Women in China have suffered abuse, silencing and erasure — despite the Communist Party’s slogans about women’s liberation. Two novels by the Wuhan writer Fang Fang show how gendered oppression persists throughout political change.

Three recent books narrate family histories that flow over time and space. But when identities evolve across borders, language holds the memory that carries us back to where we came from.

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 bury the past, there are those who seek to dig it up.