Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent books, both published in 2016, are, as author, Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin), and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford). An Associate Fellow of the Asia Society who belongs to and has served on the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, he is Editor of The Journal of Asian Studies, Advising Editor for Asia for The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a member of Dissent magazine’s Editorial Board. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in many general interest periodicals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Internazionale, TIME, Slate, The American Scholar, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently writing a book about the Boxer Uprising and the invasion by armies marching under eight different flags that crushed it, while also collaborating with Maura Cunningham on a third edition of the primer China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.
We are troubled by how often lately we experience a strange sort of China-related déjà vu when following events in the U.S.