’s Post-1978 Legal System a Mirage?

The scholar of Chinese law argues that post-Mao legal reform — as aided by Western lawyers including him — may yet prove enduring. Its critics...

Don’t Write Off the Mao Dun Literature Prize

Never mind the Booker, Pulitzer and National Book Award — China’s Mao Dun Prize, despite its behind-the-times reputation, can shift the reading habits of a...

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