Imperial Twilight tells the story of the China’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the 19th-century Opium War. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable and mostly peaceful meeting of civilizations at Canton over the long term that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history.
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...
If there were just one Chinese in the world, he could be the lonely sage contemplating life and nature whom we come across on the misty mountains of Chinese scrolls. If there were two Chinese in the world, a man and a woman, lo,...
The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House threatens a significant acceleration in the rivalry between the U.S. and China.
One of Sebastian Heilmann’s major works is a comprehensive guide to how China is governed, now updated and translated into English as China’s Political System. This is a wide-ranging examination of how the system works—how it guides the...
On August 12, China once again met with man-made tragedy. Massive explosions at a chemical storage warehouse in Tianjin took the lives of 173 people and injured nearly 700, some of them seriously. The owner of the warehouse that blew up, Rui Hai...
Many years ago, the F.B.I. coined an acronym, MICE, to describe the motivations of the spy. This stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. All spies, it is argued, are drawn into espionage by some combination of these factors.
China scholar Minxin Pei reviews the high-level exchanges published in Nina Hachigian's book “Debating China: The U.S.-China Relationship in Ten Conversations”.
Thirteen knowledgeable academics trained in diverse disciplines and based around the world explore disquietude surrounding Chinese values and civic life in clusters of essays on “Legacies,” “A New Electronic Community,” “Values,” and “...
On one level Lao She’s novel is a work of science fiction—a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars—that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the prophetic work predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era’s chaos...
Navigating the significant and sometimes dangerous differences between Western and Chinese business culture is the focus of “Trouble in the Middle,” the very well-timed new book by Steven Feldman, professor of business ethics at Case...
