ARTICLES
Avoiding the road to serfdom
Today, The New York Review of Books has published a 10,000-word essay by Ai Xiaoming, one of China’s foremost public intellectuals. Echoing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, “The Road to Miaoxi” is a plea against unfettered state power, which she sees as increasing in China–and in fa
Damn True
From December 19-21 I’ll be speaking at the inaugural “Damn True” Sinophone non-fiction writing conference in Tokyo. Why Sinophone and why Tokyo? Over the past decade or so, two things have happened. One, the space for independent Chinese-language writing in China has shrunk to v
Constellation of Complicity
I recently interviewed Sai, the Burmese curator of a show in Bangkok that was partially censored by request of the Chinese embassy. We talked about how artists from authoritarian state are trying to counter the dictators’ club. This was published in 民間檔案館/China Unofficial Archives as
2025 Kukula Prize for Non-fiction Book Reviewing
I’m honored to win the 2025 Kukula award issued by Washington Monthly for my 2024 review in the New York Review of Books of I Have No Enemies, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate. This award is named after an influential
Get ready for two Dalai Lamas
In this ChinaFile dialogue with several experts on Chinese religion, I posit that two Dallai Lamas are likely to emerge in the coming years: China’s playbook for the Dalai Lama’s succession will be quite straightforward: Beijing will ignore everything that the current Dalai Lama says and try a r
Lessons from his father
In this review for the New York Review of Books, I look at two new state-of-the-art biographies of Chinese Communist Party leaders: the former party secretary, Hu Yaobang, whose firing and death led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, and Xi Zhongxun, father of the current leader of Chi
Interview in 田間 on the China Unofficial Archive
This is the first in-depth interview I’ve given on the China Unofficial Archives, the online non-profit that I set up in 2023 to promote independent Chinese writing and films. The interview is by Hsiaofan Su of the 田間 Tian Jian newsletter. You can read it here: The interview is in Chines
Global Voices on the China Unofficial Archives
In this concise interview, Filip Noubel of the news service Global Voices, interviews me about the evolution of the China Unofficial Archives and our efforts to create a platform for independent Chinese Voices. As I mention to Noubel, “Our users are primarily Chinese or overseas Chinese comm
The PRC’s Original Sin
In Sparks, I wrote about Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial but at the time it hadn’t been translated into English. Now, thanks to the effort of UCLA professor Michael Berry, it has just been published by Columbia University Press. In this review for The Atlantic magazine, I explain why Fan
History and the Cultural Revolution in Holland
In March I’ll be going to the Netherlands for five days to talk about my favorite topics: Unofficial History, but with an interesting spin: is some version of the Cultural Revolution happening in the West today? My trip will start on March 12 at 15:15 at Leiden University, where I’ll tal
Redefining China
For decades, Perry Link has been the dean of foreign scholars writing about independent Chinese thinkers, so it’s a real honor to be reviewed by him in The New York Review of Books. In this review of Sparks, he points out that one of my goals is to redefine what we mean by China: The […
Did Hong Kong’s Protests Matter?
The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) cordially invites you to a public panel discussion and book presentation: What the Struggle for Hong Kong Tells Us About Growing Authoritarianism in China Under President Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has charted a path toward great