Viewpoint
02.03.22
Keeping the Flies Out
from Mekong Review
The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and...
Culture
11.04.16
A New Comedy Looks Back at a Bygone Beijing
The forthcoming Mandarin-language comedy King of Peking takes the viewer back to Beijing in 1998. The sooty rooms, the boxy automobiles of just a few makes, models, and colors, and the alleyways crammed with shops hawking cheap home cooking and...
Photo Gallery
06.15.16
Building An Icon
China’s economy is still growing. But its ascent is nothing like the period of double-digit growth during the first decade of this century. In the early aughts when the economy was soaring, Shanghai was the place that probably best embodied its...
Caixin Media
06.03.16
Bearing Witness to the China Story
In 1993, Fritz Hoffmann was a young American photojournalist ready for a new adventure. He had honed his picture-making skills while hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest, harvesting crabs in Alaska, and working at newspapers in West Virginia and...
Photo Gallery
04.10.15
Stroller Factory, 1999
In 1999, photographer Willem Wernsen spent ten days in the small city of Kengzi, in Guangdong province, about 30 miles northeast of Shenzhen in an industrial zone. This was part of a longer, five-week trip, Wernsen’s first to the People’s Republic...
Sinica Podcast
05.10.14
Initial Impressions: Three First Trips to China, 1970s-1990s
from Sinica Podcast
In this show: dating tips for hooking up with your Marxist-Leninist thought instructor, advice on what modern music and seasonal vegetables to smuggle in from Hong Kong, the origins of China’s somewhat unorthodox driving customs, and instructions on...
Sinica Podcast
12.13.13
From the Underground to the Internet—Contemporary Art in China
from Sinica Podcast
In the late 1990s, the visual arts in China operated on the fringes of society, and those who dared to flirt with public prominence risked finding themselves on the disapproving end of a government clampdown. And yet how different things seem today...
Excerpts
11.22.13
Shen Wei’s ‘Chinese Sentiment’
When Shen Wei was growing up in Shanghai during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, his mother worked as a fashion designer who specialized in calendars. If a company wanted to publish one, they hired Shen Wei’s mother, and she designed clothes for...
Culture
08.21.12
When Art Happened
from Leap
In the 1990s, there were very few places to hold contemporary art exhibitions, concerts, or even simple gatherings of friends. Nonetheless, some of China’s most celebrated cultural figures—particularly in the fields of art and music—would manage to...
The NYRB China Archive
04.24.97Peking, Hong Kong, & the U.S.
from New York Review of Books
No recent book has blown a bigger hole in the proposition that the US must follow a policy of “positive engagement” with China than The Coming Conflict with China. It is a mark of the wound they inflicted on Peking that the authors, ex-reporters in...
The NYRB China Archive
12.17.92Deng’s Last Campaign
from New York Review of Books
China had its own form of grueling political campaign this year, which ended when the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party (CCP) took place in October. There, too, the issue was “change” and the main concern the economy. But in China the...
Viewpoint
12.14.92
China Plays the Market
from Nation
With the Chinese stock market in turmoil earlier this month, Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, wrote about the dramatic crash for The Guardian: “Why China’s Stock Market Bubble Was Always Bound To Burst.”...
The NYRB China Archive
09.26.91The Anatomy of Collapse
from New York Review of Books
In Moscow, 1991, as in Beijing in 1989, eight hard liners made a last-ditch stand to preserve communism. Yet in both cases, the Communist party was left on the sidelines and no appeal was made for support in the name of Communist doctrine. Politics...