The NYRB China Archive
01.13.21
Seeing the CCP Clearly
from New York Review of Books
The split between the two friends is a small example of a wider disagreement between “Trump boosters” and “Trump critics” in the Chinese dissident community. The rift is plainly visible both inside and outside China and is likely to persist in one...
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07.17.17Liu Xiaobo’s Death Pushes China’s Censors into Overdrive
New York Times
It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of grief on social media that followed.
The NYRB China Archive
07.14.17
Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed
from New York Review of Books
In 1898, some of China’s most brilliant minds allied themselves with the Emperor Guangxu, a young ruler who was trying to assert himself by forcing through reforms to open up China’s political, economic, and educational systems. But opponents...
The NYRB China Archive
07.13.17
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo
from New York Review of Books
In the late 1960s Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman, encouraged children and adolescents to confront their teachers and parents, root out “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and otherwise “make revolution.” In practice, this meant closing China’s...
The NYRB China Archive
09.29.16
‘The Songs of Birds’
from New York Review of Books
Day and night,I copy the Diamond Sutraof Prajnaparamita.My writing looks more and more square.It proves that I have not gone entirelyinsane, but the tree I drewhasn’t grown a leaf.—from “I Copy the Scriptures,” in Empty ChairsEvery month, the...
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02.10.14Chinese Dissident Lands at Cato Institute With a Caution to Colleauges
New York Times
Xia Yeliang, dismissed from his job as an economics professor at Peking University after clashes with his government over liberalization, warned that American universities should be careful about partnerships with Chinese universities. “They use the...
The NYRB China Archive
01.09.12Banned in China
from New York Review of Books
In late December, a foreign correspondent in Beijing emailed me to say that a four-page article on China I’d written for a special New Year’s edition of Newsweek had been carefully torn from each of the 731 copies of the magazine on sale in China...
The NYRB China Archive
01.27.10What Beijing Fears Most
from New York Review of Books
On December 29, four days after being sentenced to eleven years in prison for “subversion of state power,” the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo filed an appeal to a higher court. For many familiar with the Chinese regime, the decision seemed quixotic: it...
The NYRB China Archive
12.21.09The Trial of Liu Xiaobo: A Citizens’ Manifesto and a Chinese Crackdown
from New York Review of Books
One year ago, the Chinese literary critic and political commentator Liu Xiaobo was taken away from his home in Beijing by the Chinese police, who held him without charge for six months, then placed him under formal arrest for six more months, on the...
The NYRB China Archive
01.15.09China’s Charter 08
from New York Review of Books
The document below, signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak intellectuals...