Tiananmen at Twenty-Five: "Victory Over Memory"
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an...
Reconsidering Marco Polo
Even the harshest critics of Polo’s historicity admit that he got some thing right, and must have had some valid sources. The question is whether he was an eyewitness and participant in the history and culture he described, and, most importantly...
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,”...
Portrait of a Monster
from New York Review of Books1.
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...
Beginning the Journey: China, the United States, and the WTO
The main finding of this report is that both the United States and China will run risks as Beijing moves ahead with membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), but the potential payoffs for both countries are well worth it. It also points...
The Beginning of the End
from New York Review of BooksFailed rebellions are often like failed marriages: former partners and their friends blame the other side for what went wrong; old tensions are magnified; the past is rewritten; feuding camps are formed. This pretty much sums up the situation...
Squaring the Chinese Circle
from New York Review of Books“China,” according to Lucien Pye, “is a civilization pretending to be a state.”1 This is an elegant formulation of an idea which eventually occurs to most people who have studied, read about, or traveled...
The Empire Strikes Back
from New York Review of Books“President Bush still regards you as his friend, a friend forever,” Brent Scowcroft told Deng Xiaoping in Beijing on December 10, six months and seven days after Deng ordered the People’s Liberation Army into Tiananmen Square. In Washington, the...
China on My Mind
from New York Review of BooksAlmost forty years have passed since John King Fairbank’s first book, The United States and China, was published in 1948. A careful blending of Chinese institutional history with diplomatic history, the book proved immediately popular...
Our Mission in China
from New York Review of BooksThis is the bicentennial year for contacts between the United States and China, since it was in 1784 that the merchant ship Empress of China sailed to Canton from New York. It was an auspicious beginning, at least for the American...
China: Mulberries and Famine
from New York Review of BooksNear the beginning of the Chinese “Classic of Historical Documents” (the Shujing), where the doings of early mythic rulers are being described, there is a brief passage that stands out among the others for its precision and clarity. The...