Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Reading List

"It’s about 250 pages, which for several thousand years of history is not bad. Jaivin’s a very talented writer, who knows China well, and from a variety of vantage points. She’s written on rock music there, on protest. She’s got a passionate interest in women’s roles both in Chinese history and in contemporary China. Women figure in the book throughout, in more than token ways for every period, which is refreshing. She brings to the book this special energy and interest in intriguing and unexpected stories, while also covering the historical milestones. The most challenging thing for a book like this is to do justice to both continuities and ruptures. She doesn’t fall into the trap of an ‘unchanging China’ idea. One nice visual touch is that most chapters have a map. It’s a map of what now comes into our mind when we hear the word China, and she shows how much or how little—and it’s often very little—of that physical space was actually controlled by the dynasty in power at the time. That’s a very effective way to keep reminding us to forget the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to get one to think of there being a single geographical space that always was and always will be China, except when bad things happened, and parts got carved away. It’s all in there. I used it as a textbook, and it seemed to work quite well. It’s sort of an anti-textbook, but those are the textbooks that I like to use. It’s not in the grade school textbook genre, in which it’s all names and dates. It gives you lots of information, but it’s carried forward by gripping tales and nicely crafted profiles. Yes, and particularly Chinese culture. If you had to classify it, I think its strength is as cultural history."

"It’s an extraordinary collection of short stories, which would be valuable for their literary merits even if they didn’t also provide a window onto China. The stories aren’t of a single genre. Some of them are what you would expect from a gifted journalist who’s taking stories in the news and putting a fictional spin on them. There is one story about a rural inventor—and I remember reading news reports about rural inventors, people in the countryside who put their energy into coming up with these amazing devices. That’s a charming story, but it’s not unexpected from a journalist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But there are a couple of other stories that veer toward science fiction or magical realism. My favorite is one about an extraordinary fruit that appears in a local market one day. The story has a great evocation of neighborhood markets in China where you shop for fruits and vegetables. But it turns out that this particular fruit unlocks memories, getting characters to talk about things that they had been repressing. As the best science fiction often does, it takes a realistic setting and spins it out, asking, ‘What if you altered one element of a milieu? How would everything change?’ In this case, people’s relationships change. The fruit is really delightful to eat, but do people want to unlock these emotions and go in that direction? It’s a lovely and strange story. The other thing that I like about the book is that even though it’s not about this, there are some characters sprinkled in that move between China and the United States. There’s some cross-cultural understanding or misunderstanding. Te-Ping Chen is a very good journalist, and a very talented writer of fiction as well. It would be a perfect book club book. It’s part of life, maybe in the way that in very religious countries, a church or religious hierarchy might be. It also has a social welfare and a prestige-granting mechanism—as well as control."

"It’s been reviewed paired with a book that I recommended last year, which was the new edition of James Millward’s big history of Xinjiang, Eurasian Crossroads , that was updated with a chapter on recent repression. What’s important about In the Camps is that there hasn’t been a short, deeply informed book about Xinjiang that you could point somebody to who says, ‘I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this subject, but I want to go deeper than I can even through a long-form journalism piece’. Darren Byler is an anthropologist who has significant on the ground experience and has been doing ethnographic work. He also just published a more scholarly book with Duke University Press, Terror Capitalism , which is very good on related fieldwork but written for other specialists. In the Camps is designed to give a feel for the human experience of having the ground pulled out from under you in every conceivable way. Forms of movement become constrained, everything you’re doing is watched. People are disappearing into camps, but also going silent because of fear of being targeted. It’s an incredibly important story, because of the impact it has on the people involved. Also—and this is something Byler gets at—while it’s a very distinctive and unusual story, it’s not an isolated one. This is an extreme example, with both the assault on the Uyghurs and on Islam as a religion, but the effort to control forms of difference is something that’s happening in other places across China, too. “It’s a dark story: there’s no way around that” Byler also takes pains to show that what is happening in China has parallels in other places and global relevance. The technologies that are being developed to control are ones that are, in some cases, being developed in part by international companies and being used in other locales. I understand why the terms ‘concentration camp’ and ‘genocide’ are sometimes used—because there’s a sense that you need to have the strongest language possible to get attention for this issue. He suggests other ways to frame discussion, however, that are equally appalling and might not lead into back-and-forth discussions. He talks about processes that are tied to carceral systems in all kinds of places, prisons where your every movement is controlled. He writes of varied forms of colonialism. The way that Beijing is trying to control places on the peripheries is very much like a colonial state, but armed with very advanced surveillance technologies. It’s a dark story: there’s no way around that. But he is somebody who—to return to the theme—fills his book with real people. He’s sensitive to things like poetry, which is incredibly important as a form of expression among Uyghurs, both within the PRC and now in exile. You’re not simply reading a catalogue of human rights abuses. It’s the story of a slide toward a very dystopian daily life. Yes, it’s very timely, with the diplomatic boycott by the United States—and other countries—of the Olympics. This is due to multiple concerns about China, including Peng Shuai . But I think if there was one thing to point to, it’s Xinjiang. It’s become a focus in the way that in 2008, when there was talk about a potential boycott, Tibet was the place that came to mind. That they are connected stories comes out in the book. It’s not an isolated thing: some of the methods now being used in Xinjiang were tried out in Tibet or against Falun Gong members. The Party keeps experimenting with and refining techniques and technologies of control. There are also echoes of Mao-era reeducation camps in this as well. It’s facial recognition, checkpoints but also just data collection. That’s something that is relevant across the PRC. It’s happening in Hong Kong as well, this effort to get people’s cellphones and their contacts and to maximize the personal data the government has at its command. Though, of course, that again is not just a China story but a global one."

"The elevator pitch for this book is The Monuments Men , the China side of the story. It’s about how people tried to preserve these precious works of art during wartime. It very much takes you into life within a fragmented and embattled China during World War Two. Any book that does that for a popular readership is important because in the English language world, there is still a tendency to forget just how central the battles fought in Asia were. There’s a default to just thinking about the European war, or about Japan and America and Pearl Harbor. So, I liked that about it. In addition, Brookes really makes some of the curators, who devoted themselves to going along with these works of art and hiding them in caves and other unlikely places, come to life as characters. There were very dramatic moments in the odysseys of the objects, and in describing them he draws on the diaries and in one case the poems of the curators to make them fleshed-out people. Adam is, by the way, somebody who just won’t stay in his lane. He first made his mark as a journalist, but then he left journalism to become a spy novelist and wrote a trio of really engaging spy novels. Now he’s moving into the realm of serious popular history. His new book is clearly written with the general reader in mind, but he does his research. He was a Chinese studies major as an undergrad at SOAS and it shows. I guess I can’t really pick on him, though, for going outside of his lane, because I move into the journalistic one plenty. In fact, we met when we were both tracking protests in 1999. I was in Beijing for a conference held to mark the 80th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and he was covering China for the BBC when NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. There were then these protests outside the British and American embassies, partially supported by the government. We became friends, in part because we realized that we were in different professions but were asking a lot of the same questions and were curious about a lot of the same things as we watched the people on the streets yelling out “Down with American-Led NATO Hegemonism” and other catchy slogans like that that just roll off your tongue. One of the things about the story is that it resonates with and speaks to a lot of broad issues. Some of the treasures spirited out of Beijing when the Japanese invaded ended up back there but a lot of them ended up in Taiwan. You can think of it as a metaphor for the fact that in the middle of the century, people are moving across borders, but so are objects. Brookes also does something that I love to see popular histories do which is slip in in passing ideas that scholars feel passionate about but that never seem to percolate through to the general audience. For example, when he talks about treasures representing Chinese culture , he refers to them representing what the state decided to define as Chinese culture at a certain point . When he’s talking about the Qianlong emperor gathering together these wondrous pieces of art, he makes it clear that it wasn’t that for thousands of years, there was a clear notion that the objects that we now think of as quintessentially Chinese were quintessentially Chinese. A lot of what we know about, and think about, modern China really took shape with these actions that members of an originally Manchu ruling family did after they took power in 1644."

"This book has many of the qualities of a spy novel , though it’s a true story. Delury is an academic historian whose dissertation was about Qing intellectual history. He’s an American China specialist, but he teaches at Yonsei University in Seoul. Since moving to Korea, he has added a whole new side to his expertise and comments a lot in the press on North Korea. He’s also very interested in the Korean War. He is, in short, another person who won’t pick a single lane and stay in it. This story is about an American secret agent who ends up in Mao’s China during the Korean War and is a prisoner there for a long time. Delury is ideally placed to write this tale because it moves between America, China, and Korea. Even more so because he studied at Yale, which figures centrally in the life of the main character in the book, John T Downey, who studies there before and ends up back in the area after his time in prison in China. Early in the book, Delury mentions that he was studying at Yale himself when Downey was living in the area and could easily have met him, but he didn’t. In this book, you learn a lot about Mao’s China, you learn about the Korean War, you learn about McCarthyism in America and even about the history of Chinese studies. All this is woven into this page-turner. Like Fragile Cargo , I think Agents of Subversion is a book that you can easily imagine being filmed, being turned into a television series or being discussed with gusto by members of a book club made up of history lovers. Yes. It’s a reminder of just how long the two places were cut off from each other. There are again all kinds of contemporary resonances that you can think about, though both Brookes and Delury are the kind of authors who trust the reader to make the connections themselves. We are now living in a time when China is again becoming less hospitable to foreigners. That’s not belaboured in the book, but it adds to the punch of the story. When I was reading it, I thought about the imprisonment of the two Canadians. They were clearly not agents of a foreign power, so there is a crucial difference, but there are interesting echoes between periods. The other reason I like this book is I do think we’re more used to imagining these Cold War spy stories linked to the Soviet Union and Britain and the US agencies. Just the fact that it’s about the China side is intriguing. The basic story is quite well-known, but it’s one of those things that goes in and out of consciousness and you think, ‘Oh yes, there was that.’ But there are many elements to the book I had no idea about, like the intersections between different figures. I learned a lot. Delury’s background as an intellectual historian shows through and there’s a lot about the ideas that were circulating about totalitarian states and modernisation. You even get cameos by some leading political theorists. It’s very interesting. Yes, George Kennan and Hannah Arendt. There are quite a few people who show up as characters who get swept up in the political tides of the time, including the China specialists. That’s another connection between my first two books: they’re stories that have strong characters in them. Even though they’re largely about events, you come away with a real feel for individuals."

"She is, she’s a linguist at Brown University, but this is a memoir. It’s a very personal story informed by a scholarly set of interests. If Fragile Cargo is in part about objects that end up divided between the mainland and Taiwan, this is about a family that is divided. One sister spends most of her life in Taiwan and the other spends most of her life on the mainland. The book also fits with Agents of Subversion , because it’s about this period of disconnection and then reconnection. In this case, it’s not about the US and China reestablishing connection—though that was part of the background—but a story that is true for many families that were divided between China and Taiwan. One of the surprising things about the late 20th century was when members of families that had long been separated began to cross back and forth across the Taiwan Strait. The interconnection between them was a crucial factor in the economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s on the mainland, since investment funds also flowed across the water. That’s not a novelty but it’s worth being reminded of that. It actually gets forgotten in some of the press coverage of tensions between Beijing and Taiwan, that there really are a lot of families with a tie across the Strait. But mostly it’s a very personal story. It’s a memoir and family history, driven by the author’s interest in figuring out the things that the family didn’t talk about. There’s a bit of the historian-as-detective in this book, as she tries to work out what was going on when her aunts were young. It is. Many books about Chinese families in the twentieth century that I find most compelling are the ones where you have a much more complicated idea, by the end, of what a small group of people went through. Too often, we imagine that there were clear winners and losers in the Chinese Revolution. There is a great deal of popularity for the stories where you know clearly which side you’re rooting for and a family is placed mostly or completely on one side. For example, a book that is not as big a deal in the United States, though it is fairly widely read there, but looms incredibly large for UK readers, is Wild Swans . That’s a family story where you have a sense of one throughline. Whereas I think the experience of the Mao period, as well as those just before and just after it, for many Chinese families was much more about ups and downs. Some members of the family were doing better and others worse, based often just on happenstance—where you ended up being. You do get a sense of the individuals in this book. The women in the story are special and they’re not just passive agents. But there is a high degree of luck, which is something that also figures in this. The author herself, in some ways, was lucky. She benefited from having a relative who could help her get connected to the outside world, even though at an earlier point, you would have said, ‘How unfortunate to have a family whose members were disconnected that way.’ That captures something important about China and the China story. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Looking ahead, I’m already reading a book I’m pretty sure will be on my list next year, Tania Branigan’s Red Memory , which is a book about the Cultural Revolution and how it’s remembered and thought about and forgotten in China. It’s coming out early next year, but I’m reading an advance copy to review. One of the things it does very well, again, is give you this idea that you can’t neatly break up Chinese families or even Chinese individuals into people who were steadily fortunate or steadily unfortunate. Some people are victims at one stage and victimizers at another. That’s part of what makes the 20th century both so tragic and so fascinating in the Chinese case."

"She wasn’t born in Hong Kong, but she grew up largely there. She’s an extraordinarily talented individual. She’s another journalist who did Chinese studies as an undergraduate and then, like Brookes, worked for the BBC. She then worked for NPR. Her first book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia , was one of the Tiananmen books that I singled out when I did a Five Books interview on that topic back in 2014. It was a daringly researched, wonderfully done book, and I feel Indelible City can be described with those same terms. A key difference, though, is that this new work is much more personal. Lim is much more of a character in it and her life becomes part of the backdrop. She deals with a lot of things that sometimes are forgotten in the Hong Kong story, such as that Hong Kongers can be people with parents from different parts of the world. She talks about the experience of having that mixed parentage and how it’s seen when she’s in different parts of the world. One of the things that is special about Hong Kong is that you can be—or at least could be for a long period—fully part of the city, whatever your ethnicity, in a way that is very hard in any other parts of the PRC. The book traces a graffiti artist, the ‘King of Kowloon,’ one of these figures who’s very known within Hong Kong, with lots of stories about him, but who gets forgotten outside. She has this fascinating set of stories and reflections about him, even as the book is largely about protests of recent decades that culminated in the upheavals of 2019 and harsh repression of 2020. Lim also does a lot of self-reflection here on the role of a journalist who is so connected to the story that the line between journalist and activist is blurred. She’s part of the story. She wrote extraordinary pieces while the protests were going on in this vein, such as an FT article with the wonderful title “Hong Kong diary—’Don’t get tear-gassed, Mum!'” She co-wrote a piece with Ilaria Maria Sala, a wonderful Italian journalist (who has her own book out on Hong Kong, but it’s only in Italian, so, alas, I haven’t been able to read it, just admire its eye-catching cover). The two of them wrote a memorable commentary for the Guardian in 2019 about being journalists who were so tied to the city and cared so deeply about what was going on that it blurred the line. Journalists were also being targeted by the police during the protests at times. At times, reporters have claimed, it felt like being a war correspondent. One of the things that’s interesting about this book, and Lim’s earlier book, is that while it’s largely a journalist doing serious reporting, she brings in findings from her historical investigations. Scholars maybe will appreciate that the most, and general readers might not realize how special it is. In The People’s Republic of Amnesia she wrote about the massacre in Chengdu that took place after the one in Beijing. She brings that much less well known massacre into the story in a way that’s very powerful. In Indelible City , she does some close archival readings of newly-brought-to-light documents that have to do with the negotiations on how exactly things would work—or were supposed to work—when Hong Kong was transferred from being a British colony to being a part of the PRC. The combination of discoveries about the time around 1997 and on-the-ground reporting about 2019 is extraordinary. Thanks for asking that. As a lead-up to answering the question, I want to mention two other really good books on Hong Kong that came out this year. One had a very similar title, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir , by Karen Cheung, which is a very personal story. It has a lot of parallels to Louisa’s book in the mixing of the personal and the political, though it’s somebody of another generation and with a different perspective. The other book that’s very special is City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule by Ho-fung Hung, a Hong Konger who is a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins writing here in a very accessible way. What it has in common with Louisa’s book—and Louisa’s book was the one I chose, in part because it brought together elements of both those books—is giving Hong Kong a history that is not just reducing it to the story of what colonizers did to colonized people. The tragic side of Hong Kong history is that Hong Kong’s people have undergone more than one process of colonization and never been able to control their own city, but the inspiring side of that same history is the determination and creativity local people have shown in the face of this. It’s a city that’s often thought of as defined by people in search of material comforts, or of money, but by finding a rebellious artist as a figure to focus on, Louisa brings in Hong Kong’s enduring rebellious tradition, and she, like Hung, brings up examples from earlier periods of feisty locals engaging in acts of resistance."

"It may seem that I’ve chosen this book just to have something by a leading figure in China scholarship, and Joseph Esherick has written decades’ worth of extraordinary, extraordinary books. He’s about 80 now and he’s published not just one but two books in the last twelve months. His other book, which I can’t wait to teach, is a collection of essays he’s written over the decades . They’re brought together into a collection for the first time and what he does—that’s rarely done when people do these ‘greatest hits’ volumes—is he introduces each essay by placing it into context of what was going on at the time, in terms of debates, and then reflecting on how he might have done things differently, if he’d been writing it later. So, there’s a self-reflective side to it. Like a lot of people coming out of the 1960s, Esherick was drawn to China studies because of criticism of imperialism related to anti-Vietnam War sentiment. There was a rooting for the Revolution, in many ways. One thing you see over the course of his career is his rethinking of some of his political positions—without giving up his rooting for underdogs and interest in ordinary as well as powerful people—and shifts in the way he does history. Accidental Holy Land is a culmination of this. Even the title of it: he’s moved very far from the notion of grand historical forces shaping the direction of history, to being fascinated by contingency and happenstance. Another shift is that he began his career not being able to do research in China as an American. Over the course of his career, he was able to use archives in China, but also to do fieldwork. He did ethnographic work in rural settings, which not many historians do. His most important book before this one was a study of the Boxer uprising . In that, he tried to explain how very specific local dynamics, including the environment, mattered in an event often approached via a discussion of esoteric beliefs, and a concern with on-the-ground issues reappears in this new book. Being able to get from point A to point B, the terrain, all these things matter. That’s a common view now, but he was saying it before. He’s spent time taking trips to the areas where, in the case of this book, the Communist Party holed up when it was gearing up to make its final push toward power. There’s a grand narrative of the Chinese Revolution. It’s about how the Communist Party made this triumphant, Long March to escape from the Nationalist Party after it was almost extinguished. They ended up in North China living in isolated redoubts, one of the most famous of which is Yan’an. That’s where the idea of Mao as a sacred figure, the idea of the Communist Party having this miracle-filled, epic quest to save the country comes from. For the Communist Party, it’s a celebratory myth, a powerful story of victory over impossible odds. And we know the power of these stories in all mythic traditions, all the way up to The Lord of the Rings . You have these great heroic figures and terrible villains. This is a story that scholars—but not just scholars—want to complicate by bringing in such things as internecine fighting that went on, the struggles between different groups. It wasn’t predetermined that one version of communist ideology would take hold. By posing ‘accidental’ with ‘holy land’ in the title, the book is suggesting that this was driven so much by contingency, by personalities, by the structures of the time. So it’s a case of retelling a grand narrative from a different perspective. That won’t shock scholars, but he does it with a granular detail and feel for the setting and the personalities that is special. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a very relevant book to read right now because it’s about taking apart a mythic story, which is similar, in a way, to the mythic story that Xi Jinping’s cult is based on. If we think about it, the cult of Mao and all the early leaders of the Chinese Revolution, including Xi Jinping’s father, was all about spending time in the wilderness, in these very tough rural settings, where they really connected with the people. Then they had a mission to save the people and once they were in power, they would do things that were for the good of the people, and they would never forget their connection to the countryside and to villagers. We know that Mao got disconnected from the masses in many ways and did all sorts of things that caused enormous suffering, including actions that caused many villagers to starve, even though, at other times, he tried to do things for the people. In Xi Jinping, you have a revision of that tale. He was sent down as a youth to the wilderness and he connected with the people. He’s presented as a man of the people, even though he spent his childhood in an elite setting and even though he’s now in power. This year, after he was given the go ahead to start a third term as General Secretary of the CCP and it became crystal clear that he could potentially stay in power much longer, even for life, the first place he took the Standing Committee was on a pilgrimage to Yan’an, to this holy land. Xi Jinping’s father figures in Esherick’s book and we now see his son trying to reenact things from that sacred generation’s life and reboot their epic story. It’s a different version, but one that resonates with that story of the man of the people from the wilderness who now exercises great power. One of the biggest takeaways of the last few weeks, just watching the news, is a reminder of how surprising struggles are. We can always take apart the road that led to them. But that doesn’t mean that the result was foreordained or to be expected. The same was true with the Hong Kong protests that are central to Indelible City . Lim and I were on panels together in the spring of 2019, looking back at the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen as well as the current state of Hong Kong, a city I too care passionately about. We were worried about the direction that things in Hong Kong were going with the tightening of controls. The Extradition Law had already been floated and there had been some small protests, but neither of us was saying, ‘Just wait till this summer, there’s going to be a grand, last-ditch effort to push back against mainland-isation.’ The way a variety of factors come together that just led people to feel, ‘Now, no matter what the potential cost, no matter how long the odds seem, this is a moment for action,’ that’s not something people saw coming. There’s something unpredictable about protests like this. It could be valuable for them to pick up any of the works I mentioned in the 2014 Five Books interview on Tiananmen I mentioned earlier. This is not because these protests are just like Tiananmen, as they really are not despite how often allusions to 1989 have come up lately. There was, for example, a division within the elite that kept Tiananmen going, which there doesn’t seem to be here. But I do think those books all have insights to offer that have relevance right now, and I’d flag one in particular: New Ghosts, Old Dreams . It’s co-written by Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin. Barmé runs a wonderful website, China Heritage , that is filled with interesting translations and commentaries, including on acts of dissent. As for Jaivin, her latest book, The Shortest History of China , made my China books of the year list last year . The book they collaborated on decades ago, New Ghosts, Old Dreams , was about the 1989 protests, but also about the whole intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1980s. It really reminds you powerfully of the varieties of thought within China, even at times when the Communist Party would like everybody to be on the same page, and the way that individualist expression comes through. It includes some examples of humor, of the interplay of art and politics, and it just generally has a lot to offer anyone looking to get a sense of China beyond the headlines at many points in time, including right now."

"In Chinese studies the first subject that I was really interested in, and have stayed with, is the study of mass protests—especially ones in which students and other youth play a leading role. My dissertation was on pre-1949 student movements on the mainland and then I was also very interested in Tiananmen , which happened just as I was finishing my graduate work. I had gone to Hong Kong regularly since 1987, but I had never thought of it as a place that I was studying until 2014, when it was the site of the biggest protest movement in which young people took a leading role than had happened anywhere in the People’s Republic of China since 1989. This was called the Umbrella Movement and it tried to bring democracy to Hong Kong, which has never been democratically governed but has had semi-democratic institutions. It was a drive to try to bring in real, open elections for the chief executive—the most powerful person in the territory—but it quickly became a struggle to defend the right to protest itself. The movement grew when police in Hong Kong, who had tended to treat protest very gently compared to any place else in China, used tear gas against protesters. That brought a lot of people out on the streets and the movement became a fight to defend the things that made Hong Kong different: a more vibrant civil society, greater freedom of speech and the right to protest. That struggle ended without a change in the voting system to universal suffrage, but it was an important move to defend local rights. Then, during the next five years, there were a variety of events that local people saw as Beijing encroaching on Hong Kong, trying to make it more like a mainland city and being aided in this by the chief executive and other proxies of the capital. There were sporadic protests to push back against that, to try to defend Hong Kong’s differences. “It’s clearly a personalistic form of rule that we don’t yet have a clear sense of, in part because it’s a change from what we’ve grown used to” Hong Kong, since 1997, has had a ‘one country, two systems’ framework where it’s supposed to be part of China, but have certain things that are done differently. To put it really simply, Beijing and its local proxies have wanted the ‘two systems’ part to just mean economic systems while local people have been fighting to have it mean the cultural and political systems as well. So, there has been a back and forth with protests and then moves of repression. Then, in 2019, a new protest wave broke out, this time against an extradition bill that was seen by local people as doing away with the rule of law in Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement had been the biggest, longest-lived urban protest movement in the PRC since Tiananmen. This movement in 2019—which again became largely a movement for the right to protest itself and against police brutality—became much bigger. It drew bigger crowds, it lasted longer and was clearly the first really giant sustained urban-based mass movement in the PRC since Tiananmen. So that’s the context behind this and that’s why there have been books coming out, including one that I wrote. Vigil was my effort to write a very short book in a series of very short books called Columbia Global Reports . These are in between really extended magazine pieces and fully-fledged books and are either by journalists who have a scholarly bent or scholars who have a journalistic bent. Yes, I was a fan of the series as a reader before I got to write for it. I wanted to include reportage and some of my experiences spending time in Hong Kong, meeting some of the activists, including Joshua Wong. I combined that with a brief history of the city and an effort to connect the events in Hong Kong to the history of protest in China as well, because I really got fascinated by the Hong Kong protests because they felt in part like a continuation, in a new setting and register, of the tradition I had been studying on the mainland. That tradition had been suppressed on the mainland but had taken on this new and different life in Hong Kong, ironically at the very moment when Hong Kong people were becoming more and more concerned with having an identity separate from China. The protesters were also drawing on international currents of youth activism. In the book, I bring in comparisons with protests in China’s past and comparisons with other places as well, such as the Eastern European protests against Soviet rule. I think of Hong Kong now as being, in some ways, like countries that were part of the Soviet empire, but not in the Soviet Union, before 1989. I see parallels between the Hong Kong protests and the Prague spring and the Solidarity movement in the late 1970s, early 80s in Poland—protests that were suppressed the way the Hong Kong ones were. I thought I would end Vigil with the 30th anniversary of the June 4th massacre . I knew I would be in Hong Kong for that and thought I would end up wondering how much longer that kind of event—which is so different from what can happen on the mainland—could continue happening in Hong Kong. But then, when the protests exploded right after that, the book became as much about the 2019 protests that I saw the beginning of, but watched from afar. I wrote the book over the summer of 2019 and it became very much a first draft of history. It’s just a moving book to me. It’s beautifully written. It’s made up of personal essays by journalists, some of whose reporting I was reading regularly to keep up with the news from Hong Kong. One of them, Elaine Yu, who is now writing for the New York Times , I got to know well between 2015 and 2019 when I was traveling there. We co-wrote a piece together once. Both her chapter and those by the other journalists who contributed are heartfelt pieces that wouldn’t have fit in newspapers because they are so personal, so emotional, so raw. They deal with issues of fear and hope and the ethical struggles they faced covering, as news, something that was happening in a city they loved, in the city they had grown up in. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Most of the essays are by Hong Kongers. There is one by a mainland journalist who has been living in Hong Kong and writes anonymously. There’s one chapter by a journalist from Taiwan. It’s a very small book, almost pamphlet-like. Each essay is different, but each of them links up in the sense of being by a journalist writing in a mode that journalists are usually steered away from writing in. It’s more like the way columnists sometimes write, but we don’t usually get columnists right in the thick of something that’s a fight for their own city. It has an immediacy and a power that I just find deeply moving. They’re very young, but some of them are writing about people even younger than they are. They’re in their 20s, but as the movement has gone on even younger people have taken to the streets. The authors are roughly the same age as some of the key figures from the Umbrella Movement, like Joshua Wong , Agnes Chow and Nathan Law. I couldn’t think of a book that came out about Tiananmen that was comparable, but the text that I thought about was the interviews in the Gate of Heavenly Peace documentary, which has some very powerful interviews with students and also some workers who were in their 20s. Aftershock has that same feel. Some have gone to Taiwan, as well as to Germany, the UK and Canada. But, as far as I know, most or all of the journalists who contributed to Aftershock are still in Hong Kong. I really admire their bravery because it’s a very challenging time to be a journalist. December 8th was the day of the last really big protest of 2019 and it was a legally authorized march. I happened to be in Hong Kong for a week then, so I attended it. Over 100,000 people took to the streets in a legally authorized march, singing “Glory to Hong Kong”, which you could be arrested for singing now. There has been no authorization of marches for months and it’s not clear if there ever will be again. There was a big march on New Year’s Day, but for most of 2020 Covid has been used as the reason not to allow gatherings. There was also an election cancelled in September, with Covid given as the reason. But there are ways to hold elections during Covid times, as we’ve seen. The vigil was not allowed to take place on June 4th and again Covid-19 was used as the reason. People still turned out on June 4th. They socially distanced themselves for the most part but it was considered illegal and people were arrested. “I think of Hong Kong now as being, in some ways, like countries that were part of the Soviet empire” There were still some protests early in the pandemic, in part because the local government wasn’t listening to experts. They were taking their cues from Beijing on how to respond. They were allowing the border with the mainland to stay open, when the mainland was the epicentre for a while, but immediately closed the border to South Korea when South Korea became the epicentre. For locals, that meant it was only the ‘one country’, not the ‘two systems’, that matters now. Then Beijing took advantage of the global distraction of the pandemic to impose a very harsh new law against sedition. It’s a national security law that carries very strong penalties for anything deemed to even gesture vaguely toward separatism, even moves that in the past would be seen as just expressing love for a locale. All sorts of things that used to be fine to do are illegal. That was imposed on June 30th and there’s been a rollout of arrests. Clearly discontent will continue and resistance will continue, but it’s going to have to take a different form. It’ll take subtler forms. Again, I think of Eastern European parallels, when Poland was under martial law in the 1980s, and what happened in Taiwan for a long period when it was under martial law after protests there were repressed in 1947."

"Yes, it’s called Eurasian Crossroads and it’s by James Millward who is, I think, the preeminent American scholar of Xinjiang, certainly among historians. He’s also, since we were talking about short books before, written a beautiful slim history of the Silk Road for the OUP VSI series . He’s done a lot of different work, but this is a classic work of putting Xinjiang into historical perspective that came out in 2007 and he has just updated. He is one of the historians of China who, while his heart is in periods of the past, is continually looking at contemporary issues that you just can’t turn away from if you work on a place that’s undergoing new kinds of repression. So, I was very pleased when this very accessible, well written history of Xinjiang came out with a new section on the rise of this massive network of camps into which Uyghurs—especially Muslim Uyghurs, but also members of other Turkic ethnic minorities—have been disappearing in Xinjiang. This year actually has seen a burst of good writing on Xinjiang: a lot of journalism and scholarly work and a couple of other very good books have come out. The reason this one stood out for me is that there are others that focus on the present or on specific earlier periods. But this one combines a smart discussion of history with a close look at what’s happening now. It presents the camps as both linked to the moves against the Uyghurs in earlier periods, but also points out the novelty of things during a period when there’s more emphasis on forced assimilation and also moves towards what Millward refers to as ethnocide, of trying to blot out the Uyghurs as a clearly defined, separate cultural group. Things got considerably worse a few years ago. This is something that Millward shows very well. There have been long-term tensions between the centre and Xinjiang. Xinjiang means new frontier or new territory and it didn’t really become part of the political Chinese state until the 19th century, when it was essentially conquered by the Qing. Then, periodically, there were tighter or looser forms of control there, more or less willingness for there to be a flourishing of a separate Uyghur identity, culturally. When Millward did the first edition of the book, he ended it with a chapter on balancing acts. We can see this in Hong Kong too, but he talks about the effort by Beijing to balance the desire to have a very different kind of place be part of the country, while realizing there needs to be some ability for it to go in a different direction. He also talked about figures like Ilham Tohti, who were also involved in personal balancing acts. He was a professor, a part of the Chinese system, and was trying to carve out a distinctive space by encouraging moderating moves by the centre toward Xinjiang as well as moderate forces within Xinjiang. You could still think of that kind of balancing act up until around 2009, but not since then. 2009 was a very tense moment with all kinds of complicating developments that Millward talks about in the new chapter. But one thing we’ve seen is Tohti, who was this moderate figure, ending up—even for things that in an earlier period might have been seen as balancing—being seen as crossing red lines. He has disappeared into a prison cell, potentially forever. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . To me there’s a parallel with Hong Kong. It’s totally different and in Xinjiang there’s the camp system, which hadn’t been there before and came into existence a few years ago. There are also other forms of repression. But I do see it as of a piece with what’s been happening in Hong Kong, where we’ve also seen even moderate figures being sentenced or driven into exile. Millward ends by saying that a critical stance toward Beijing makes these balancing acts by Uyghurs impossible, at least for now, and I think that would be an apt way to think about the situation of Hong Kong too, as different as it is."

"For me, reading wise, this has been a year of reading a lot about the peripheries of the People’s Republic of China. These are peripheries that I used to think of as very different because Hong Kong was by far the freest and Tibet and Xinjiang the most tightly controlled, which is still true, but I do see the first three books on my list as fitting together thematically in certain ways. It’s been a year with a burst of publishing on Tibet and this isn’t the only good book that’s come out. Forbidden Memory is about the Cultural Revolution era, and the Mao years in general. Tsering Woeser is a woman originally from Tibet who is living in Beijing and is one of the most interesting critical intellectuals in the PRC right now. She’s another one who’s been trying to carry out a balancing act—of being a voice keeping attention on Tibet without ending up in prison, and she has managed it so far, though she’s been hassled in plenty of ways and had her movements constricted. The photographs in this book are powerful for many reasons. One is they show the way in which the Communist Party has convinced and coerced members of local populations to be complicit in the repression that goes on. I think of Xinjiang, Tibet and increasingly Hong Kong as colonial setups where there are members of the colonized population who are convinced, cajoled or coerced into carrying out repression; pressured, persuaded or forced to become collaborators. That’s clearly true in Hong Kong now with figures like Carrie Lam, but it’s been true in Tibet and Xinjiang as well. The photographs are largely of Tibetans engaged in loyalty rituals associated with Mao struggle sessions. They have Woeser’s own glosses on the photographs, which were taken by her father. The book is a beautiful work, but it also comes with an introduction by Robert Barnett, who is one of the leading writers on Tibet in the West . He’s written a great history, in very accessible short form, of Tibet up to the Mao era. “It’s almost as if the international imagination can only have one part of western China to focus on at a time” The story of Tibet in this period is a tragic and moving one because, initially, when Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China, there was a promise that it would be able to maintain its own distinctive way of life and that Tibetans would have a high degree of religious freedom. The term ‘one country, two systems’ wasn’t used, but as Isabel Hilton and others have argued, you can see the arrangements made in Tibet as a kind of precursor to the arrangements made for Hong Kong. That ended in a very tragic way in the late 1950s. Barnett gives a very good brief history of that, very well written, and that’s combined with the photographs and the explanation of the photographs. This was an important publication in Chinese, that circulated in Taiwan before, but this is the first translation. Like the Millward book, it’s both a new book and a reboot of an earlier one, in this case via assured translation work by Susan Chen. The story of it is, but it strives very hard to be a documentary record of a period that could be forgotten. Publications on Tibet are important this year, because the repression in Xinjiang is finally getting more attention, but it’s almost as if the international imagination can only have one part of western China to focus on at a time. For many years that was Tibet and Xinjiang was ignored, now it’s the other way around. But they’re connected. One of the main architects of the camp system in Xinjiang had been overseeing Communist Party policies in Tibet before being transferred to Xinjiang. There is a way in which the two places are seen as parallel problems, from Beijing’s point of view."

"I’ve always been concerned with the need for us to resist thinking of all of China as a single entity. When people say, ‘How do people in China feel about x?’ you have to say, ‘Are we talking about Han Chinese or members of other ethnicities? Are we talking about people in the countryside or people in the cities?’ But this book shows that, even within a single city, there can be a dramatic difference in experiences and modes of life. Harriet Evans is a historian who has consistently worked the borderlands between history and ethnography. She uses a lot of the techniques and asks a lot of the questions that we’re more used to finding people ask when they’re studying villages in China, than when they’re studying a city. She deals with this ironically marginalized population living at the very centre of Beijing, near the Forbidden City. She’s spent a long period of time getting to know the people, gaining their trust and talking to them. She’s a historian of gender so there’s a lot of concern in the book with the different experiences of men and women and members of different generations as well. It’s like a work of ethnographic journalism, almost, that gives you a feel for the lived experience and differences among individuals. But it’s also a community study of this section of Beijing and what it’s gone through. The main figures in her book are people who have never really had a moment when their lives dramatically improved—in the way that the Revolution was supposed to have dramatically improved their lives after liberation. Their lives also didn’t dramatically improve when the reform period happened, and money began to be made in China. They were continually on the margins. One of the things that’s powerful about this book is that the major standout events in a political, top-down history of Beijing aren’t necessarily the things that are the key marking points in these people’s lives. It’s a very ground’s eye view of the Mao years and the period after that, which gets you to rethink a lot of your assumptions about the shape of China during the last 70 years. Yes, the alleyways. Then one of the issues, which happens in other cities as well, is that when there’s a move to gentrify or to rebuild, do people view it as an improvement or a destruction of the fabric of what was meaningful about their life? They’re relocated to ostensibly better conditions, but away from the rhythms of the life they’ve known. Another thing I like about this book is that when I do things like this, recommending books, I don’t want to suggest a book that only people who are academics in a particular field will be able to read. This is an example of a book by a sophisticated scholar that is also an engaging read. There are quite a lot of them. Evans worked closely with a local photographer, Zhao Tielin, while researching the book. He died before it was completed, and Evans dedicates the book to the people of the community as a whole and him in particular."

"Shanghai is the first city in China I lived in and the first I studied, and what got me interested in specializing in Chinese history as a field were beautifully written books that had a strong storytelling dimension to them. I was always interested in protest‚ but I was also interested in the kind of writing that in the 1980s at least was particularly associated with Jonathan Spence: imaginative recreations of China’s past that were rooted in research but driven by stories. The person who trained me, Frederic Wakeman, was also a great storyteller in that way. Champions Day is a wonderful foray into this kind of historical recreation and does it via a single day at the Shanghai races when the Japanese are about to shut down horse racing. Carter was a student of Jonathan Spence’s. Not that it’s derivative, but it continues that genre within Chinese studies. “I think of Xinjiang, Tibet and increasingly Hong Kong as colonial setups” It tells the history of the city in part by spinning off of people who are at the races: some Chinese, some Western, some neither, some in between, people from different locales and social stations within Shanghai. It’s a creative reimagining of a city on the cusp—at a particular moment when war was ending one incarnation of the metropolis. Shanghai as the amazingly cosmopolitan and freewheeling place it had once been would never really recover, because it went from being occupied by Japan to being under authoritarian rule under the Nationalist Party and then under the Communist Party. It’s a re-creation of a lost world, of the hybridity and messiness and unfairness, as there was a dark side to it, that defined Shanghai for the period when it was divided and partly colonized—but never fully colonized. In a way we’re circling back, because the space that Shanghai filled in the international imagination, and the special place it was, is what you might have said about Hong Kong. When those features disappeared in Shanghai, they re-emerged in Hong Kong. In Shanghai too there were people who left to go to places where they could try to live. Hong Kong was one of the main places that they fled to. So, there are a lot of echoes between Shanghai at that point and Hong Kong in the last few years. And there were great horse races in both. Horse racing was a defining sport in old Shanghai and has been in Hong Kong too. Some of my all-time favorites on Old Shanghai continue to be Lynn Pan’s and there are continually good books on it coming out. Recent ones I’ve liked have been a couple by Paul French and Last Boat Out of Shanghai , which is by a Chinese American writer, Helen Zia, whose mother left the city around the time that Carter’s book is set. There weren’t any works of fiction published in 2020 that stood out to me as one of my five books, but I’ve been spending more time reading works from other years by a writer who I just recently discovered, Xue Yiwei. He’s a Chinese writer now living in Canada. At the beginning of this year, I was enthralled by one of his books, Dr. Bethune’s Children . I’ve also read a couple of stellar short stories this year by Te-Ping Chen, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has a book coming out in 2021 called Land of Big Numbers , which is her first collection of short stories. Her stories, like some in a Yu Hua collection of a few years back, are partly linked to current events in China, but they’re also richly imagined works and each one’s in a different genre—or at least has a different feel to it. I’m very taken with that book, that I’ve been reading in galleys. Also in 2021 a new translation of Journey to the West/Monkey King is coming out. Julia Lovell has done an abridged translation and I’ve been reading that. So I see 2021 as year when I might pay more attention to fiction. There isn’t one that’s sufficiently accessible and engaging. This comes with a very good introduction, placing it in context, and also has a foreword by my favourite graphic novelist who writes about China, Gene Luen Yang, who wrote a graphic novel, Boxers and Saints , about the Boxer uprising."

"It’s very cool. I think it’s better known in the United States because of the splash he made with a book called American Born Chinese . He wrote about his ethnicity and he did this dual book on the Boxers because he said he grew up a Christian but Chinese ethnically, so he didn’t know who to root for. He pairs a story of a boy who becomes a Boxer and a Chinese girl who becomes a Catholic. There’s one other novel I’ve just started, Peach Blossom Paradise , a brand new historical novel with fanciful elements by Ge Fei that is set close to 1900 as well. It looks very good, but I’m not far enough along to be able to recommend it yet. I’ll be able to tell you more about that next time we speak. Part of our best books of 2020 series."

"Yes, I like that about it. It’s sometimes forgotten that that was one of the songs that the students rallied to. Calhoun is now director of the London School of Economics. He was an outsider to Chinese studies, but he was in China at the time of the protests in 1989, teaching a course on social movements. He brought a freshness to thinking about what was going on that sometimes people who are specialists in a topic miss. One of the first things that caught my attention in a short piece he wrote was how the snowballing of the movement — the number of people joining it — had a lot to do with friendship circles and people being brought into the movement due to connections among classmates. There’s this interest in the nitty-gritty of what gave coherence to this rapidly growing mass movement. Once he became fascinated by the protests, he immersed himself in the literature on China , going deeper and deeper into Chinese history. He pays a lot of attention to the historical precedents for the movement and the links to student movements of China’s past. At the time, a lot of the commentary and press coverage focused on the protests going on in other parts of the socialist world. Sometimes the rootedness in China’s own specific traditions, and things that made these protests really quite different, were glossed over. Flagging the role of The Internationale gets at this. The movement was, in some ways, calling on a Communist Party to live up to its own professed ideals, as opposed to saying — as many protestors simultaneously on the streets in Poland or East Germany were saying — ‘We’re sick and tired of everything associated with Communist Party rule’ or ‘We think of the Communist Party as an external group that’s been imposed on us.’ In China, the Communist Party arose with the struggle for national liberation. The students really wanted Chinese leaders to be the kinds of people they claimed to want to be, and to lead a Party that stood for the things they claimed it should stand for. That was certainly part of it. I don’t think Calhoun says this, but in many ways the Tiananmen protests — if there was a parallel to an eastern or central European event — were more like the 1968 rising, the Prague Spring –a last effort to tie a popular movement around reformist figures within the Communist parties that were in control. The Chinese students didn’t want any particular reformist leader to take control, but they wanted the reformist strains within the party to come through, somehow. That’s venturing into alternative history or even science fiction – which is fascinating to speculate on, but…What I do know is that, while I wasn’t in China 25 years ago, I was there in 1986-7 when there were the warm-up protests to 1989. At the time, there was a real sense of open-endedness, of people wondering what kind of shape China would take. China seemed to be going into uncharted territory (as did the Soviet Union) with reformist experiments going on and who knew where they would go? After 1989, that sense of open-ended possibility was closed off. It became clear that the Party was not going to give up its monopoly of power. Something emerged quite quickly, this consumerist version of Communist Party rule. It was something new, it had not been seen before, but China was very much on a set trajectory. There would be a combination of consumerism, a mantra of stability being necessary, and an emphasis on nationalism. These kind of cohered and from the 1990s onwards there hasn’t again been that sense of ideas being in play that could take things in all different directions. Yes, though it’s important to mention there has been variation over the last 25 years. There have been moments of tightening and moments of loosening. One of the disturbing things right now is how frequent the periods of tightening are and how rare the moments of relaxation — that allow intellectuals to at least feel they can catch their breath — are. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Certainly there are people who make that argument — about the need for stability so people can lift themselves out of poverty, is the way I would put it, rather than anybody doing the lifting from above. There’s also been an ongoing debate about whether things could have turned out differently if there had been more compromise early on within the movement. A lot of the second-guessing by people who took part is about whether a willingness to accept small gains and retreat from the square would have made a difference. That whole debate is a central part of the film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace , that I mention as my final choice. That’s a real debate. At the time, there were voices within the movement calling for a more conciliatory approach. But the dynamic seemed to privilege the opposite. The more idealistic the voice was, the more magnified it became, and caution became seen as a lack of heroism."

"What is important about this book is that while within China there has been an effort of forced amnesia by the government, in the West there has often been a very selective remembering of 1989. Things that are sometimes left out are the complexity of the movement and the importance of the role of workers. What often also gets forgotten is how many other cities were affected by large-scale protests. In fact, part of what kept driving the protests in Beijing was the arrival of people who’d begun protesting in the provinces but then took the train to become part of the protests at Tiananmen Square. This book is largely a collection of first-hand analyses — generally by people with deep knowledge of China — about what was going on in other parts of the country. Given the fact that nearly all of the video footage, and a lot of the photographic documentation deals with central Beijing, it’s a tremendously important counterbalance. The book captures the extent to which this really was a movement of urbanites throughout the country. It’s really important to recapture that sense. When I think back to what was surprising about 1989 it wasn’t that there was a crackdown on large-scale protests. What was surprising was how long they went on and how far they spread. It affected so many different social groups: there were journalists taking part, there were whole work units turning out for marches. Then this sense developed of, “Well maybe this is going to be a game-changing event.” For something to grow that big in China there had to be some kind of divide within leadership — and if there was a divide in the leadership, why couldn’t the seemingly unimaginable happen and the movement succeed?"

"On my list of books I felt I needed to have a source book with documents produced by thinkers and activists of the time with as wide a variety of Chinese voices possible. New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices is a series of collections of speeches and writings of the time, pulled together by Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin. It’s an unusually creative and varied contribution. It brings in artistic currents, it brings in some voices from history — the figures from China’s past that rebels in 1989 found appealing. It’s an unusual book, it’s more of a collage than a straightforward collection of documents, but even that unwieldiness helps capture something significant about the movement. It was partly carefully reasoned speeches, partly rock and roll, partly youth movement, partly intellectual counter-culture movement — as well as a more straightforwardly political movement. There was a way in which it was a festival. Some of the photos are very powerful. They show people dancing, during the period before it became a standoff between the troops and the students. So I think it’s important to get that side of it in, which Geremie Barmé does. He also has a chapter, “Beijing Days, Beijing Nights” in the Unger book. He’s a very hard to categorize cultural historian and cultural analyst of China. Linda Jaivin is an experienced translator and novelist and has also written about Chinese rock music. The things they bring to that project — a historical sensibility but also an interest in the popular culture of contemporary China — makes the book stand out."

"Yes, and a great book. It’s the most important book to deal with 1989 in a long time: to my mind at least in the past decade. It’s powerful in the way it revisits the events of 1989 through profiles of participants. For example, we hear from a soldier who was involved in the crackdown and has rethought his role in events since then. The book also has a new investigation of a massacre that took place outside of Beijing, a few days later, in Chengdu. It was known about in specialist circles so it wasn’t as if this was something she discovered out of nowhere, but she did some very determined and brave investigation of the details. So that is one contribution of the book. But the biggest contribution is its careful charting of the efforts by the government to suppress memory and discussion of 1989 over a long stretch of time, as well as the daring ways in which people have pushed back against that — figures like the Tiananmen Mothers, who she spent time interviewing. It’s a courageous book, it’s a well written book, and it’s an important one. We still don’t know that. There’s very little clarity, in part because there have been such limitations on the kind of investigations you can do. Through careful piecing together of the story of individual victims that the Tiananmen Mothers have done, we know that there were more than a couple of hundred who died. We just don’t know how high that goes. We know there was crowd violence against soldiers in which a small number were killed in quite gruesome ways. We know that a much larger number of ordinary civilians were killed. We know some of them were students but many were members of other social groups, some of them people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, bystanders, people in neighbourhoods where shooting began. We know that many more deaths were caused by weapon fire than by tanks actually rolling over people. By the way if Louisa Lim’s book hadn’t come out, the book I would have put in this slot would have been Quelling the People by historian Timothy Brook. That remains the most detailed account we have of the massacre itself. It’s a very carefully researched work. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what’s distinctive about it. First of all, this is not the only subject the government tries to hush up discussion of in China. What’s peculiar is the way discussion of 1989 is closed off so completely. There is discussion, in a very general sense, of the Cultural Revolution. You’re discouraged from investigating the details of who did what and where, but it’s not problematic to say casually in a setting, including even in university classrooms, that the Cultural Revolution was a very difficult time for the country and some very horrible things were done during it. In the case of 1989, this emphasis on absolutely no discussion is peculiar, especially because initially there was discussion of it. At the time, the government was encouraging discussion of it to gain adherence for its story: that this was just a chaotic riot that was going to plunge the country back into the bad old days of the Cultural Revolution, and that strong measures were needed. For months after the massacre, there was quite a lot of publication within China about it, trying to spin the story into a direction that would make the government’s actions look justified. Liu Xiaobo’s writings were even republished. He was described as one of the “blackhands” behind the movement. I’ve seen a copy of his collected writings published by the Party — to get people to read it and realize how misguided he was! Then there was a shift towards clamping down on all discussion of it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think there are a lot of events around the world that authorities would prefer people not to talk about or maybe even discourage people from talking about, and there are unpleasant parts of every country’s past that are left out of textbooks or don’t get the kind of attention they deserve. But the intensity of the Chinese government’s efforts to prevent discussion and this year – quite alarmingly — the move from cracking down on public commemoration to detaining and arresting people for a private commemorative activity is very, very worrisome. That would be one way to think about it. Or simply that if a full reckoning came out there would be no way to make it a look like a proportionate use of force. One thing that is going on now that is unexpected is that many people thought that over time the toxicity of the events for the Party would be diminished. The people in power would be less connected to the people who made the decision to use force. Maybe it was just a matter of waiting until more people with direct blood on their hands had disappeared from the scene. It would be easier once Deng Xiaoping had died, or people like Li Peng had faded from view. Part of the problem now is that Xi Jinping has identified very directly and intensely with Deng Xiaoping. So it’s getting harder rather than easier for the Chinese leadership to open the space for saying ‘This was a mistake,’ because it’s an action very much identified with Deng Xiaoping. That’s the biggest thing that hasn’t gone away. It’s important to always keep in mind how much the movement was as much anti-corruption as pro-democracy. Even though two of the books I chose have democracy in the title or subtitle I generally try to use other terms — to talk about it as a people’s movement, or a popular protest, because I do think that outrage at corruption, a real anger at unfairness, is what drove things — and still drives protests today."

"It’s a very powerful film. I was one of the historical consultants on it. It needed to be very focused on Beijing, because that’s where the footage was and the power of the film largely comes from that. I love the fact that in trying to capture what was going on there are very powerful interviews with workers. Han Dongfang, the organizer of the independent labour union, who is still a labour activist in Hong Kong, comes off more eloquently and powerfully than perhaps anybody else in the film. There are also a variety of voices of intellectuals at different places on the political spectrum, with different life experiences, as well as discussions with students. It’s a very powerful film and I think the website was ahead of its time in being coupled with a film from a very early point. It gives you excerpts from the film and also brings in other kinds of audiovisual materials and written texts. So there are sections from some books I’ve mentioned. There are also links to important articles including the best article from the time specifically about the role of the workers in the movement, which often gets eclipsed by the student narrative. The fact that workers were turning out to support the students is a crucial part of what worried the government so much. This was partly because of its own experience, historically, of students taking to the streets first and workers following them. This was especially the case when it was felt that the people in power were not acting as worthy leaders. The intellectuals spoke out as the voice of the nation, the voice of conscience, and the workers would follow the clarion call of intellectuals out onto the street, which is something that does not usually happen in the United States. But it was also because the combination of students/intellectuals plus workers was something that was going on in Poland at the time, with Solidarity. China’s leaders were very aware of this so they saw this multiclass activity — both in 1989 and since — as the thing they need to guard against. Like the best books, there are people who disagree with parts of its emphasis, or parts of its interpretation, but it is a really significant interpretation of the events of 1989. It generates debate and discussion at a serious level about very big issues, such as the potential for popular struggles to lead to change quickly. It raises a lot of very important issues, so I think it should be taken seriously in the way that a serious work of interpretive scholarship should be taken. Another important thing about 1989 is that Chinese events take on different significance or resonance as history moves on. Immediately after the movement, it was hard to separate it out from the images that were coming out of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and so forth. Now, when you watch this film, or think back to Tiananmen, it’s the images of the Arab Spring that are on your mind. There’s a lot of things that resonate — for example the ongoing importance of taking control of a large public square, which we saw again with Tahrir Square. I do think the complicated way history has moved on in the last 25 years is part of the mix in thinking about how the Chinese Communist Party has managed to stay in control. One of the lucky breaks the Party has gotten in the last couple of decades is the many places they can point to around the world where a change away from authoritarianism has led to a very divisive and difficult period. I’m always on the side of people struggling against authoritarianism, but it’s easier than it should be for the Chinese Communist Party to point to places like the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and say — without ever saying it in so many words — to the people of China, “You may hate us, but are you positive that what could come after us would be better? Couldn’t it end up like the former Yugoslavia, that just descended into civil war and ethnic cleansing?” More recently, they were very nervous about the Arab Spring protests when they began, but they were quickly able to find places in the Arab world to point to and emphasize in the official media as object lessons in roads you probably wouldn’t want your country to go down…The fact that the world is so deficient at the moment in terms of positive models for change is something that makes it easier than it should be for the Chinese Communist Party to tell the kind cynical tale it likes to tell about the dangers of change, the ease with which change might lead to chaos and turmoil. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, but even though they’re not having that discussion, the official media can still saturate life in China — down to the television programs playing in the subway. They’re continually playing up the difficulties being experienced by other places in the world, countries that are experiencing chaos and turmoil, as well as reminding people of a time when China was weaker than it is now, and bullied by other countries. So there are images from World War II, and they particularly play up Japanese aggression in China, as a continual reminder of where China once was. Implicitly they are trying to pave the way for a situation where even some knowledge of what really happened in 1989 won’t necessarily lead people to the conclusion that China would have gone down a positive route if the troops hadn’t been called in. It’s a complicated and sometimes convoluted logic, but what the Communist Party talks a lot about is important, as well as what they try to maintain silence over. They work together. I think this is precisely the way to push the Chinese government. They are putting so much emphasis on the need for other countries to come to terms with difficult periods in their own past — but they’ve also got a lot to answer for on that score. I’ve been thinking about that. There were plenty of things I grew up not knowing about that happened in my own country’s past. Every country has things they’re not good at coming to terms with, dark periods from their own past. For example, I don’t think I ever learned in school about the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. There were a lot of things that were swept under the rug, at least in textbooks. But it wasn’t that you would be fired from your job as a teacher if you brought one of those up in a classroom. That’s what makes the Chinese effort to impose amnesia different. This interview was published on June 4th, 2014 Bullets and Opium by Liao Yiwu (w/ an introduction by Ian Johnson ) would definitely be a contender for inclusion if I did this now, but not sure what I cut off the list to make room for it."

"It’s set in the Qing dynasty, mostly in the 19th century, and it tries to bring to life the experiences of the women of a single family. One of the challenges of biographies of women in different settings is the limited records that are left of their lives. But with these particular women, they wrote a lot of poetry, and Mann uses that to great effect. She also experiments with the form of writing. She’s doing something that in Chinese would be called waishi , which means ‘unconventional history’. As Mann describes it, it records things that might have happened, based on invented or unauthenticated sources or on gossip. So she takes what these women wrote, and then she tries to weave fully textured lives around them, drawing on everything that could possibly help to illuminate their lives. These were elite women – but the fact that they were women also makes them one of the groups that gets left out of the historical record. Not particularly. But there was a tendency until recently for historical writing about most parts of the world to focus largely on male experiences. I think that with China there’s a special challenge, in that a lot of the general works don’t capture how variegated the lives were of women of different social groups, different classes, even different periods. There’s a tendency to think about an unchanging oppression of Chinese women. But one of the things this book captures is the degree to which women of elite groups, and in particular parts of the country, would be much more literate, much more engaged with the life of the mind than is sometimes imagined when there’s this focus purely on the patriarchal structures that kept women down. There are a lot of similarities. The Death of Woman Wang is a book which I frequently teach, and it was one of the first books I read as a student when it first came out in the late 1970s. It’s one of the books that inspired me to become a Chinese historian, and it’s a lovely work. Spence takes a woman who only shows up in the record through one incident – a crime – so he has to take much greater liberties than Susan Mann, who’s dealing with women who left more traces of themselves to be used as building blocks. But there’s definitely a kinship between the books. Mann’s book also draws on China’s long and well-established tradition of biographical writing. One way she tries to bring the reader into China is not just through Chinese lives, but also by adapting some of the forms of Chinese biographical and historical writing. It’s a tradition that goes back to Sima Qian in the first century BC, who is sometimes spoken of as the Chinese Herodotus or the Chinese Thucydides, and who interspersed accounts of great events with accounts of individuals."

"He’s a man who, after a fairly ordinary family life, went through a process of religious discovery which led him to become an itinerant monk, establishing Buddhist temples across China. He also lived through many of the most important events of the 20th century. Part of the conceit of the book is to cast familiar events – such as the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s – in a new light, by keeping the focus on an individual’s life, and then telling the story of a nation’s transformations around that. That’s a good point. In the book there’s a lot of juxtaposition between the quiet contemplation of life in a temple and Tanxu’s engagement with what’s going on around him. But what is striking – and we don’t think of these as going hand in hand – is that Tanxu has to be seen as a nationalist as well as a spiritual seeker. Carter argues that what he was doing was one way to strengthen China – to strengthen its soul as part of the effort to strengthen it as a polity."

"He’s an incredible figure, in almost any way you think about it, to have led this transformative revolution that turned China upside down and inside out, and then go on to lead the country for the first 27 years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. So he was involved in dramatic events, he was a larger-than-life figure, and also there are distinct stages in his life in which he operates in different ways. We see him first as a rebel figure and then also as an almost godlike holder of enormous power. So it’s not hard to see why a lot of biographers would be drawn to the drama of that kind of a life. I think there are actually two kinds of Mao biography that come to mind. Those two that you mention do present Mao as a despicable figure – a monster more than a man. But before that probably the most famous biography of Mao was Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China , which is a very romanticised vision of Mao’s life. It focuses on Mao the rebel, before he came to power, whereas the more demonising biographies tend to focus on Mao’s life after taking power. Or, in the case of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s, they take the most evil period of Mao’s life and then read his entire earlier life through the prism of his most brutal actions while in power. What I like about Spence’s biography, which is very short, is that it presents us with a very human Mao, both in his accomplishments and in the tragedies that he foisted on the country. So you get a more rounded picture – but that doesn’t mean impartial, that it’s a balance sheet of positives and negatives. The book is driven by a vision of a flesh-and-blood individual who accomplished some amazing things, and made some very terrible mistakes. Not one that would make for compelling reading! Though I recently wrote a piece for Time magazine about how when Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao, he seemed in comparison a more down-to-earth, unexciting and pragmatic character – but now, in comparison to Hu Jintao, Deng seems positively charismatic. So we’ve had a kind of steady progression away from larger-than-life Chinese leaders."

"I wasn’t excited about reading this book at first, because I thought it would be yet another familiar account of suffering during the Cultural Revolution. And yet the book really won me over. And that’s partly because it deals with the 1950s as well as the Cultural Revolution of 1966 through 1976. Indeed it goes beyond that to the author’s subsequent journey to the United States. I think the book loses a lot when it gets past the 1980s, but the earlier parts are an amazing evocation not just of suffering but also of daily life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. One of the things that’s special, if not unique, is that he grew up in an urban setting – the city of Xi’an – but he was then exiled to the countryside, and lived a significant part of his life in an ordinary village. So he’s someone who experienced both urban and rural China. Another thing that’s different from the other memoirs is that he wasn’t a believer in Mao’s ideology who then had the scales fall from his eyes. He presents himself as being an iconoclastic figure from childhood – the kind of person who was always doubtful of orthodoxy. So that’s refreshing as a part of the genre. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But what’s most refreshing is that while we get a lot of harrowing accounts of his time in labour camps and so on, he tells his story with continual flashes back to his childhood. Meals or conversations while he was in a jail cell, or while he was doing forced labour, trigger Proustian memories – sending him back ten or 20 years. And so we learn about his relationship to another iconoclastic figure, his Buddhist grandfather, who had collaborated with different political regimes and tried to find a way to continue living an eccentric life in different settings. He also tells you about what street food tasted like in Xi’an in the early 1950s. There are just a lot of lovely vignettes. Hah, well he misses some of the dishes of that time. The funniest thing he mentions related to food – and it’s hard to imagine anything funny related to a period of terrible famines – is that during the Great Leap Forward famine, the government got concerned about how few calories people were taking in. One thing they did was try to get people to move around less, so that they wouldn’t expend energy. So they briefly lightened up the censorship mechanisms that prevented the showing of most foreign films, and you were suddenly able to see movies that would previously have been thought of as subversive, because it was one way to get people to just sit there. This is one angle on a period of suffering that, without minimising the suffering, makes you think about it in a totally new way – and that’s what I love about an illuminating biography. That’s very true. I guess one thing we have at least, in addition to the memoirs that do get told, are works of fiction that have that evocation of the ordinary. And Yu Hua’s To Live is one of my favourites – a novella that tries to give you the sense of an ordinary life lived through these incredibly extraordinary times of revolution. I know – you got me."

"I love the way it’s written, and the way that Chang blends her own life story in with it. She pairs the story of her family’s migration out of China to the United States, where she grew up, to the movement of young women from rural China to urban China today. And she sets up a parallel between the way that American cities were transformed by overseas immigrants who fuelled the American industrial rise, with the enormous migration today – that doesn’t involve crossing an ocean or leaving one country for another – of rural dwellers to the world of Chinese cities. I also love the way she brings to our attention the distinctive personalities of young Chinese women. She describes them as working in very difficult conditions, but often experiencing them as liberating, because they have so much more freedom and control over their private life than they had in their villages, where male-dominated family structures remain powerful. Absolutely, but actually you put your finger on something very significant. I think the fact that Leslie Chang is ethnically Chinese did make a difference in her ability to tell certain kinds of story, and she’s fairly upfront about that. At one point she goes back to visit the village of one of the girls who she’s got to know, and she’s told she’ll be sleeping in the bed with the other females of the family. It’s hard to imagine that kind of entrée into local family life if she hadn’t been ethnically Chinese. But I think there’s a challenge for any ethnographer – and this book is in ways very much like an ethnography – to get at people’s real opinions and feelings. You have to invest a lot of time into it, and she spent a lot of time, over an extended period, getting to know these people, and getting them to share things with her that they wouldn’t have in a more casual interview setting. It’s quite amazing to think of two members of a couple who have written books that are very different from one another, but share skilful writing and deep empathy for the people that they’re describing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I also loved being able to end with this book, having begun with Susan Mann’s. Mann’s book is an effort to bring to life the experience of privileged women who were ignored in the historical record; whereas Chang’s is about less privileged women a century later who, in the specificity of their experience, are also ignored. For China as it is now, Peter Hessler’s Country Driving is a wonderful place to start. It gives you a sense of the sheer speed at which the country is being transformed, and how at a human level people are experiencing and dealing with that."

"It’s not about formal historians, which I think is interesting given its title. This actually came up at one of Johnson’s book launch events, the one at UC Irvine where I teach. One of the questions from the audience was from my department’s historian of Vietnam and she wondered why Johnson didn’t talk about academic historians. Johnson noted that he talks about a couple of historically minded academics, just ones in other disciplines. In a sense, he’s talking about a particular kind of documentarian, but that’s not as nice a word to use in a title. His book is about people who are trying to document things that have happened that the party-state is trying very hard to sweep under the rug and to get people to forget about. I’d also say that even though he skips over discussing historians per se, he has crafted a powerful book that definitely qualifies as a work of history as well as of journalism. It’s about engagement with history. It’s about recent history, the period since the Communist Party took power, although there are also interesting stories to tell about the politics of history in earlier periods. It’s very focused, and what drives it, in part, is how compelling the profiles of the individuals involved are—people who are making these very risky moves to unearth stories from the past that deserve to be told. These people are not really what we think of as dissidents: they’re people who are trying to work within the system, but within the crevices in the system. “I decided to think about it as the ‘best books’ to recommend to busy general readers” One of the most important things about the book is the way it pushes back against any idea of a brainwashed population that has either completely accepted official lines or given up on the idea of being able to push back against them. It captures a sense of the struggle to keep alive alternative views of the past that’s happening inside of the PRC in these very daring ways. It also connects with efforts outside of the PRC, including by young people from China who are doing things like posting images of things that are banned on the internet inside their home country. Posting them outside of China allows them to filter back into the country. At the end, he brings up the ‘White Paper’ protests that happened just over a year ago. Slogans were put up on a Beijing bridge in a lone act of protest in October 2022. The banners were taken down, but images of them were posted on the internet and on campuses outside China and then circulated back into China. Those slogans came up when people took part in the protests, which were specifically against a zero-COVID policy that had gone on too long and been accompanied by abuses but were also used to express other concerns about repressive and autocratic actions of many kinds. The book is very interesting about how even things that are almost suppressed and circulate in these underground ways can keep alternative visions from being extinguished. Johnson includes some very interesting comparisons with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc in general, during the Cold War . He refers a lot to Central and Eastern European parallels and precedents. These are things that Chinese intellectuals think about as well: Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt and others are looked to as models. One is the acts of horrific violence in the 1950s that there’s no place for in the official record – things like the killings of not only landlords, but people who were connected to landlords’ families, or people who were presented as rightists. When people talk about the suppression of memory in China, people outside of China often focus on the Cultural Revolution – a specific moment – and Tiananmen Square, the massacre of June 4th near there . Those are two different examples. With the June 4th massacre, there’s an effort to blot out the very fact that it took place. With the Cultural Revolution, there’s an effort to minimize the horrors of it to quite specific things and then move on. The underground documentarians in Sparks are also interested in other periods that are suppressed: earlier purges and struggle sessions that ended up with people being beaten up or killed or pressured into suicide, which came before the Cultural Revolution. These get less attention from even critics of the Chinese Communist Party because they fall out of these few moments that loom large in foreign and exile historical accounts. It’s not that there aren’t academic historians and others who are writing about those things outside of China, but to be inside of China and trying to keep alive the suffering of people in the 1950s is a key part of this. Yes, the grand tradition of the historian as a daring figure. Sima Qian was long before, but there are academic historians who’ve tried to carve out those spaces, too. If Johnson were going to bring in an academic historian, he could have written about Sun Peidong, who is a historian of the Cultural Revolution and taught courses at Fudan on the Cultural Revolution, presenting it as a complicated historical moment in China, for as long as she could. She was pressured to leave, in part by nationalistic students who objected to what she was doing, but also by the constricting space in China. She left to go to Paris and now is teaching at Cornell. There are also examples of people who are using their fiction to do similar things. Fang Fang, the author of Wuhan Diary (which was nonfiction), has a novel coming out next year in translation (with the talented Michael Berry doing the honors) that’s set in the early 1950s, about the violence of the land reform period. Yan Lianke has written novels–many available in English in very fine Carlos Rojas translations–about these kinds of things as well. Fiction is mentioned in passing in Johnson’s book, but it’s not a focus. When I was listening to one of his talks, I thought a work of fiction that could fit into his book is Lu Xun’s classic short story “Diary of a Madman.” The madman, who may see things clearly, imagines the official record of the Chinese past – the Confucian, prettified version of the past – and interspersed within each line are horrific descriptions of people eating people. It’s this idea of a counter-history of brutality that gets left out of the sanitized version of a history. You have these competing versions of an official version of the past and a counter version. It links up to a lot of interesting things in Chinese culture. One of the recurring themes in official histories by new ruling groups, which we saw before the revolutionary period, is you want to emphasize the things that were done that caused suffering before you took power, and then figure out a way to emphasize the successes after that. For the Communist Party, while there’s a willingness to accept that mistakes were made, there’s an attempt to say that’s not the main theme. Part of the goal of the underground historians is to show, just by presenting the sheer accumulation of suffering, that to present this as a minor theme in the history of post-1949 China is to make a mockery of any notion of a truthful account."

"It’s another beautifully written book and it also deals with issues of contested memories. It has a much tighter focus, temporally. It goes up to the present, but it is continually going back to what is remembered and forgotten about the period from 1966 to 1976, which is now talked about as the Cultural Revolution decade. In that sense, it’s a micro study – it zeroes in on this one moment. It makes sense to read these two books together. Not surprisingly, they’re being reviewed together occasionally (a good example is Yangyang Cheng’s excellent essay in a new venue called China Books Review that is edited by someone you’ve worked with a lot, FiveBooks.com alum Alec Ash), or a review of one will bring up the other. There are overlaps and intersections between them. Branigan’s book came out first in the UK and got a lot of review attention. It’s gotten less review attention in the United States, where it came out later. Not only has it been getting prize nominations in the UK, but in North America it won the prestigious Cundill History Prize. (The prize has been around for about a dozen years and is administered by McGill University in Montreal. Two books about China have won the prize before: Julia Lovell’s book on Maoism and Stephen Platt’s book on the Taipings). Meanwhile, Ian Johnson’s book got a lot of review attention in the United States. It is partly a function of his being based in the United States and the book coming out at the same time in both countries. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But I’m struck that there’s a particular value of Branigan’s book within the UK for a very specific reason, which relates to Wild Swans . That’s a book that came out in 1991 and is about the suffering of the author’s family during the Cultural Revolution. It was a global bestseller, but it looms especially large in shaping the understanding of China within the UK where its author Jung Chang is based. People whose view of China was shaped by reading that family memoir have an idea that it’s possible to think of the Cultural Revolution as an event with a fairly simple dividing between people who were victims and people who were victimizers. Other memoirs about the Cultural Revolution have had that impact as well. Life and Death in Shanghai is another one that reinforces the idea that you can think about it as a time when there were people who committed violence and those who suffered violence. What Red Memory does very powerfully, as many specialist works on the Cultural Revolution have done before it, is to show that one of the deeply disturbing things about that decade was that people could begin on one side of the perpetrator-victim divide and end up on the other or flip back and forth between them. It’s a real mistake to try to divide up the people who suffered and the people who caused suffering because it was often members of the same family who were affected in different ways, and there were individuals who were victims and victimizers during different parts of their lives. Efforts to simplify this complicated event creates real problems for understanding China. We’re seeing official uses of a simplified version of the memory of the Cultural Revolution in officially promoted Xi Jinping biographies. They talk about his time in the countryside as a time that gave him a particular connection to ordinary Chinese. It’s another way of turning it into a simpler story than it is. I think it’s true. People who are reaching their seventies or eighties have lived through an incredible set of events, of extraordinary periods and changes in China during the course of their lifetimes. Younger people have also lived through incredible changes. They haven’t had a way to put it into a full perspective by the truncated version of any discussion of what happened during this decade. It really is a crucial decade to come to terms with. With the Cultural Revolution, there are a small number of narratives that you are allowed to talk about briefly and then move on. It’s not this thing that you can’t even mention, but rather, there’s a desire not to dwell on it. The one time I lived in China for an extended period was in 1986 through 1987. There would be foreign travelers I would meet, who would say in a hushed way, ‘My tour guide mentioned how his family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not surprising that they mentioned it but didn’t go into the details. Tell me when somebody says their family did well during even part of the Cultural Revolution.’ The taboo is about talking about being swept up in it. It became okay to say, ‘That was a dark period. That was bad.’ However, to probe into the details and to get at the fact of how many people had something to feel ashamed about, something to be disturbed about – that’s where a richer perspective is needed, to give a sense of how the event affected people in many different ways, in many different places."

"She calls it Invitation to a Banquet , and it has this sense of reveling in the pleasures of Chinese food, and also reveling in – and this is what I’m drawn to most about it – the variation within Chinese cuisines, a term that decidedly should at times be used in the plural even if there are situations in which it can be used in the singular as well. Some of her individual books have zeroed in on a region. I love her book about Jiangnan cooking. She’s famous for one about Sichuan food. In each of those, implicitly, there’s this idea that it’s a problem to imagine there’s something called ‘Chinese food.’ It’s the same problem as if you say there’s something called ‘European food’ or ‘Western food.’ Sometimes, in China, you’ll see a menu that says ‘Western dishes.’ Your first reaction is to think, ‘But these dishes have nothing to do with each other!’ If you had gone into a Chinese restaurant in the US or in the UK before the rise of regional restaurants, you would have said, ‘These dishes don’t go together.’ Invitation to a Banquet moves across time, across thousands of years, and it moves across the country and goes outside of China. It begins with her talking about her first encounters with something called ‘Chinese food’ while growing up in England. This food was very different from anything that she encountered when she got to China. In one way, this book is a celebration of food. This is a period when the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is celebrating anything about the country it can brag about, from its monuments and philosophers from the past to its recent technological accomplishments. You might imagine that this book, which celebrates a part of the culture, would fit in with that, but in a way it challenges it. Not directly, in the way that Johnson and Branigan’s books do, but because it emphasizes the diversity, the variation, and even the limitations of imagining that there is something enduring that you can put your finger on as Chinese-ness through the ages. Dunlop writes about how dishes that have come to be thought of as quintessentially Chinese were influenced by flows from other parts of the world. You get an idea that the Silk Road wasn’t just about Chinese influences flowing out, but it was actually also about what we now think of as China being shaped by things flowing in from Central Asia. She talks about thinking of this cuisine as a cosmopolitan creation, the blending of influences from different parts of what we now think of as China with influences from places outside what we now think of as China. There’s a lot of memoir. This is somebody from outside of China, with a very simple idea about it, being awakened to its depths and spending a lot of time hanging out with and listening to people with expertise, which isn’t so different from what Ian Johnson did. Dunlop includes vignettes about Chinese chefs that she’s met or studied with, and blends these with travelogue and memoir. In Isabel Hilton’s wonderful review of the book in the Financial Times , she said there’s an almost pornographic quality to some of it. Dunlop is so good at evoking the sensual experience of eating food that it becomes almost food writing as a form of erotica."

"What’s interesting about reading these two together, as I did, was that Clarissa Wei – who’s lived largely in Taiwan but grew up in California – writes that when she was a kid, people whose families had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or mainland China could talk about a shared connection to Chinese culture, but that has changed over time. It’s become more politically fraught to identify with these different places, but also, there’s an awareness of how artificial the idea of a singular Chinese culture is. Like Dunlop’s book, this book is a love letter to a cosmopolitan cuisine, but to a more specific one, associated with an often overlooked or underappreciated setting. It makes the case for appreciating Taiwanese food as something that can’t be thought of as a subset or distillation of Chinese food. It is a cuisine in which some dishes are heavily influenced by versions that existed in China, but for centuries Taiwan has had a separate historical trajectory, which has sometimes been tightly connected and sometimes at most only loosely connected to the Chinese mainland. It has been influenced by indigenous traditions and by other parts of the world, especially Japan, and includes versions of ingredients that aren’t found on the mainland. You have a blending of influences from different parts of the Chinese mainland by immigrants who come from different places at different times. The end result is a radically distinctive cuisine, even if you think you recognize some of the dishes. It shouldn’t be that hard a concept to recognize if you think about Europe and how different dishes that seem somewhat similar are when they’re made in places across different borders. There’s a blending of what we think of as Chinese food with all kinds of other dishes that have much more to do with local, Japanese or other influences. Wei clearly has an interest in thinking about this as a story not only about food, but also as a gateway into thinking differently about Taiwan – not thinking of it as a place temporarily separated from China, but as a place with its own history going back for centuries and which has also been a self-ruled country since the late 1940s. The subtitle of the book is “Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation,” and this is one reason that a mainland edition of this book would not work. It made me hunger for a comparable book about Hong Kong, using food to capture how different Hong Kong is than just something that’s a subset of China. I was waiting to see if she would refer to Din Tai Fung, which is a quintessentially Taiwan restaurant chain that has now become a global one. Its trademark dish is xiaolongbao – which I think of as Shanghai-style soup dumplings, though some claim they originated in other parts of the Yangzi Delta region. She has a nice way of talking about how that fits into the story of Taiwan cuisine. She doesn’t say it, but it’s almost as if we were to say McDonald’s isn’t an American restaurant because the hamburger doesn’t originate in America, you can find its roots elsewhere. There’s a way in which the story of food is about flows between cultures, which are complicated. Whenever you’re talking about something that’s related to one place, you often can find a more interesting global story about it as it travels."

"It’s a very personal story, framed partly around looking back at get-togethers that he had with other artists and intellectual figures involved with film and poetry, and the way that the space for them to live kept on narrowing. They had to become more and more cautious. And then, some of them began disappearing into camps. He is intensely aware that he was one of the lucky ones who managed, along with his family, to get out at a time when the space was disappearing. He tells his story through these amazing vignettes. He talks about a group of poets and other intellectuals getting together, and there’s this intense watchfulness of any signs of any growing connection to Islam, which would then put them in a category of potential terrorists. They’re aware they’re being watched, and so they make a point of drinking alcohol during the get-together, just because simply to not drink alcohol starts to become interpreted, by people who are looking for any excuse to get you, as increased religiosity. It’s very strange. When people talk about Xinjiang now, there are references to all kinds of dystopian fiction, and 1984 gets talked about a lot. Darren Byler , an anthropologist who worked there, talks about how one of the first people he met in Xinjiang brought up the Hunger Games . Another one is Minority Report , where people in an imagined dystopian future get arrested before they’ve done anything because of the imagined clues that they will be doing something. This memoir captures that in a very personal way. There’s a Minority Report side to the idea of that group saying, ‘Let’s make sure there are bottles of alcohol clearly visible at our meeting, so that people won’t put us in this other category.’ “A poet in exile is a poignant thing” The rationale for the harsh detention camps created across Xinjiang was that they were ‘vocational’ institutions where people were being put so they could be offered skills, and they could be educated. If you look at the figures in this book, what you actually had was the intellectual and artistic and educational elite ending up in these places. That really undermines the official story about these detention camps being about education, something also undermined by the harsh treatment of leading Uyghur academics. Joshua Freeman is the translator, and he wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. He’s translated a lot of Uyghur poets, including Tahir Hamut Izgil, the author of this memoir. Poetry has an important place in Uyghur culture; it’s a highly respected art form. I think there’s something very powerful about making the poetry from Xinjiang available to the world. It gets you out of the box of thinking of the population of a place only in terms of oppression and resistance. It gives us a sense of the real lives being led there, the dreams and aspirations. Some of the poems have to do with oppression, some have to do with attachment to the landscape and things like that. A poet in exile is a poignant thing. If the poetry is rooted in a local language and meditations on a local landscape, and you’re set apart from there, it makes the human catastrophe relatable. I think the way that people relate to something comparable with Tibet is via the religion and the figure of the Dalai Lama and an idea of spiritualism. I think with this book, the power, in a sense, comes from having a poet’s life at the center of it. Freeman begins by writing that if you had taken an Uber in Washington, D.C. a few years ago, you would have had no idea that the person driving it might well have been this extraordinary poet. When you hear about his life, and the lives of his friends – Izgil was involved with filmmaking, and he and others in his circle were studying modernist literature in Beijing and introducing the works of other writers to the Uyghur population – you are taken far away from the stereotypes of a faceless suffering, as well as far away from Beijing’s story of everybody in Xinjiang being a potential terrorist. It explodes both of those tropes. That’s a challenge with both Sparks and Red Memory . Both authors try very hard to give you enough information that you can have a sense of what’s going on without having read anything else, but, in both cases, there’d be value in reading them together with something that gave you a brisk walkthrough. I’d suggest a book that I recommended in a previous interview: Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China . If you were going to read one book along with those, that would be valuable. That’s not the official version so it fits in, interpretively, with these others. Susan Shirk’s Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise is very valuable. It’s an accessible book by a political scientist and came out in 2022. A book that I was tempted to recommend but didn’t (in part because it’s co-authored by a student that I co-advised) is Taiwan: A Contested Democracy Under Threat , by Lev Nachman and John Sullivan . It’s short and accessible. It goes well with Made in Taiwan . It talks about the way that Taiwan often is approached as a geopolitical problem and gets beyond that. If we’re talking not just about books, Evan Osnos had a long piece in the New Yorker recently about his return to China post-COVID that deals well with US-China relations. And though I’ve largely been focusing on Thailand and Hong Kong lately for a book project, I have a very short piece on US-China relations coming out any day now myself. It’s part of a Wall Street Journal year in review series. Historian that I am, though, I manage to talk not just about 2023, as I am supposed to, but also about an earlier year when it similarly looked like US-China relations were in free fall but then in the autumn heads of the two countries had a surprisingly cordial summit meet up."

"So, one work I want to draw attention to here, even though I have so far just had a chance to dip into it since I just got my copy, is the special issue of writings from mainland China that Granta has published. Granta 169: China is a kind of collage work, a sort I’m often drawn to about China. Sometimes such works will be made up of profiles of very different individual Chinese people but, in this case, we get a literary collage. It has a story by Yan Lianke who’s thought of as one of the most critical voices in the literary sphere. He lambasts and satirizes various moves the Chinese Communist Party has made, and his works are often banned inside of China. Then there are other writers represented in the collection who work inside the official writers’ organizations or who are not particularly political. You get pieces by writers who had very little schooling and learned to write while they were working in factories, as well as poets and writers who have an almost punk sensibility. Then you also have representations of more refined writing. There is also a lot of attention to how different regions can be in terms of writing. There’s a heavy representation of writers from the Northeast. It’s a way to get out of a Beijing or Shanghai-centric view of China. That’s what I really liked about it. It’s a mix. There are essays. There are a couple of pieces about genres of writing. There’s one reported piece by Han Zhang who is based in New York and has written good pieces, not always related to China, for the New Yorker . There are photo essays sprinkled in, which is quite nice. Some are high-quality color spreads that liven up the book as you’re going through it. The bulk of the volume is translations of short stories and memoirs, that sort of thing. I love Yu Hua’s writing . It was a pleasure to get a new short story by him, “Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It.” It’s translated by Michael Berry, who I admire as a translator as well. It seems autobiographical, except that it’s by a writer who is frustrated by trying to make it, not breaking through for a longer period than it took Yu Hua to do so. You can tell he’s drawing on the experiences he had as a young writer and then as an older one. I especially like “Adrift in the South,” a memoir by Xiao Hai that is translated by Tony Hao, neither of them people I was familiar with but whose names I will now look for as a reader. It’s about somebody who shows up in Shenzhen and works in factories, making his way and stumbling into a life as a writer. It’s earthy in style and evocative of a world of low wage and no guarantees labour and of drifting from factory to factory. It’s a love letter to Shenzhen. It’s not as though any experience he had there was so great, but it was crucial as a coming-of-age period for him. I describe it as a memoir, but in it genres bleed into each other and he even includes some stanzas from poems that he wrote. One strength of the collection is that it showcases work by many talented translators. Helen Wang, who has done some wonderful translations of children’s literature from China, is represented in it. Jeremy Tiang, a Singapore translator who seems to be everywhere right now and also writes fiction of his own, was a consultant to the volume. There’s an enjoyable interview with the editor of Granta , Thomas Meaney, about the creation of this volume on the Sinica podcast . Kaiser Kuo interviews him and he talks about the creation process of trying to get a different set of voices from China out there. Yes, although I do have to stress that I don’t come close to reading—or even looking at—everything that’s published because there’s an enormous amount. There continue to be interesting works by journalists and various kinds of reportage. Alec Ash has a memoir, The Mountains Are High , about living in Yunnan during COVID. Peter Hessler has a new book, Other Rivers , that’s partly about teaching in Chengdu, decades after he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in a different part of Sichuan and wrote River Town about that experience. There were also books by Yuan Yang, with a focus on a small group of women, and Ed Wong, with a focus largely on the experiences of his father, which are based on the time they each spent working as journalists in Beijing and traveling around the PRC. The former wrote for the FT for a long time before she went into politics (she was just elected an MP in your country), and the latter wrote in China and still writes for the New York Times (now based in my country in DC). Each of these four books have things to offer. There’s also one coming out next year by a talented journalist, Emily Feng , that I’ve read in proofs and was so taken with that I’d be surprised if I didn’t want to talk to you about it again a year from now if we do a similar interview on 2025 China books. The kind of writing in all these books by journalists is something to watch because there is likely be a gap in quality books by reporters and freelancers who spent extended amounts of time in China and were able to roam around in unstructured ways. Many journalists with long-time China experience either aren’t there now or if they are there, are confined in their movements. 2024 was also an interesting year for accessible academic writing on China, which I’m always glad to see. There are more academics with deep knowledge of China who are either trying to write books for the general reader or at least create crossover works intended for specialist and non-specialist audiences. There was, for example, Tom Mullaney’s Chinese Computer , a sequel to his Chinese Typewriter . It’s a specialist study but it’s very accessible because it tells stories of people involved in the creation of these new technologies. So that’s a good trend. Two of the books that I chose this year are by academics who are moving to a more accessible style of writing: in one case, very fully in that direction."

"After the 1911 Revolution and the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, there was an inability of the newly-founded Republic of China to get on its feet. One reason for that was the jockeying for power among military strongmen. They had armies that seemed more loyal to them than to the country. Sun Yat-sen was briefly the provisional president, but he was nudged aside by the ultimate warlord, Yuan Shikai, who had been a powerful general in Qing times. He maneuvered himself into power. He initially ruled as President of the Republic but then set himself up as an emperor. That’s something that happens periodically in China. In recent cases it hasn’t been as overt, but for a time you couldn’t talk about Yuan Shikai on the Chinese internet without censors stepping in. After Xi Jinping did away with term limits, people used allusions to or images of Yuan Shikai as a coded way to suggest that the president-who-makes-himself-an-emperor phenomenon was not just one of the past. Kate Merkel-Hess is fascinated by this period of disunity and uncertainty in China—particularly the late 1910s and 1920s—before it settles into a version of one-party rule, first under the Nationalists and then under the Communist Party. (Full disclaimer: Kate was a student of mine at UC Irvine and we were also involved in the collective China Beat blog, of which she was the first editor.) Kate has always been a lovely writer, writing for broad audiences in places like the TLS, and this new book, her second solo written one, reads really well. I love the title, Women and Their Warlords , rather than the other way around. One of the goals of the book is to unsettle the stereotype of this period as being all about men battling for control of the pie. She wants you to think about them as a set of people who believed in different things and had different ideas about how to strengthen the country—an ongoing concern of Chinese political leaders from the late Qing on. She wants us to think about them as influenced by different kinds of intellectual currents at the time. Liberal ideas made an impact on some of them; they were connected to different religious traditions. Above all, though, she wants you to think about the women in their lives–what these women did on their own and how they influenced powerful and better known men. Her focus is the wives, consorts, and in some cases daughters of military men, and the new roles these women carved out for themselves in political life. They were political figures whose high profile came in part because of their connection to the men, but who also found creative ways to pursue passion projects and things that animated them. Some were drawn to socialist ideas and to the Communist Party; some to Christianity. The book populates the period with more interesting, complex individuals than standard accounts, a collage of sorts, to go back to the metaphor I used earlier. There have been a couple of popular histories recently, set in the same era. There was one last year about a train robbery, Peking Express by James Zimmerman , which I reviewed for the TLS . Paul French, a consistently engaging writer, also has a very enjoyable book just out, Her Lotus Year , which is about Wallis Simpson’s time in China. It was a period of disunity, of China’s weakness in the world, when it was being bullied. But you can also think about it as a time when different groups and individuals, including the women who interest Kate, were experimenting with varied ways that society could be reorganized. It’s mixed. They have different degrees of education. None beside the one you mention was a household name outside of China. At the time there were people who thought of Chiang Kai-shek as just another warlord and there were people who are now thought of as warlords who aspired to be nation-building figures like Chiang Kai-shek was. There have been a lot of biographies of Soong (and some about her and her sisters, two of whom also married important men, Sun Yat-sen in one case), so you could call this a book about her metaphoric cousins."

"Liang Qichao is somebody who really should be a household name, globally, and isn’t. He is plenty well known still in China—he’s enormously important. It’s hard to come up with a parallel figure. Not being aware of Liang Qichao is like not being aware of Nietzsche or Hegel . And there’s an imbalance—because a well-educated Chinese person would know who Nietzsche and Hegel were, even if they hadn’t read any of their works. Liang was head of a family that included other influential members. Some of his sons, grandsons and granddaughters made their marks in different fields. His granddaughter, Wu Liming, wrote a history of her grandfather and his progeny and how they shaped the country’s intellectual life. Liang Qichao himself was a wunderkind. In his 20s he became one of the leading reform figures. In 1898, late in the Qing era, along with his mentor Kang Youwei and others, he got the ear of a youthful emperor and tried to introduce sweeping reforms. And, for 100 days, it looked like China was going to go the way of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The reformers wanted to keep the imperial exam system and keep the Qing in power, but introduce all kinds of new institutions and forms of education. Instead, they got driven into exile or were arrested or executed. Liang Qichao ended up in exile in Yokohama in Japan, where, still in his twenties and then into his thirties, he founded and edited periodicals and translated works at a dizzying pace. Most of the translations he did himself or published in his journals were of books or essays that had come out in Japanese after being written in European languages, and were then translated from Japanese into Chinese. These translations introduced ideas like evolution , different varieties of socialism, and constitutional democracy to readers in China and in the Chinese diaspora. He didn’t settle into a completely unified ideology but he remained intent on figuring out what recipes were out there that could be used by China to prevent itself from being subjugated in the way so many places outside of the West were through processes of formal colonization and other types of domination. He was an extraordinary figure and a prolific essayist. As if that wasn’t enough, Liang also wrote one of the first science fiction stories. It imagined a China in the future that would be well-respected and would host something like a World’s Fair where a descendant of Confucius would lecture dignitaries from around the world. That story got a lot of play when China was finally hosting the Olympics in 2008 and then a World Expo in 2010. Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio is a fairly slim volume, which has an insightful and clear introduction by its translator, Peter Zarrow, a specialist in Chinese intellectual history who has done a lot of work on the 1898 Reforms and the decades following them. The essays Zarrow chose showcase Liang’s omnivorous reading in Western, Chinese, and Japanese history and thought, and the way he drew on those readings to spread understanding of ideas about citizenship and promote public-mindedness in China. It’s a good sampler of his writings, particularly from the incredibly productive period he had around the turn of the century. He promoted ideas that had an impact. Nearly everybody who was significant in Chinese intellectual life at the time owed a debt to Liang. He influenced Mao early in Mao’s life—even though Liang Qichao was a Buddhist and often wanted to work with rather than try to topple rulers. He was eclectic and robustly cosmopolitan, a fascinating figure. Yes, and he not only peppers his essays with varied concepts but throws in all kinds of statistics, like how many people were speaking English at one point in the past, compared to centuries later when London was the hub of a massive empire. He’s trying to make sense of a world that was rapidly changing in that period as the great empires divided up so much of the globe."

"Yes, that fits in well. One way of thinking about the long arc from Liang Qichao to the present is that while people were embracing different kinds of ideologies and strategies the common thread was, ‘How do we make this country cohere and make it strong enough to be able to hold its own in a dangerous world?’ There were all sorts of different formulas for doing this that were tried, most of which involved connecting to parts of the Chinese past and borrowing from clusters of ideas circulating in the wider world. Chen Jian and Arnie Westad are both historians of China who are also very interested in the Cold War and the international situation. They remind us that there was eclectic borrowing going on during the first decades of PRC history that we sometimes forget when we think in terms of East-West polarities, or communist-capitalist dichotomies. Their book looks at what happened after the exhaustion with Mao’s particular utopian interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. What, they ask, came out of the rubble of the early Cultural Revolution? The heroes of their story, in a way, are a combination of ordinary people trying to rebuild their lives, and leaders who were trying to come up with new, mix-and-match ideas to move China forward. A lot of times the story about China opening up after Mao is largely about Nixon going to China, and its opening to the West, and then about Deng Xiaoping having a bold new approach. What they draw attention to is the degree to which the Chinese state always needed to have some connections to places outside in the wider world. So even when China was closed off, there were moves toward connecting up with Japan. This was in the 1960s, when China had pivoted away from the Soviet Union but was still feuding with the United States. It wasn’t as though they could eschew connections with all other places and still have any sort of economic development. The authors write about business in a very fine-grained way—they look at which foreign companies began to get footholds in China and at what point. Germany came fairly early in the 1970s. They’re very interested in details and what they find in the archives. What they cover in the book won’t surprise people who’ve been following the scholarship, but they tell it in an accessible and relatively dispassionate way that’s very appealing. Sometimes, when I’m reading Frank Dikötter’s recent books, as spirited as his writing is, I feel like I’m making my way through a prosecutorial brief against the Chinese Communist Party. There are other writings, focusing on figures like Deng Xiaoping, that veer toward the hagiographic. Both of these kinds of approaches seem to flatten out things that should be, like history often is, bumpy and shaped by contingencies and flukes as well as nefarious plans and good intentions, though those certainly can both exist. There’s something valuable about just going into the nitty gritty of, ‘How exactly does a country that was in such a shambles in the late 1960s end up surging forward economically by the 1980s?’ A lot of specific choices were made. The book is an argument for the importance of contingency, rather than a grand vision. Yes, the long 1970s. It fits with a trend pointing out that it didn’t all start in 1979 with Deng donning a cowboy hat when he went to America, as evocative as photographs of him at that famous rodeo might be. These things were percolating from the early 1970s and then last into the mid-1980s. The Great Transformation , for better and worse, then stops the story with Tiananmen Square events on the horizon. Rather than treating the Cultural Revolution as one topic and the Reform Era as another, how they overlap is something that scholars have become more interested in lately. This book is an example of that. It’s a very accessible survey book that doesn’t start with the death of one leader and the rise of another."

"Michelle King is a historian of the Republican period, so this book is a real departure. It’s beautifully written. It’s about Fu Pei-mei who is typically described as Taiwan’s Julia Child. But as Michelle King points out, Fu Pei-mei started her TV show before Julia Child, hence you could just as easily say that Julia Child was the American Fu Pei-mei. Fu Pei-mei was very important in introducing Chinese food and cooking to audiences in Taiwan as that country was developing. Her cookbooks sometimes came out bilingually, so they introduced Chinese food to Western cooks as well, and she included European dishes in her shows, so the cosmopolitanism went still further. The book fits in with the recent transnational turn in East Asian and Chinese history, moving between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and also crossing the Pacific in different ways. Michelle King’s interest is drawn partly from growing up an American of Chinese descent. She intersperses the biography of Fu Pei-mei she’s telling with vignettes about what she calls ‘kitchen conversations’ that she has about food with her mother and other women in her family. It’s about their relationship to food and the way in which learning about food links to culture and the role it can play in individuals staying connected to a place that they’ve left behind and sometimes encouraging their children who never lived there to feel connected to it as well. Along the way, you learn a lot about the history of Taiwan, about migrants from the mainland to Taiwan, about divisions within Taiwanese society, and about other things. It’s got a lot to say about gender. The hero of the story, Fu Pei-mei, is not a natural cook. She doesn’t really know much about cooking but is called upon to provide food for her husband and men who come over. She studies cooking assiduously, becomes an expert at it, and then shares her knowledge. There’s a pedagogic side to this, a pragmatism to helping people to be able to cook. You also get a lot about the history of television and the world of TV shows. No, she left the mainland very young. It’s a Taiwan story. Because of this, the book pairs well with one of my choices from last year: Made in Taiwan . They’re two books that would be interesting to teach side-by-side. But it also pairs well with Women and their Warlords . How does a story look different when you put female characters at the center of it? You can think of this as a story of Taiwan’s rapid modernization and shifting ties to the United States, told through the life of a woman and what’s traditionally thought of as a domestic-sphere activity. Yes, it’s a story of discovering and reconnecting with family traditions—and about an author’s shift from having a casual interest in East Asia as a place her family was from and not knowing much Chinese to being a specialist who uses Chinese sources to write good books about that region. It’s always a pleasure. Actually, yes, I’ll be there for a week early in 2025. A new independent publishing house, Brixton Ink, is publishing a just for the UK updated edition of my 2020 book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink . This edition, which has a different subtitle, places my original text, with the American spelling changed to British spelling naturally, between two completely new parts on developments in the 2020s penned by two talented journalists: a foreword by Amy Hawkins and an afterword by Kris Cheng. I’ll spend 22-27 January traveling around England doing launch events for that work, Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong."

"There are a lot of things I like about this book. It makes broad points through profiles of individuals, which is very compelling. It’s Emily Feng’s first book, but I was familiar with her reporting for National Public Radio. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom is about how this period of rule by the Chinese Communist Party is one that is increasingly intolerant of diversity of cultural forms and of language uses. Xi is trying to get everybody onto the same page in a way that you could argue we haven’t seen since the final decades of Mao’s rule. She talks about Hui Muslims in China, and how it was possible not that long ago for them to feel fully Chinese but also Muslim, and now it becomes problematic for them to combine these identities. She uses stories about Hong Kong and Mongolia as well, the efforts to push the former to be more in step with the mainland, and about use of the Mongolian language being suddenly seen by the state as a challenging thing. People casually following the news about China might think of what’s been happening with Tibet and with Xinjiang , the effort in those two places to crush difference, and in some ways they remain extreme cases of the push to homogenisation. But Feng charts the way in which, even just in the time that she was reporting in China from the mid-2010s onward, spaces for easy expression of difference shrank. She notes the tighter control of artistic expression. She also weaves in her changing sense of her own identity as somebody of Chinese descent, and her excitement about being in China initially and a dulling of that excitement as she saw some of the things that were still possible when she arrived becoming less and less possible."

"Forever Hong Kong is a deep dive into one particular place where this intolerance for variation has been strikingly clear. The focus is on 2019 and protests Ching Kwan Lee presents as a last-ditch effort to defend a Hong Kong that could operate very differently from mainland cities — a test of the idea of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. Lee is one of the most talented sociologists working on China, and a gifted and bold ethnographer. She had done impressive books before on labour in China, and on Chinese mines in Africa, all written with a theoretical sophistication and rooted in a lot of time hanging out with people, trying to figure out what mattered to them. This new book turned that ethnographic eye on her own city. Events like the 2014 Umbrella Movement reinforced her sense of caring about Hong Kong deeply, and she spent a lot of time with very young activists who were on the front lines there five years later. A more clearly scholarly work than many I recommend to Five Books , it’s written with passion and is accessible, so that even when she’s making sophisticated points she’s enlivening them with a lot of detail from her interviews. Her argument has to do with Hong Kong never having had a period free from having to deal with problems of colonial control. She sees a continuity of sorts between the period of British colonial rule and what followed, which has had many of the characteristics of colonial control, with Beijing, in this case, being the metropole. She has a special way of thinking about colonialism and decolonisation. It’s a book that could be very valuable for people who are interested in other colonial and post-colonial and decolonised settings to read. She’s very attentive to the way that global capitalism operates via different strategies and alliances between businesses and governments, moving from one form of colonialism to another. She emphasises that Hong Kongers as a group were left out of the discussion of the future of Hong Kong when there was a transition. That is quite different from the classic image we have of what happens when a territory stops being part of an empire and the voices of the people of the territory that was controlled, though they may be competing with one another, are the main voices involved in figuring out what comes next. Given that the voices of Hong Kong’s people have never been at the centre of the official debates on its future, she argues that it became natural for the young people whose perspective she highlights to feel justified in calling for and fighting for a chance at self-determination, however long the odds of success were in 2019."

"Yes, this book is also about how there can sometimes be more and sometimes much less space for different forms of cultural expression in the physical territory that we now think of as China. Rian Thum is a beautiful writer, as he showed in his first book, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History , a wonderful work on Xinjiang. He’s at heart a historian who was tempted by archaeology, and he really likes to go deep. In this book, what he claims is that there’s a very long history of both China being part of the story of global Islam, and Islam being part of the story of China. He finds it curious that both Buddhism and Islam started having a presence within China around the same time, in each case due to people moving, texts moving and ideas moving across borders. And yet, now many think about Buddhism, which began in India , as a part of Chinese culture, whereas Islam keeps being seen, at least at times, as alien. If we think of the Hui who are both Chinese and Muslim, whether or not that becomes something that people think of as a problem is partly political and, like so many things about China, including where exactly its borders are, subject to change. This is not just a book for scholars; Thum enlivens it with storytelling about individuals and also about objects, about the circulation of books from different places and different sets of maps. He tracks the way that books flowed in and out of China, and how different languages could be used by the people involved in this. There are Persian texts that become important within China and are created by people who are also creating texts in Chinese. We often think in terms of assimilation or resistance to assimilation, rather than about fusions or hybrid elements from Islam that become so much a part of life within China that people don’t think of it as a problem. There are many examples in earlier periods in Chinese history when there was less of a sense of Islam being thought of as something that has not fully integrated into the life of China proper, when there was more of a sense that there could be people who follow different faiths or had ties to different parts of the world. He uses stories of some quite memorable figures, including some who write using different names at different times, so you might have a whole set of interactions with them but you don’t think about their Islamic -ness. Yes, he would be probably the one who people know about, this pivotal figure from Chinese history who is talked about as Chinese. I think what Thum’s book is partly about is, imagine not thinking of it as a curiosity that stands out when you learn that Zheng He was a Muslim. What has not penetrated our image of Asian history is the fact that land-based connections between the Indian subcontinent and East Asia were often via Muslims. I think other national histories have those blind spots, too."

"Yes, it’s very much the voice of the kind of person who often gets written about , but we rarely hear their voice. It explodes any notion that there isn’t a life of the mind and a questing and asking questions about things in the mind of somebody who’s reduced to the kind of labour that one imagines making them almost an automaton. This is somebody who was always determined to carve out space for thinking and writing, no matter what. It’s fascinating to get his perspective. He spends time doing all sorts of different kinds of occupations that probably some of his readers will be able to relate to, having done something like one of them for a time. It has a lot of the pleasures of works of fiction, but is nonfiction. It’s like a work of ethnography, only with the ethnographic subject being the central narrator. It’s a charming, surprising book. Maybe if I was an editor, I would have wanted to change something about it, but on the other hand the roughness of it can be part of the value. The takeaway isn’t about victimisation, even though he’s somebody in economic precarity. I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad it’s getting a bit of attention. Yes, sometimes you feel you’re eavesdropping on somebody or reading some of their diary. A book from early in this century that I love is Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls , in which there are long enough interviews that you get a good feel for individuals you don’t often hear from directly. Here the whole book is one person in this kind of forgotten group taking charge completely of the narrative."

"Dan Wang, starting in the in the 2010s, would write an annual letter from China, a fascinating, long-form reflection on the year where he would talk about stories that he had covered, experiences he had moving in the world of tech and economics, and books he had read and liked on all sorts of places and topics. It was like an erudite holiday letter where someone fills you in on their last year, and it really conveyed an interesting personality. I thought this book was going to be in that vein, and parts of it are — it’s very much driven by stories and reflections. It’s too bad that one of the less interesting parts of it has become the takeaway that gets talked about the most, which is the idea that China is a country of engineers and America a country of lawyers. The idea is that an engineering state can do things on a big scale without worrying about regulation and can accomplish amazing things, but can go in terrible directions via social engineering. Wang uses the one child policy and the zero covid policy as examples of the engineering state gone wrong. The achilles heel of the lawyerly society, by contrast, is an obsession with legality that can get in the way of getting things done. The benefit is it can potentially protect people. A couple of reviewers within China studies have pointed out that, actually, some of the same things he is saying about today’s China as an engineering state were said about Japan late in the last century. As a historian, I go back even further. I was reading Jules Verne ‘s From the Earth to the Moon . In it, he says America is going to launch a rocket to the moon first because America is a country of engineers. America used to be able to build things, but was thought of as a pretty lawyerly place as well, so it wasn’t as though you had to choose between the engineering and lawyerly sides. Anyway, it’s not that the idea of a contrast is wrong but it oversimplifies things. One good thing is that, to counteract drawing too stark a divide, Wang makes the point that he’s often struck that the people he knows who are Americans and those who are Chinese seem to have more in common with each other than they think. No. One of the real values of it is trying to think about not having to choose between either being impressed by some of the things that are going on technologically in China, or being horrified by the political repression — he walks this line between. It’s important that he has the chapters on the one child policy and zero covid, about things that go terribly wrong when the human impact of big projects is not taken seriously enough. What I like about the book the most is being in the company of an incredibly thoughtful person who spent time in many different parts of China thinking about what’s going on. Sure. I haven’t done research in China for about a decade but, certainly, it’s more restrictive now. A big shift in terms of access to scholarship on the Mao era is what’s happened to Hong Kong, which used to hold an easily accessible and amazing archive of documents about China under communism . Another shift is an expansion of the topics that are seen as sensitive. For example, you can be criticised for your interpretation of the Qing era if you say that the Qing were as much influenced by Manchu as by Chinese traditions. I think it’s challenging to be a foreign historian writing on China in terms of getting access and getting visas, and it’s more difficult to figure out what an unproblematic topic to be researching is. Some things are night and day; in the early 2010s people could do research in Xinjiang, and that’s off the table. It used to be I felt I could give a talk on anything related to protests in Hong Kong, whereas on the mainland I’d have to be careful, especially about anything that happened in the recent past. Now I can’t give talks at Hong Kong universities on the protests there in the 2010s. So, yes, there are lots of changes. This was an extraordinary year for books about China, so I imposed some rules on myself to make it easier to pick a group of five. I didn’t include any books about Taiwan , although I could easily have included one of several very good 2025 titles, such as Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation , in my set of five. I didn’t include The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear , although I liked it very much, because I thought of it more as a work of literary criticism than a work on China per se, though it has memoir elements. I tried to err on the side of books that I felt were getting too little attention. I also tried to steer clear of books that were as much about the United States as about China (I partly violated the two last rules with Breakneck , but it is really about Chinese phenomena much more than American ones). There are probably two good books on China a month that come out, so any list of “the five best” is bound to be incredibly subjective, partly in my case driven by a sense of some works that I would like to see more people read and would pick for my selections if I were in a book club."