Books
09.17.19

Railroads and the Transformation of China

As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present. The railroads have persisted because they have been exemplary bureaucratic institutions. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past 40 years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the People’s Republic of China’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

The NYRB China Archive
02.19.19

‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

The forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate...

The NYRB China Archive
02.05.18

Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

In these pages nearly seven years ago, Timothy Snyder asked the provocative question: Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin? As useful as that exercise in moral rigor was, some think the question itself might have been slightly off. Instead, it...

Books
01.26.18

A Village with My Name

When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start up the first full-time China bureau for Marketplace, the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the United States. But for Tong, the move became much more—it offered the opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who had remained in China after his parents fled the communists six decades prior.

Viewpoint
10.20.17

Mao Wished He Could Upend the World Order. Does Xi?

Sergey Radchenko

In his October 18 speech opening the 19th Party Congress, Chinese Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping cautiously embraced the future. Eyeing thousands of Party delegates, Xi spoke for three-and-a-half hours about...

The NYRB China Archive
06.22.17

Novels from China’s Moral Abyss

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

Modern China was built on the nearly thirty ruthless years of Mao’s rule. The country’s elite—the “literati” of educated small landowners who held the empire together at the local level—was brutally eliminated. Almost everyone’s...

Sinica Podcast
07.27.15

Beijing’s Great Leap Forward: Microbrew in China

Kaiser Kuo & Carl Setzer
from Sinica Podcast

Great Leap Brewing is an institution. As one of the earliest American-style microbreweries in China, not only has the company rescued us from endless nights of Snow and Yanjing...

Books
06.02.15

China Under Mao

Andrew G. Walder

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

The NYRB China Archive
12.18.14

China’s Brave Underground Journal—II

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

In downtown Beijing, just a little over a mile west of the Forbidden City, is one of China’s most illustrious high schools. Its graduates regularly attend the country’s best universities or go abroad to study, while foreign leaders and CEOs make...

The NYRB China Archive
12.04.14

China’s Brave Underground Journal

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

On the last stretch of flatlands north of Beijing, just before the Mongolian foothills, lies the satellite city of Tiantongyuan. Built during the euphoric run-up to the 2008 Olympics, it was designed as a modern, Hong Kong–style housing district...

The NYRB China Archive
01.09.14

China: Reeducation Through Horror

Ian Buruma
from New York Review of Books

Here are two snippets from a Chinese Communist journal called People’s China, published in August 1956:

In 1956, despite the worst natural calamities in scores of years, China’s peasants, newly organized in co-

...
Books
08.27.13

Ancestral Intelligence

In Ancestral Intelligence, Vera Schwarcz has added a forceful and fascinating work to her ever-growing list of publications depicting the cultural landscape of contemporary China. Here, she has created stunning “renditions” of poems by a mid-20th century dissident poet, Chen Yinke, and has added a group of her own poems in harmony with Chen Yinke’s. Like his, her poems show a degradation of culture and humanity, in this case through comparison of classic and modern Chinese logographs.  —Antrim House {chop}

Culture
11.27.12

Remember to Tell the Truth

Maya E. Rudolph

The recording of memory brings history to life and creates a legacy of its own. In 2010, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched the Memory Project to try to shine a light on the long-shrouded memories of one of modern China’s most traumatic...

The NYRB China Archive
11.22.12

China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

Last summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea plantations in central China’s Henan province. I met a pastor, a former political prisoner, and together we made a day trip to Rooster Mountain, a onetime summer retreat...

Recording the Untold Stories of China’s Great Famine

A young man trudges doggedly around his village, notebook in hand, fringe flopping over his glasses. He goes from door to door, calling on the elderly.

The young man has one main question: Who died in our village during the Great Famine?...

A Great Leap Into the Abyss

Unlike the horrors of the Soviet gulag or the Holocaust, what happened in China during the Great Leap Forward has received little attention from the larger world, “even though it is one of the worst catastrophes in twentieth-century history,”...

The NYRB China Archive
06.21.12

China: Politics as Warfare

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

Mao’s Invisible Hand is one of those books that make one feel good about scholarship. It describes inner workings of Chinese Communist society about which few nonexperts know anything—it may even surprise the experts—and it will interest...

The NYRB China Archive
02.09.11

The Worst Man-Made Catastrophe, Ever

Roderick MacFarquhar
from New York Review of Books

When the first waves of Chinese graduate students arrived on American campuses in the early 1980s, they were excited at entering an unfettered learning environment. After the recent ravages of the Cultural Revolution, political science students...

The NYRB China Archive
12.20.10

Finding the Facts About Mao’s Victims

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

Yang Jisheng is an editor of Annals of the Yellow Emperor, one of the few reform-oriented political magazines in China. Before that, the seventy-year-old native of Hubei province was a national correspondent with the government-run...

The NYRB China Archive
02.26.09

The China We Don’t Know

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

In the late 1990s, Chinese peasants in the village of Da Fo, many of whom between 1959 and 1961 had survived the twentieth century’s greatest famine, felt free enough to install shrines to Guangong, the traditional war god of resistance to...

The NYRB China Archive
02.05.98

The Mark of Cain

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

1.

In Hong Kong’s China Club, fashionable people have lunch beneath pictures of Mao Zedong after a drink in the Long March Bar. Most of the members are refugees from Mao or the children of refugees. In Russia, or Germany, or Cambodia,...

The NYRB China Archive
03.25.93

The Party’s Secrets

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

Not long after Mao Zedong died in 1976, one of the editors of the Party’s People’s Daily said. “Lies in newspapers are like rat droppings in clear soup: disgusting and obvious.” That may have been true of the Party’s newspapers, which...

The NYRB China Archive
04.27.89

Mao and Snow

John K. Fairbank & Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

In response to:

Message from Mao from the February 16, 1989 issue

To the Editors:

Edgar Snow was...

The NYRB China Archive
12.16.71

Bringing Up the Red Guards

John Gittings
from New York Review of Books
Everyone who has studied the Chinese Cultural Revolution has his own favorite quotation from the Red Guard press. Those who want to make fun of it can always pick one of Mrs. Mao’s ridiculous pronouncements (“‘P'an T'ien-shou’ is a...