History Archives | China Books Review

Logging Unpaid Hours

When a state-run sawmill from the Mao era privatized and eventually closed, its female workers were denied fair compensation. Its story doubles as an alternate...

Sins of the Father

Xi Zhongxun, one of China’s early communist revolutionaries, tried to balance reformist instincts with loyalty to the Party. His failure left an indelible mark on...

Vikram Seth: Hitchhiking From China to India

Before he became an award-winning novelist, the Indian writer Vikram Seth was an exchange student in China. In the 1980s, he traveled overland from Nanjing...

Wanted: Pandas, Dead or Alive

In 1928, the eldest two sons of President Theodore Roosevelt set out to capture or kill a giant panda. Their hunting trip accidentally contributed to...

Sima Qian: Records of the Grand Historian

History is supposedly written by the victors. Sima Qian, author of China's original historical classic, showed it could also be written by the condemned.

Ep. 23: Mark Kitto on Shanghai in the 2000s

The author and former media mogul explains why he chose fiction as the best way to capture Shanghai’s go-go years in his new novel.

Jane Gardam: The Old Filth Trilogy

A clever skewering of British colonials in pre-handover Hong Kong became a best-seller for its portrait of imperial ruin and class jockeying.

Liang Qichao: Reformer or Revolutionary?

The legacy of the late Qing era intellectual, once exiled in Japan, is overlooked in the West. A new collection of his essays shows a...

Ep. 22: Michael Luo on the Chinese-American Story

The New Yorker writer discusses his new history of the Chinese in America, and immigrant identity from the Chinese Exclusion Act to Donald Trump.

How to Hide a Chinese Empire

After millennia of imperial history, China today has distanced itself from the concept of empire. But the new forms of Chinese imperium are more subtle...