HE RESEARCHED HISTORY, AND MADE IT TOO

In 2016 I published a long article in The New York Review of Books on a team at Tsinghua University that had made revolutionary discovery about ancient Chinese texts.

The lead historian of that team–and probably the most influential of the past half century–was Li Xueqin. This past week he died in Beijing and in this obituary for The New York Times I look back briefly on his life, and how the Communist Party has come to embrace history as a form of legitimacy.

(Note: for those who don’t subscribe to the NYRB, the 2016 article is avaiable here, via the ChinaFile website.)