One might be forgiven for thinking “Oh no, not another book on modern China… What could anyone possibly have left to say about it?” But Alexandre Trudeau does not simply write about what he observes, but, like all good travel-writers, shows us what effect the journey had on him. And he does so without thrusting…
For a book targeted at children, Division to Unification in Imperial China has a ponderous title. Parents and teachers might wish to cover this over with masking tape so that young readers instead concentrate on the handsome black, white and ochre illustration that otherwise adorns the cover.
Manila was not the best place to be on New Year’s Eve 1941. US General Douglas MacArthur had withdrawn to Corregidor and had declared Manila an “open city”, not that the Japanese forces—literally at the city gates and expected to enter the next morning—were paying much attention to that. But Melville Jacoby, a journalist for…
Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West is a collection of academic articles edited by Ben Hillman and Gray Tuttle. Although ethnically and historically quite dissimilar, the two regions of Xinjiang and Tibet occupy a similar space in China’s political landscape. Both are large volatile regions on the country’s western…
Those with an academic interest in Chinese literature are undoubtedly aware of the CT Hsia classic History of Modern Chinese Fiction which has just been reissued by the Chinese University Press. Those who aren’t might find the thought of a 600-page tome of literary criticism to be more than a little daunting; that would be…
Luise Guest’s Half the Sky is a welcome addition to works on Chinese contemporary art. Amid all the froth of the Chinese art scene, Guest focuses solely on female artists, long overlooked and under-studied, presenting the work and thoughts of some thirty artists.
Integral to the misguided conception of China as unknowably complex is the sheer scale of its history. While historians of the United States, for example, need to cultivate a knowledge base which extends back a few centuries or so, scholars of Chinese history must contend with a national story of anything between three thousand and…
A few weeks after her inauguration, incoming Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party said that Taiwan would be re-evaluating its trade links with the Mainland. This was expected after the student-led Sunflower Movement had resisted attempts by the defeated incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang, to pass further free trade agreements. At…
Anthony Giddens and Martin Wolf in London, Thomas Friedman in Washington, Saskia Sassen in New York, John Meyer and Manuel Castells in California … nearly all of the best-known writers on globalization come from the parts of the world that are doing the globalizing, not from the places that are getting globalized. In Global Exposure…
One would think—what with this year being the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare—that a treatment of the playwright in China would be inevitable. And so it has proved: Nancy Pellegrini’s The People’s Bard has just been released as the latest Penguin China Special.
While the communication of ideas across cultures is itself generally a good thing, it inevitably involves the transmission of both good and bad ideas. Richard Jean So, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, in his new book Transpacific Community, describes the development and evolution of a cultural, literary network between certain…
Google vs. Baidu. Amazon vs. Taobao. Whatsapp vs. WeChat. And, most recently, Uber vs. Didi. There is clearly a divide between China and the rest of the world when it comes to internet companies. Homegrown Chinese tech firms have fought off American challengers attempting to enter the Chinese market. Chinese firms have tried to expand…
Jack Ma once described online shopping as a dessert in the United States, but the main course in China. That’s one of a set of key differences between developed-economy e-commerce and that of China, differences that escorted eBay out the Chinese door and kept Amazon as a minor player here, while the Alibaba Group has…
In the author’s preface to Flock of Brown Birds, Ge Fei writes of his response to those who have told him that they do not understand the work: “I don’t blame you. I’m not sure I understand it either.” Straightforward comprehension is, however, far from the point in this slight novella. Self-consciously inspired by the…
Reading and translating Taiwanese poet Ling Yu reminds me much of American writer, environmentalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams’s wisdom: There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private. In my opinion, Ling Yu’s poetry contains the above qualities: perhaps aware of how…