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...
China-watching isn’t what it used to be. Not too long ago, the field of international China studies was dominated by a few male Westerners with an encyclopedic knowledge of China, but with surprisingly little experience living in...
The film “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant,” based on the 1995 novel of the same name by best-selling Chinese writer Yu Hua, has finally begun shooting nearly 14 years after it was first announced. But it won’t be a Chinese film...
People like to hear voices critical of the government, so social media companies can’t silence them entirely.
Thus, Los Angeles Review of Books Asia Co-editor Megan Shank and Yu exchanged Chinese-language e-mails about history’s most over- and underrated Chinese writers, the evolution of an ancient language and why Yu will never read Anna Karenina ...
The wacky and arbitrary nature of some rules, regulations and laws imposed by the local and national governments recently demonstrates the arrogance of power in China.
A little over a year ago, I went with the Chinese writer Yu Hua to his hometown of Hangzhou, some one hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, and realized that his bawdy books might not be purely fictional; their characters and situations seemed to...
