Emily Hahn: China to Me
In her memoir of 1930s and 40s China, the New Yorker correspondent brought the country to life while coming down from opium binges in Shanghai...
Fox Butterfield on China in the 1970s
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author tells us about his first trip to China, and opening the Beijing bureau of "The New York Times" in...
Move Fast and Break Things
Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour of 1992 has been heralded as the unofficial act that kick-started China’s economic miracle. But other voices were also calling for...
Philip Kuhn: Sorcery in Qing China
A supernatural crisis pits an anxious autocrat against his own functionaries, when a hunt for soul-stealing sorcerers turns into a political witch-hunt among 18th-century China’s...
Where the River Reaches Home
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...
Book Talk: Edward Wong on the Edge of Empire
The New York Times journalist tells us how his father followed Mao's star in the 1950s — and how the frontiers he reported on in...
Orville Schell on China in the 1980s
The 1980s in China were an exciting, ephemeral period of opening. The Peking Hotel podcast talked to a veteran China watcher who lived, and recorded,...
Sarah Conger: Letters from the Boxer Rebellion
In 1900, the wife of an American envoy to China was caught up in the infamous siege of Beijing. The letters she wrote at the...
Perry Link on June 4 Intellectuals
Chinese intellectuals played a critical role in China’s opening during the 1980s, and the protests of 1989. In a new podcast collaboration, we talked to...
Ep. 9: Tiananmen Remembered
It has been 35 years since the violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests of 1989. We talked to an activist whose work pushes for the...
Tibet’s Cultural Revolution
The brutality of Maoist Red Guards is well documented, but lesser known in relation to Tibet, where its spiritual damage ran deep. Few records remained...
Edgar Snow: Red Star Struck
The left-wing journalist’s 1937 account of meeting Mao influenced a generation who saw China through rose-tinted glasses as late as the 1970s — until the...