Ep. 15: Paul French on Wallis Simpson’s China Year
In 1924, an American socialite — who would later cause a scandal by marrying Britain's King — traveled the length of China. Her experience was...
Dancing To Prison
1983’s Strike Hard Against Crime Campaign led to the arrests of many innocent victims, caught up in a culture of fear. One of them was...
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on China from 1988 to Now
The Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalists reflect back on their time in Beijing three decades ago, and what has changed since.
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 Bringing the New York Times to China
The veteran journalist and author tells us about his first trip to China, and how he opened the Beijing bureau of "The New York Times"...
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...
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 Visiting China in the 1980s
The 1980s in China were an exciting, ephemeral period of opening. The Peking Hotel podcast talked to a China watcher who lived, and recorded, what...
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 Getting to Know 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...