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...
Yasheng Huang on Autocracy vs. Creativity
From its earliest imperial history, China's bureaucratic system and civil service exams have ensured homogeneity and control. But at what price?
Expulsion!
In early 2020, at the height of China’s early Covid epidemic, over a dozen American journalists were expelled from the nation. Where does that leave...
‘I’ve Been Liberated From a Cage’
Murong Xuecun, formerly one of the last dissident writers left in China, is now living in exile. How does a novelist get to the point...
A Spark Extinguished
At the height of the Great Famine in 1960, a group of students exiled to the countryside launched a magazine that dared to tell the...
Mao to Now
Communist China, once all but impenetrable, opened up only to tighten politically again. Has Xi circled back to the Mao era? And what can we...
How to Deal with the Chinese Revolution
In a 1966 essay, the American historian and father of Chinese Studies reflects on centuries-old cultural and political differences in the (then) early days of...