The NYRB China Archive
06.22.17
Novels from China’s Moral Abyss
from New York Review of Books
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 personal life was...
Sinica Podcast
05.12.17
What It Takes to Be a Good China-Watcher
from Sinica Podcast
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 country or...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.17.14Blood-Drenched Chinese Story to Finally Grace Big Screen … in Korea
WSJ: China Real Time Report
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.
Culture
02.21.14
Stranger Than Fiction
In the short twenty years since Yu Hua, a fifty-three-year-old former dentist, has been writing, China has undergone change enough for many lifetimes. His country’s transformations and what they leave in their wake have become the central theme of...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.06.14The Censorship Pendulum
New York Times
People like to hear voices critical of the government, so social media companies can’t silence them entirely.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.06.13The Challenges of Conveying Absurd Reality: An Interview with Yu Hua
Los Angeles Review of Books
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&...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.17.13In China, Power Is Arrogant
New York Times
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.
The NYRB China Archive
10.11.12
An Honest Writer Survives in China
from New York Review of Books
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...