On September 13, Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn was delighted to chair a panel discussion at the Beijing Bookworm with authors Ian Johnson and Christina Larson, two well-known China journalists and now contributors to Chinese Characters, a collection of essays on individualism in modern China edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom of the University of California, Irvine and freelance writer Angilee Shah.
Our show today is a recording of that event, and while this is a bit more public than most of our recordings, it was a lot of fun nonetheless. So listen in to Sinica today as we revisit that evening two weeks ago when Ian and Christina joined Jeremy for a discussion that swept from mercantilist monks to renegade geologists before settling on the question of whether Peter Hessler’s writings constitute their own independent oeuvre of literature on China, and what on earth is the man doing in Egypt these days anyway?