Perry Link is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. He has published widely on modern Chinese language, literature, and popular thought, and is a member of the Princeton China Initiative, Human Rights Watch/Asia, and other groups that support human rights. He has authored, among others, the books The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (Norton and Co., 1992); coauthored Chinese course books; and edited several books including Two Kinds of Truth: Stories and Reportage from China by Liu Binyan (Indiana University Press, 2006). He coedited, with Andrew J. Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People—In Their Own Words by Zhang Liang (Public Affairs Press, 2001). His published essays include “Corruption and Indignation: Windows into Popular Chinese Views of Right and Wrong” for the American Enterprise Institute’s De Tocqueville on China project in 2007, and “Whose Assumptions Does Xu Bing Upset, and Why?” in Persistence and Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing (Princeton University Press, 2006). His latest book is An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard , 2013).
Last Updated: August 23, 2016
The NYRB China Archive
08.19.10Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing’s Seven Secrets
from New York Review of Books
While people in the U.S. and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by WikiLeaks of classified U.S. documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in...
The NYRB China Archive
05.24.10Talking About Tibet: An Open Dialogue Between Chinese Citizens and the Dalai Lama
from New York Review of Books
Following is an English translation of an Internet dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens that took place on May 21. The exchange was organized by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese intellectual known for his writing on Tibet and for theorizing...
The NYRB China Archive
02.17.10Locked Out: Beijing’s Border Abuse Exposed
from New York Review of Books
On February 12, Chinese human rights campaigner Feng Zhenghu was allowed to return to Shanghai after a 92-day stay in diplomatic limbo at the Tokyo Narita airport. Having left China last April to visit family in Japan, Feng, who is a Chinese citizen...
The NYRB China Archive
01.27.10What Beijing Fears Most
from New York Review of Books
On December 29, four days after being sentenced to eleven years in prison for “subversion of state power,” the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo filed an appeal to a higher court. For many familiar with the Chinese regime, the decision seemed quixotic: it...
The NYRB China Archive
12.21.09The Trial of Liu Xiaobo: A Citizens’ Manifesto and a Chinese Crackdown
from New York Review of Books
One year ago, the Chinese literary critic and political commentator Liu Xiaobo was taken away from his home in Beijing by the Chinese police, who held him without charge for six months, then placed him under formal arrest for six more months, on the...
The NYRB China Archive
12.07.09Copenhagen: China’s Oppressive Climate
from New York Review of Books
As the UN’s Climate Change Conference opens in Copenhagen this week, much attention will focus on China and the United States, who are, by a wide margin, the world’s two leading emitters of greenhouse gases. The success of the conference will depend...
The NYRB China Archive
10.21.09Obama’s Bad Bargain with Beijing
from New York Review of Books
As the echoes of China’s spectacular military parade on October 1 were subsiding, officials in the Obama administration, in quieter settings in Washington, D.C., were telling representatives of the Dalai Lama that the president was not going to meet...
The NYRB China Archive
10.07.09China at 60: Who Owns the Guns
from New York Review of Books
The most striking feature of China’s October 1 celebration of sixty years of Communist rule was the spectacular and tightly choreographed military parade in the center of Beijing. The display of crass militarism—paralleled only by parades in...
The NYRB China Archive
01.15.09China’s Charter 08
from New York Review of Books
The document below, signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak intellectuals...
The NYRB China Archive
04.03.08
He Would Have Changed China
from New York Review of Books
In trying to make sense of their country’s turbulent modern history, Chinese intellectuals sometimes resort to counterfactual speculation. How might things have been different if one or another accidental event had happened differently? For decades...
The NYRB China Archive
11.16.06Chinese Shadows
from New York Review of Books
In 1920 a young Chinese poet named Guo Moruo published a poem called “The Sky Dog,” which begins:Ya, I am a sky dog!I have swallowed the moon,I have swallowed the sun.I have swallowed all the planets,I have swallowed the entire universe.I am I!After...
The NYRB China Archive
02.09.06
Liu Binyan (1925-2005)
from New York Review of Books
Liu Binyan, the distinguished Chinese journalist and writer who died of cancer on December 5, 2005, in exile in New Jersey, at the age of eighty, was an inveterate defender of the poor and the oppressed, a man with a powerful analytic mind. But the...