The Bones Remember
Three new books grapple with the suppressed histories of modern China, from the Cultural Revolution to the Covid pandemic. But for every state effort to...
Professor Pangloss Goes to Shandong
Daniel A. Bell has been proposing a Confucian, meritocratic alternative to liberal democracy for decades. In a new memoir, his optimism for the China model...
The Shadow of Chiang Kai-shek
China’s nationalist former leader has a mixed legacy. Two new books present him in a revisionist light — but what inheritance did the Generalissimo really...
A Contested Century
In China, the 19th century is presented as an era of national humiliation. Two new books and an exhibition attempt to humanize it. But who...
Tears of Salt
Rural women in China have been disadvantaged and abused for millennia. A star Chinese journalist shows how in one village, little has changed.
Will We Hear the Real Stories of Chinese Female Workers Again?
A women’s rights activist, one of the "Feminist Five" detained by authorities in 2015, discusses a banned Chinese book about the lives of female factory...