Xu Zhangrun, perhaps China’s most famous dissident legal scholar, released a letter addressed not only to China’s censors but also to the editors and publishers with whom he had worked for decades. That essay, translated below, is Letter Eight in...
Authoritarians, in China and elsewhere, normally have preferred to dress their authoritarianism up in pretty clothes. Lenin called the version of dictatorship he invented in 1921 “democratic centralism,” but it became clear,...
Chinese censorship has come a long way. During his rule in the second century B.C.E., the First Emperor of a unified China, Ying Zheng, famously quashed the intellectual diversity of his day by ‘burning the books and burying the scholars’. He not...
Robert Silvers died on Monday, March 20, after serving as The New York Review of Books Editor since 1963. Over almost six decades, Silvers cultivated one of the most interesting, reflective, and lustrous stables of China writers in the world,...
HarperCollins signs ‘historic’ deal with Shanghai publishers amid hopes it will boost British students’ performance
Desperate to find somewhere she could live and work as she wished, Xiaolu Guo moved from Beijing to London in 2002.
After a decade covering Asia for The Wall Street Journal, I devoted three years of my life to researching and writing a book about China’s one-child policy, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. This month, I’m giving away the...
Over the summer, I traveled to Wuhan to continue my series of talks with people about the challenges facing China. Coming here was part of an effort...
At the annual meeting of BookExpo America that was held in New York last May, to which most leading U.S. publishers sent representatives, state-sponsored Chinese publishers were named “guests of honor.” Commercially speaking, this...
Mr. Xi recently visited the three main newsrooms in the country to convey in unmistakable terms that journalists are expected to behave like apparatchiks.
Last week, Chinese authorities announced that as of March 10, foreign-invested companies would not be allowed...
The presumed kidnapping of the Hong Kong bookseller and British citizen Lee Bo late last year has brought international attention to the challenges faced by the Hong Kong publishing business. During a break from The New York...
The disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers in recent months has attracted international attention
The Chinese writer Liu Cixin has won the 2015 Hugo Award, the first time the prestigious prize has gone to a Chinese writer.
Someone desperately needs to call a fumigator, because China’s self-help bug is eating up the woodwork. Train station bookstores may always have served the genre’s trite pablum to bored businessmen legging it cross-country, but in recent months...
A couple of weeks ago, I received a request from a New York Times reporter to talk about publishing in China. The topic has been in the news lately, with the BookExpo in New York...
In September 2014, I was commissioned by the New York-based free speech advocacy group PEN American Center to investigate how Western authors were navigating the multibillion-dollar Chinese publishing world and its massive, but opaque, censorship...
If you happen to live in the anglophone world and aren’t closely tied to China by blood or professional ties, chances are that what you believe to be true about this country is heavily influenced by the opinions of perhaps one hundred other...
E-commerce giant to pay about $200 million for a 30% stake.
Last week, 20,000 publishers convened in New York’s Javits Center for BookExpo America (BEA), the...
A PEN American Center report found some books were expurgated by Chinese censors without the authors knowledge.
This week, a new PEN American Center report “Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship,” by Alexa...
Liu Xiaobo’s arrest was cut from the Chinese translation of Auster's novel without his knowledge.
One night in September, three hundred people crowded into the basement auditorium of an office tower in Beijing to hear a discussion between two of China’s most popular writers. One was Liu Yu, a thirty-eight-year-old political...
China’s reading public has begun to discover nonfiction books about China by foreigners.
This week on Sinica, Jeremy Goldkorn is pleased to be joined by two people navigating the English-language publishing industry as it involves China: Alice Xin Liu, Editor of Pathlight magazine, and Karen Ma, first-time author of the well...
Yiu Mantin, a retired engineer from Hong Kong, had plans to distribute a withering denunciation of Xi Jinping.
No, this week’s Sinica isn’t an attack on Element Fresh. Rather, it’s a discussion hosted by Kaiser Kuo about the new book Unsavory Elements, an anthology of stories and essays about the experiences of expats in China. And joining us for this...
Party guidance is the "soul” of China's moves to privitize and promote industries that can spread soft power abroad.
Like any editor in the United States, I tweaked articles, butted heads with the sales department, and tried to extract interesting quotes out of boring people. Unlike my American counterparts, however, I was offered red envelopes...
As any self-respecting booklover in Taipei knows, you can immerse yourself in the endless variety of glossy printed books at the Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua South Road. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Moreover, the flagship store near Taipei...
While fashion labels are spending more on magazine advertising in the United States, they’re pouring even more money into magazines across mainland China.
Has China’s most famous blogger finally been brought to heel? Han Han, writer, car racer, and China’s youth opinion leader, recently sealed a deal with massive Chinese Internet company Tencent and founded an e-journal, “One.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon and Beijing’s biggest bookstore is preparing for a major event: the launch of a new book by a bestselling American author, who will be on hand for the occasion. Six-foot banners on the sidewalk out front announce the talk...
When I arrived at the London Book Fair on Monday, I saw a huge sign outside showing a cute Chinese boy holding an open book with the words underneath him: “China: Market Focus.” The special guest of this year’s fair was the Chinese Communist...
Dissertations dominate the lives of doctoral students. A PhD candidate spends years researching, writing, and editing his or her dissertation, inching toward the day when the whole process is finished. Finally, he or she can leave behind the...
