The New York Review of Books China Archive
The New York Review of Books China Archive is a collaborative project of ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books. The archive is currently under construction. When complete, it will contain a full and easily searchable collection of China-related essays and reviews that The New York Review of Books has published since its founding in 1963.
The ‘Breaking of an Honorable Career’
RODERICK MACFARQUHAR1.In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies,...
Will the Chinese Be Supreme?
IAN JOHNSONDuring the turbulent Maoist era from the 1950s to 1970s, China clashed militarily with some of its most important neighbors—India, Vietnam, the Soviet Union—and embarked on disastrous interventions in Indonesia and Africa. But by the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping had put China on a...
A Mao for All Seasons
MARTIN BERNALA psychologist and an expert on the Far East, Mr. Lifton believes that the most fruitful way to look at Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution is to combine the investigation of psychological motives with historical analysis in what he calls the “psychohistorical” approach. He claims that the present confusion in China can best be understood within this “psychohistorical” framework, as coming from a desire to transcend death and achieve immortality for the Chinese Revolution. Mr. Lifton has recently...
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David Levine’s China
DAVID LEVINEDavid Levine’s depictions of Chinese notables—and everyone else he drew, for that matter—are so sublime that very often after seeing an image, one is left hardly able to remember what the real person actually looked like.Levine had way of catching exactly the right repose of a person’s mouth, what their eyes told of their souls, or the larger suggested meaning of their physiognomies that was able to make even these remote and larger than life Chinese figures suddenly seem real—even human. Nowhere was this quality more...
Read full storyThe Battle for Hong Kong
JONATHAN MIRSKY1.Hong Kong—The first weekend of the Year of the Dog, February 11–13, was not a good one for those of us who live in Hong Kong. The annual fireworks display, sponsored by the Bank of China (in Peking fireworks are banned), was muffled in mist. In Shanghai for his winter break...
A Little Leap Forward
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFThe Communist dynasty is collapsing in China, and in retrospect one of the first signs was a Chinese-language computer virus that began spreading when I was a reporter in Beijing in the early 1990s. The virus would pop up on your screen and ask a question about the hard-line...
Passage to China
AMARTYA SEN1.The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history,...
The Last Days of Hong Kong
IAN BURUMA1.“Everything you need to know about a new life abroad…. It’s all in the pages of The Emigrant.” —Advertisement for a new Hong Kong periodical, 1989May 1983: It was exactly seven months after Mrs. Thatcher stumbled and fell on the steps of the Great Hall of the People...
The Chinese Amnesia
FANG LIZHIThe following was written while Fang Lizhi was staying in the American Embassy in Beijing, before his release last June.In November 1989, during the fifth month of my refuge inside the American Embassy in Beijing, I received two letters from New York, one from the president of a...
The Party: Impenetrable, All Powerful
IAN JOHNSONIn the next few weeks, an event will take place in Beijing on a par with anything dreamed up by a conspiracy theorist. A group of roughly three hundred men and women will meet at an undisclosed time and location to set policies for a sixth of humanity. Most China watchers will...
A Shameful Tale
JOHN GITTINGSOn the contents page of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs1 the new shape of American diplomacy is writ large and in italics. In this prestigious house organ of the international affairs establishment—and by coincidence it happens to be its fiftieth anniversary issue—the...
Who Was Mao Zedong?
RODERICK MACFARQUHARIn Kashgar’s largest bazaar a few years ago, I spotted a pencil holder sporting an iconic Cultural Revolution image: Mao Zedong and Marshal Lin Biao smiling together. But Mao’s personally chosen heir apparent had been a nonperson since 1971, when he allegedly godfathered an...
The Underground War for Shanghai
JONATHAN D. SPENCEDuring the night of November 21–22, 1928 a steamer moored at the docks in the Chinese section of Shanghai, and a group of harbor coolies, flanked by a squad of thirty armed guards, began to unload chests onto the dock. Alerted by a tip some weeks before that the chests would...
From the NYRBlog
China: The Fragile Superpower
CHRISTIAN CARYLSome China watchers believe that China’s dramatically rising prosperity will inevitably make the country more open and democratic. President Barack Obama’s highly-scripted trip this week provided little to support that claim. As The Washington Post noted, in contrast to 1998...
Booming China, Migrant Misery
RICHARD BERNSTEINAt the beginning of September, a Beijing criminal court announced a decision that called attention to the difficult and sometimes tragic circumstances of millions of migrant workers in China who have left their countryside homes to work for low wages under deplorable...
‘I’m Not Interested in Them; I Wish They Weren’t...
IAN JOHNSONAmid the recent crackdown on dissidents by the Chinese government, the case of Liao Yiwu, the well-known poet and chronicler of contemporary China, is particularly interesting. For years, Liao’s work, which draws on extensive interviews with ordinary Chinese, has been banned by...