June 2015

We have enough favorite writers on China that we’ve had to develop a sophisticated classification system just to keep track of everyone. That said, one of our hardest to place within the long-form taxonomy is Chris Beam, who you may have heard on past episodes talking about his experience in Chinese ping-pong bootcamp, or maybe his account of the birth of American football with the saga of the Chongqing Dockers.

Zhou Yongkang—erstwhile oil czar, former chief of China’s dreaded state security apparatus, a man once swaggering and fit enough to perform 50 to 100 pushups in front of fawning onlookers—has completed his transformation into a sad historical footnote.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a request from a New York Times reporter to talk about publishing in China. The topic has been in the news lately, with the BookExpo in New York, where Chinese publishers were the guests of honor. In May, the PEN American Center released “Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship,” an excellent and extremely useful report on the restrictions in China, and PEN organized a protest to coincide with the Expo.