ARTICLES
Faithful Disobedience
How I got to know Wang Yi, the jailed pastor of Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church. This article in Christianity Today (简体字 / 正體字）is an introduction I wrote to a collection of his theological writings, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Mov
Challenging the washington Consensus on China
How a Cornell University professor became a leading voice calling for a more constructive policy toward China. A profile for The New Yorker.
Xi vs The Street
How did Xi Jinping botch his country’s exit from its zero-Covid policy? And does this herald a new era of protests in China. I answer these and other questions in this Foreign Affairs essay.
Xi Jinping Exposed
In this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, I give my quick take on the recently concluded party congress, questioning whether Xi is really as powerful as people make him out to be, or if his omnipresence is a sign of looming weakness.
The President’s Inbox
It’s an honor to be on “The President’s Inbox,” one of the snappiest podcasts (most are about 30 minutes long) on offer. And I don’t say that because my supervisor at CFR, Jim Lindsay, is the host! It is really a great summary of key issues in the news and Jim keeps it
What is a Party Congress and Why Does it Matter?
One of my favorite parts of working for the Council on Foreign Relations is writing “In Briefs,” which are Q&A-style explainers of a current event. They’re aimed at anyone from high school students facing a term paper to people who’ve been in the field for a long time but
How Will the Xi Jinping era End?
In this essay for The New York Review of Books, I explore the sensitive issue of who will succeed Xi Jinping. As a jumping-off point, I review two new books on succession in China and the Soviet Union. The upshot is we could be in for a long wait for a successor, with decay setting in. […]
Indestructible City?
In the current (Aug. 18) issue of The New York Review of Books I have an essay on four impressive new books about Hong Kong by Ho-fung Hung, Louisa Lim, Karen Cheung and Mark Clifford. These books give real insider accounts by people who were either born there, raised there, or simply lived most of
Breaking Out of China’s Silences
“Wang Xiaobo seemed to have come out of nowhere, and he left nearly as quickly, dying of a heart attack in 1997, at age 44. In just a few years he wrote an avalanche of novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles, many of them published posthumously.” My review of his most significant
Has China Lost Europe?
For a decade now, China has made the countries of central and eastern Europe one of its diplomatic focal points. Today, however, Europe has become one of China’s biggest foreign-policy headaches. In part, the current situation is a result of economic miscalculations by both sides, which overestima
China’s Ukraine War
Apologies for this late posting of an op-ed I wrote on March 10, 2022, arguing that people calling for China to play a broker’s role in the Russia-Ukraine war miss an important point: Under Xi Jinping, China has tried to win more allies not by joining the international order but by courting ro
Wanting It Both Ways: China’s Ukraine Dilemma
In this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, I look at how China is caught in the embarrassing position of having cozied up to an autocrat who is waging the biggest war in Europe since World War II.