The Erasure of the Uyghurs
Oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang has slipped from headlines — but two recent memoirs by Uyghurs abroa attempt to portray the minority as more than...
The Martyrdom of Liu Xiaobo
China’s dissident writer was an exemplar of iconoclastic intellectual spirit, pursuing a more humane society despite state repression. A new biography draws the arc of...
China’s New Maritime Order
Asia contends with a complex history of unresolved disputes in the South China Sea. Two new books unpack the challenge posed by Beijing to maritime...
A Record of Old Kashgar
The Uyghur city in Xinjiang has been disrupted by outside forces through history — of which Chinese rebuilding is the latest change. A book of...
In-Between City
Hong Kong has been caught between empires — and narratives — for almost two centuries. The diversity of its early migrants made the city what...
Brave Attempt
A new account tells the story of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and their failures, through four individual lives. But we need more unmediated voices...
All We Have to Fear
The Western world has held an outsized fear of Chinese power for centuries. But why? A new book argues that alarmism began in the late...
What is Xi Jinping Thinking?
China’s first paramount leader since Mao is, for all the ink spilled on him, a black box. But behind the speculation over his intent, Xi...
One for the History Books
How Endymion Wilkinson’s encyclopedia of Chinese history grew from 70,000 words in 1973 to 1.75 million words for its 50th anniversary edition.
Washing History
A new novel about the Chinese Civil War feels true to the author’s experience of it, but also amplifies the Party’s preferred version of the...
The Bones Remember
Three new books grapple with the suppressed histories of modern China, from the Cultural Revolution to the Covid pandemic. But for every state effort to...
Professor Pangloss Goes to Shandong
Daniel A. Bell has been proposing a Confucian, meritocratic alternative to liberal democracy for decades. In a new memoir, his optimism for the China model...