Books
11.20.13

Empress Dowager Cixi

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.
At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China—behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.

Jung Chang Writes ‘Groundbreaking’ Cixi Biography

The new biography will “comprehensively overturn … the conventional view of Cixi as a deeply conservative and cruel despot”, said Jonathan Cape, and show how she abolished foot-binding, developed foreign trade and diplomacy, and...

The NYRB China Archive
10.25.12

Who Was Mao Zedong?

Roderick MacFarquhar
from New York Review of Books

In Kashgar’s largest bazaar a few years ago, I spotted a pencil holder sporting an iconic Cultural Revolution image: Mao Zedong and Marshal Lin Biao smiling together. But Mao’s personally chosen heir apparent had been a nonperson since 1971, when...

Sinica Podcast
09.28.12

An Evening at the Beijing Bookworm

Jeremy Goldkorn, Ian Johnson & more
from Sinica Podcast
On September 13, Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn was delighted to chair a panel discussion at the Beijing Bookworm with authors Ian Johnson and Christina Larson, two well-known China journalists and now contributors to Chinese Characters, a...

Yu Jie on His New Biography of Liu Xiaobo

Yu Jie is one of China’s most prominent essayists and critics, with more than thirty books to his name. His latest work is a biography of his friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, that was published in Chinese in Hong Kong a few weeks...

Books
02.09.12

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World

Throughout this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong’s life and thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader’s personal experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and territorial sovereignty.

The NYRB China Archive
11.10.11

The Real Deng

Fang Lizhi
from New York Review of Books

When a scientific experiment uncovers a new phenomenon, a scientist is pleased. When an experiment fails to reveal something that the scientist originally expected, that, too, counts as a result worth analyzing. A sense of the “nonappearance of...

Books
09.15.11

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Ezra Vogel

Harvard University Press: Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century.

Books
11.01.10

Heart of Buddha, Heart of China

The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary obstacles—poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation—to become one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples and schools, and attracting crowds of students and disciples wherever he went. Now, in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, James Carter draws on untapped archival materials to provide a book that is part travelogue, part history, and part biography of this remarkable man.

The NYRB China Archive
10.28.10

A Very Superior ‘Chinaman’

Richard Bernstein
from New York Review of Books

Charlie Chan, the fictitious Chinese-American detective from Hawaii, makes his first appearance in the movie Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) looking out the window of an airplane while flying over the Pyramids and the Sphinx. We next see...

The NYRB China Archive
10.14.10

The Question of Pearl Buck

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

The announcement by the Swedish Academy in November 1938 that Pearl Buck had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature was met with sarcasm and even derision by many writers and critics. They were not impressed that this was the third choice by...

The NYRB China Archive
02.25.10

The Triumph of Madame Chiang

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

Charlie Soong, born in 1866, was a new kind of figure in Chinese history, an independent-minded youngster with an openness to the world who came to Boston from Hainan Island at the age of twelve to work in a store. At fourteen he stowed away on a...

The NYRB China Archive
05.28.09

The Mystery of Zhou Enlai

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

Through the ups and downs of the unpredictable Chinese Revolution, Zhou Enlai’s reputation has seemed to stand untarnished. The reasons for this are in part old-fashioned ones: in a world of violent change, not noted for its...

The NYRB China Archive
08.14.08

The Passions of Joseph Needham

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

It is now a little over four hundred years since a scattering of Westerners first began to try to learn the Chinese language. Across that long span, the number of scholars studying Chinese has grown, but their responses to the challenges of...

The NYRB China Archive
11.03.05

Portrait of a Monster

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

1.

It is close to seventy years since Edgar Snow, an ambitious, radical, and eager young American journalist, received word from contacts in the Chinese Communist Party that he would be welcome in the Communists’ northwest base area of...

The NYRB China Archive
02.24.00

Divine Killer

Ian Buruma
from New York Review of Books

“If there was anything Mao wouldn’t want to see, it was tears. Mao said on one occasion, ‘I can’t bear to see poor people cry. When I see their tears, I can’t hold back my own.’
“Another thing which upset Mao was bloodshed.”

...
The NYRB China Archive
08.10.95

In China’s Gulag

Jonathan D. Spence
from New York Review of Books

Near the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn includes a chapter he calls “The Muses in Gulag.” Most of the chapter describes the absurdity and uselessness of the Communist Party’s Cultural and Educational Section, but he also...

The NYRB China Archive
11.17.94

Unmasking the Monster

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

In 755 the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu wrote about the corruptions of court life:

In the central halls there are fair goddesses; An air of perfume moves with each charming figure. They clothe their guests with warm furs of sable,

...
The NYRB China Archive
02.16.89

Message from Mao

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

In Kansas City, Missouri, the family of Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China was to introduce Mao Zedong to the world, employed a black washerwoman, Crazy Mary, who hated one of her Chinese competitors. To enrage the man she taught...