Christian Caryl is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a senior fellow with the Legatum Institute. He is the editor of Democracy Lab, a special project of the Legatum Institue published by Foreign Policy that follows transitions from authoritarianism to democracy world-wide. Christian worked as Washington bureau chief for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was a foreign correspondent and ran the Tokyo and Moscow bureaus for Newsweek. He has reported from about 50 countries, and his assignments have ranged from Japanese cuisine to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His first journalistic assignment was covering the collapse of communist East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has lived in Germany for thirteen years, Russia for seven, Japan for five, Kazakhstan for one, and Hong Kong for four months.

Last Updated: April 3, 2014

Unveiling Hidden China

Christian Caryl from New York Review of Books
Napoleon famously described China as a sleeping giant that would shake the world when it finally awoke. Well, now the giant is up and about, and the rest of us can’t help but notice. 2010, indeed, could well end up being remembered as the year when...

China: The Fragile Superpower

Christian Caryl from New York Review of Books
Some 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...

An Asian Star Is Born

Christian Caryl from New York Review of Books
Ian Buruma’s life would itself make a nice subject for a novel. His father was Dutch; his mother was British, from a family that emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century; as an undergraduate in the Netherlands he focused on Chinese...

The Amazing Wanderer

Christian Caryl from New York Review of Books
1.I could tell you a lot of potentially useful things about Colin Thubron’s latest travel memoir—for example, that he’s a gifted linguist, a dogged reporter, and an elegant writer. For a start, though, perhaps it’s enough to point out that his shoes...