The New York Review of Books China Archive is a collaborative project of ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books. It contains an easily searchable collection of China-related essays and reviews that The New York Review of Books has published since its founding in 1963.
The NYRB China Archive
10.03.24
China’s Iconoclast
from New York Review of Books
I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link, the leading Western chronicler of dissent in China, and a Chinese colleague who writes anonymously as Wu Dazhi is the definitive biography of the most famous dissident in the nearly...
The NYRB China Archive
12.07.23
A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China
from New York Review of Books
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting...
The NYRB China Archive
10.04.23
China’s Foreclosed Possibilities
from New York Review of Books
Like other authors of recent Western histories of this period, Dikötter attributes most of the early initiative in the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing to the Chinese, not to Nixon. Beijing’s preoccupation with...
The NYRB China Archive
04.06.23
Appeasement at the Cineplex
from New York Review of Books
Although Beijing and Hollywood inhabit political and cultural universes that have little in common, they are similar in one important respect: both have expended vast amounts of energy, time, and capital confecting imaginary universes. The Chinese...
The NYRB China Archive
01.04.23
Mysterious Displays of Will
from New York Review of Books
Nadine Hwang led a dauntless life. What she did over the course of the twentieth century makes her sound like a superheroic projection from the twenty-first: a queer, Chinese fighter pilot and lawyer with a sword-dancing act who spoke at least four...
The NYRB China Archive
10.06.22
Little Town on the Prairie
from New York Review of Books
Liang Village sits on the edge of the North China Plain, about 650 miles south of Beijing. The area was settled by migrants who came in waves throughout Chinese history, attracted by the fertile soil in what was traditionally one of the country’s...
The NYRB China Archive
09.20.22
China: Back to Authoritarianism
from New York Review of Books
Over the past decade, Xi has become a transformational figure on a par with the two other giants of Chinese Communist Party rule: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Like them, he has reversed earlier policies, in Xi’s case the relative openness that his...
The NYRB China Archive
08.18.22
Hong Kong from the Inside
from New York Review of Books
In November 2019, some one thousand young pro-democracy protesters occupied the campus of Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University, which is located at a crucial junction of two highways and the cross-harbor tunnel. They disrupted traffic for more than a...
The NYRB China Archive
03.10.22
The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei
from New York Review of Books
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it...
The NYRB China Archive
10.21.21
The CCP’s Culture of Fear
from New York Review of Books
One way to measure China’s urge to transform itself is to note how often the word new has been used by Chinese leaders. In 1902, the concept of the “new citizen” took hold in Liang Qichao’s New Citizen Journal. 20 years later, the May Fourth...
The NYRB China Archive
10.04.21
Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards
from New York Review of Books
In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou Hospital No. 8 in Wuhan. Dressed in an all-white infectious disease suit, the only equipment he carried...
The NYRB China Archive
08.09.21
Xi’s China, the Handiwork of an Autocratic Roué
from New York Review of Books
At this crucial juncture, China’s political, business, and academic elites revealed a core of craven self-interest and vacuous hypocrisy. The display was even further evidence of the degraded state of our nation’s public life, one that has long been...
The NYRB China Archive
05.22.21
The Protest Families of Pro-Democracy Hong Kong
from New York Review of Books
They met at a crossroads in October 2019. That day, Hong Kong’s people came out in their tens of thousands, to protest the proposed Extradition Bill, which would allow the territory to detain and transfer citizens to mainland China. Hoikei was there...
The NYRB China Archive
01.13.21
Seeing the CCP Clearly
from New York Review of Books
The split between the two friends is a small example of a wider disagreement between “Trump boosters” and “Trump critics” in the Chinese dissident community. The rift is plainly visible both inside and outside China and is likely to persist in one...
The NYRB China Archive
01.12.21
China’s First Big #MeToo Case Tests the Party
from New York Review of Books
In November, a court at last notified Zhou Xiaoxuan, known more commonly by her nickname, Xianzi, that it would try her case, a civil lawsuit filed in 2018 against television host Zhu Jun, who she alleges sexually harassed her. But when the trial...
The NYRB China Archive
11.19.20
China’s Clampdown on Hong Kong
from New York Review of Books
Hong Kongers demonstrated about everything from the removal of hawkers selling fish balls during the Chinese New Year to fare increases on mass transit (which had also provoked protests under British rule). But mostly they have demonstrated against...
The NYRB China Archive
10.08.20
How Did China Beat Its COVID Crisis?
from New York Review of Books
The coronavirus was a big deal; it was something that I (and many other smug foreigners) misjudged but that the Chinese authorities accurately saw as a public health crisis. The thought and effort that went into the flyer were especially impressive...
The NYRB China Archive
03.26.20
The Flowers Blooming in the Dark
from New York Review of Books
It’s possible to identify another period that might surpass the 1980s as China’s most open: a 10-year stretch beginning around the turn of this century, when a rich debate erupted over what lay ahead. As in the past, many of those speaking out were...
The NYRB China Archive
03.24.20
‘Everyone Is Isolated’: An Interview with Yuan Ling
Yuan Ling is a border-crosser: between village and city, academia and journalism, mainstream and underground—a writer who is sometimes censored but usually measured (or ambiguous) enough to be published in China.
The NYRB China Archive
03.02.20
Evacuation from China, Quarantine in the UK: A COVID-19 Dispatch
from New York Review of Books
I had missed the first British evacuation when my embassy didn’t get me a permit for the checkpoints in time, but I was trying to make the second. My send-off gifts: two instant-noodle pots (hot food safer than cold), a tub of alcohol-soaked cotton...
The NYRB China Archive
02.04.20
Stuck in Central China on Coronavirus Lockdown
from New York Review of Books
Before Shiyan, a city in Hubei province, went into quarantine, the sum of 30 yuan (about $4) could buy two cabbages, enough spring onions for two soups, a large white radish, two lettuces, a potato, and 10 eggs. Not any more. Wanting to record the...
The NYRB China Archive
11.26.19
How China’s Rise Has Forced Hong Kong’s Decline
from New York Review of Books
For nearly six months, people around the world have watched the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong with one question in the back of their minds: When will Beijing lose patience and the repression begin? Journalists expecting to cover Tiananmen II...
The NYRB China Archive
10.24.19
The Eastern Jesus
from New York Review of Books
Over the past few years, the authorities in Beijing have given churches across the country orders to “Sinicize” their faith. According to detailed five-year plans formulated by both Catholic and Protestant organizations, much of this process...
The NYRB China Archive
09.26.19
What Holds China Together?
from New York Review of Books
It’s easy to put oneself in the minds of government propagandists and feel that things are going quite well in China. Yes, faraway Hong Kong is in crisis, with huge anti-government protests going on since March. But it was always going to be tough...
The NYRB China Archive
07.13.19
A Radical Realist View of Tibetan Buddhism at the Rubin
from New York Review of Books
For many, Buddhism is “a religion of peace” and its adaptation for political purposes, even to inspire violence, feels flat-out wrong. That makes the exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art, “Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism,” an...
The NYRB China Archive
06.27.19
China’s ‘Black Week-end’
from New York Review of Books
When Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun began publishing articles last year criticizing the government’s turn toward a harsher variety of authoritarianism, it seemed inevitable that he would be swiftly silenced. But then, remarkably, dozens of...
The NYRB China Archive
05.14.19
‘One Seed Can Make an Impact’: An Interview with Chen Hongguo
from New York Review of Books
Chen Hongguo might be China’s most famous ex-professor. Five years ago, he quit his job at the Northwest University of Politics and Law in Xi’an, publishing his resignation letter online after administrators prohibited him from inviting free-...
The NYRB China Archive
05.09.19
China: A Small Bit of Shelter
from New York Review of Books
At night, a spotlight illuminates four huge characters on the front of the Great Temple of Promoting Goodness in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in northwestern China: mi zang zong feng, “The Esoteric Repository of the Faith’s Traditions.”...
The NYRB China Archive
04.19.19
A Specter Is Haunting Xi’s China: ‘Mr. Democracy’
from New York Review of Books
Something strange is happening in Xi Jinping’s China. This is supposed to be the perfect dictatorship, the most sustained period of authoritarianism since the Cultural Revolution ended more than 40 years ago, a period of such damning disappointment...
The NYRB China Archive
02.19.19
‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue
from New York Review of Books
The forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate...
The NYRB China Archive
02.07.19
‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims
from New York Review of Books
In a courtroom in Zharkent, Kazakhstan, in July 2018, a former kindergarten principal named Sayragul Sauytbay calmly described what Chinese officials continue to deny: a vast new gulag of “de-extremification training centers” has been created for...
The NYRB China Archive
01.30.19
‘My Responsibility to History’: An Interview with Zhang Shihe
from New York Review of Books
“Tiger Temple” (Laohu Miao) is the nom de guerre of Zhang Shihe, one of China’s best-known citizen journalists and makers of short video documentaries, many of them profiling ordinary people he met during extraordinarily long bike rides through...
The NYRB China Archive
11.23.18
The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam
from New York Review of Books
Last month, I spent several days at the Forbidden City, the gargantuan palace in the middle of Beijing where China’s emperors ruled the land for nearly five hundred years. I was there to attend a conference on religion and power in imperial China,...
The NYRB China Archive
11.08.18
In Search of the True Dao
from New York Review of Books
Last year I got a call from Abbess Yin, an old friend who runs a Daoist nunnery near Nanjing. I’ve always known her as supernaturally placid and oblique, but this time she was nervous and direct: a group of Germans were coming to spend a week...
The NYRB China Archive
09.27.18
Mission Impossible
The name of George C. Marshall, one of only six U.S. Generals of the Army in modern times, is indelibly linked with the Marshall Plan that was critical to the rebuilding of Western Europe after the devastation of World War II. When he spoke at...
The NYRB China Archive
09.27.18
Breaking Eggs Against a Rock
from New York Review of Books
Blood Letters is an important new biography of Lin Zhao, the journalist who was executed 50 years ago this spring for criticizing the Communist Party’s misrule in the 1950s and 1960s. After years of imprisonment, torture, and mental deterioration,...
The NYRB China Archive
06.28.18
One Decent Man
from New York Review of Books
The thought of hearing back from Simon Leys filled me with dread. It was late 1976 and I was an exchange student at a university in Shenyang, in northeast China. I’d only recently learned that Pierre Ryckmans, the man who had taught me Chinese, was...
The NYRB China Archive
06.18.18
‘Ruling Through Ritual’: An Interview with Guo Yuhua
from New York Review of Books
Guo Yuhua is one of China’s best-known sociologists and most incisive government critics. A professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, she has devoted her career to researching human suffering in Chinese society, especially that of peasants, the...
The NYRB China Archive
06.07.18
The Fantastic Truth About China
from New York Review of Books
In 1902, Liang Qichao, a reformist intellectual of the late Qing dynasty, wrote a futuristic story called “A Chronicle of the Future of New China.” In the unfinished manuscript, he depicts Shanghai hosting the World Fair in 1962 (“Confucius year...
The NYRB China Archive
05.10.18
China: Back to the Future
from New York Review of Books
In 2023, Xi Jinping will conclude his second term as China’s president. Ever since Deng Xiaoping revised the country’s constitution more than 35 years ago, two consecutive terms have been the most that a president can legally serve. But it has...
The NYRB China Archive
05.09.18
After-Shocks of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake
from New York Review of Books
The province of Sichuan is a microcosm of China. Its east is flat, prosperous, and densely settled by ethnic Chinese. Its mountainous west is populated by poorer minorities, but possesses resources that help make the east rich.In Sichuan, the...
The NYRB China Archive
03.14.18
Chairman Xi, Chinese Idol
from New York Review of Books
For nearly sixty years since it opened in 1959, the Great Hall of the People has been the public focus of Chinese politics, a monumental granite block that extends 1,200 feet along the west side of Tiananmen Square. It is where the country’s leaders...
The NYRB China Archive
03.02.18
The Brands That Kowtow to China
from New York Review of Books
There’s been no joking as the apologies to China have come thick and fast in recent weeks, issued not by teenage singers but by some of the largest and richest multinational corporations in the world—the German luxury car manufacturer Daimler, the...
The NYRB China Archive
02.05.18
Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?
from New York Review of Books
In these pages nearly seven years ago, Timothy Snyder asked the provocative question: Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin? As useful as that exercise in moral rigor was, some think the question itself might have been slightly off. Instead, it should...
The NYRB China Archive
01.18.18
The Red Emperor
from New York Review of Books
This fall, the Nineteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) gave proof that during his five years as general secretary Xi Jinping has become the most powerful leader of China since Mao Zedong died in 1976. Most observers, Chinese and...
The NYRB China Archive
01.06.18
‘The Biggest Taboo’
from New York Review of Books
One of China’s most influential artists is forty-eight-year-old Qiu Zhijie. A native of southern China’s Fujian province, Qiu studied art in the eastern city of Hangzhou before moving to Beijing in 1994 to pursue a career as a contemporary artist...
The NYRB China Archive
11.27.17
China’s Art of Containment
On the evening of May 20, 1989, in response to weeks of mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government placed Beijing under martial law. The following morning, in Hong Kong, far to the south, Wen Wei Po, the main Communist-...
The NYRB China Archive
11.23.17
The True Story of Lu Xun
from New York Review of Books
1.Addressing an audience at the Hong Kong YMCA in February 1927, the writer Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) warned that despite ten years of literary revolution and the promotion of a written vernacular language, Chinese people had...
The NYRB China Archive
10.26.17
Sexual Life in Modern China
from New York Review of Books
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Chinese writers grappled with the traumas of the Mao period, seeking to make sense of their suffering. As in the imperial era, most had been servants of the state, loyalists who might criticize but never seek to...
The NYRB China Archive
10.12.17
The Chinese World Order
from New York Review of Books
Ten years ago the journalist James Mann published a book called The China Fantasy, in which he criticized American policymakers for using something he called “the Soothing Scenario” to justify the policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with...
The NYRB China Archive
09.05.17
Beijing’s Bold New Censorship
from New York Review of Books
Authoritarians, in China and elsewhere, normally have preferred to dress their authoritarianism up in pretty clothes. Lenin called the version of dictatorship he invented in 1921 “democratic centralism,” but it became clear, especially after Stalin...
The NYRB China Archive
08.17.17
When the Law Meets the Party
Like an army defeated but undestroyed, China’s decades-long human rights movement keeps reassembling its lines after each disastrous loss, miraculously fielding new forces in the battle against an illiberal state. Each time, foot soldiers and...
The NYRB China Archive
08.16.17
The Lonely Struggle of Lee Ching-yu
from New York Review of Books
On March 19, a human rights activist from Taiwan named Lee Ming-che disappeared in mainland China, and his wife back in Taipei, Lee Ching-yu, became a member of one of the least desirable clubs in the world: the spouses of people who for political...
The NYRB China Archive
07.14.17
Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed
from New York Review of Books
In 1898, some of China’s most brilliant minds allied themselves with the Emperor Guangxu, a young ruler who was trying to assert himself by forcing through reforms to open up China’s political, economic, and educational systems. But opponents...
The NYRB China Archive
07.13.17
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo
from New York Review of Books
In the late 1960s Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman, encouraged children and adolescents to confront their teachers and parents, root out “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and otherwise “make revolution.” In practice, this meant closing China’s...
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...
The NYRB China Archive
06.08.17
China’s Astounding Religious Revival
from New York Review of Books
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 family system is...
The NYRB China Archive
05.06.17
The Earthy Glories of Ancient China
from New York Review of Books
French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the fifth century BC. It is a common conceit of 19th-century nationalism that citizens of modern nation-states can trace their national...
The NYRB China Archive
04.28.17
Should the Chinese Government Be in American Classrooms?
from New York Review of Books
Since their beginning in 2005, Confucius Institutes (CIs) have been set up to teach Chinese language classes in more than 100 American colleges and universities, including large and substantial institutions like Rutgers University, the State...
The NYRB China Archive
04.20.17
Recreating China’s Imagined Empire
from New York Review of Books
China’s influence in the world has become a persistent theme of these early days of the Donald Trump era. During his campaign, Trump portrayed China (not entirely incorrectly) as the leading malefactor in the politics of international trade—holding...