The Springs-and-Autumns period is a strange period in Chinese history. Coming after the decline of the Zhou, and before the famous Warring States Period, this period of Chinese history features a large number of small states with no powerful hegemon, no strong sense of the mandate of heaven, rules of chivalry that wouldn’t seem out…
This is a translated excerpt from La Fregata Novara intorno al mondo — The Frigate Novara Around the World; reprinted with permission from Salerno Editrice and set to English by the ARB’s Editor, Peter Gordon. On 24 June 1858, the Austrian travellers reboarded the Novara and on the next day left the anchorage of Cavite…
Few novelists dare to take on the backdrop of COVID-19 in China but Isabelle Li does not shy away. In The Northern Tomb, the government’s severe regulations are woven into the background of a story where Mr Zhao, an elderly widow enlists the help of 51-year-old Sister Zhu, a retired cleaner, to be his full-time…
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know each other well. Since 2013, when Xi completed his ascent to the top of the People’s Republic of China, they have met more than 40 times. Perhaps no other two heads of state currently in office have conferred as often. This, the pair maintains, has fostered an unusually close…
Xuenan Cao offers an unexpected angle on China’s technological rise, spotlighting the role of deficit-driven improvisation. As Cao demonstrates, where printing paper, computers, and microchips have been in shortage, media improvisations and AI gadgetry have filled the gap and become the unlikeliest accelerants of tech imaginaries. Equal parts media-historical and literary analysis, the book connects…
Born one year before the Republic of China, Qian Zhongshu was to become one of its most revered fictional chroniclers. The cast of Fortress Besieged—the only novel he ever completed—characters were to become stand-ins for a generation of the Republic’s fumbling (pseudo-)intellectuals. The novel follows one Fang Hung-chien, starting with his 1937 return from Europe…
For most readers and filmgoers, the emotional architecture of the final Qing court was built not by historians but by Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 visually intoxicating film The Last Emperor. It fixed certain ideas about the enigmatic emperor Puyi in the public imagination: a spectral figure wandering through a museum of vanished power, emotionally stunted, politically…
The life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, often feels like a spectacle—in no small part due to the 1987 Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor. Yet the true story being Puyi, as well as his wife, the empress Wanrong, is more complicated. Two foreigners were asked to tutor both Puyi and Wanrong: Reginald Johnston and…
Both the subtitle of historian Michael Dillon’s new book Shanghai: The Story of China’s Most Dynamic City and its jaunty pink and yellow cover, punctuated with stylised drawings of the city’s landmarks, suggest this might be a fairly breezy version of the Shanghai story. Certainly, the city seems to encourage such accounts, which often foreground…
How can a small democracy resist the influence of a powerful authoritarian neighbor? Taiwan is frequently praised for its successful economic development and peaceful transition to democracy, serving as a model for other developing countries. However, it faces substantial challenges, both from internal political divisions and external geopolitical pressures. As Stormy Seas reveals, Taiwan’s political…
Today, we’re welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown, June 2026) moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota; after the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for…
From Lab to Life: How AI Works in China argues that China built the world’s first governed AI ecosystem, a market in which regulation, commercial capability, and distribution developed together. Since August 2023, China has required consumer-facing generative AI services to clear government filing before public launch. The book traces how that machinery emerged and how it determines which models reach users and which companies gain distribution. Twenty chapters across…
What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump. Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest book The Next China Is Still China: An Insider’s…
The poetic tradition of China has historically found a warm welcome in Japan, and both cultures draw on a common well of poets, religious currents, and sacred texts. It is thus fitting that two new volumes by essential poets from each country should be published nearly side by side by New Directions. The first, Cold…
Among the earliest examples of sculptural art are representations of the human figure, like the 25,000-year-old Willendorf Venus discovered in Austria in 1908. In western art, fascination with portraiture and anatomical realism were features of the earliest sculptures around the Mediterranean, from Nefertiti and King Tut to Roman emperors and Greek gods. This important volume—the…