The NYRB China Archive
03.10.22

The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei

Orville Schell
from New York Review of Books

As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that...

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...
The NYRB China Archive
10.23.69

Mao and the Writers

Martin Bernal
from New York Review of Books

By the 1930s the intolerable quality of life and the inefficiency, corruption, and conservatism of the Kuomintang had driven nearly every serious creative writer in China to the Left. Most turned toward some form of Marxism, which not only...