The NYRB China Archive
10.04.12
David Levine’s China
from New York Review of Books
David 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...
The NYRB China Archive
02.09.06
Liu Binyan (1925-2005)
from New York Review of Books
Liu Binyan, the distinguished Chinese journalist and writer who died of cancer on December 5, 2005, in exile in New Jersey, at the age of eighty, was an inveterate defender of the poor and the oppressed, a man with a powerful analytic mind. But the...
The NYRB China Archive
09.23.99
The Jiang Zemin Mystery
from New York Review of Books
Since the Chinese Communist Party leaders will not allow themselves to be criticized in the press or on television, critics have had to find other means to express their political grievances. Historically speaking, one of the most telling ways to...
The NYRB China Archive
01.09.97
China: The Defining Moment
from New York Review of Books
The evolution of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949 has been tumultuous and bloody, and marked by the suffering of millions. It has been anything but peaceful. Yet it is precisely the prospect of “peaceful evolution,” which in...
The NYRB China Archive
12.21.89
Keeping the Faith
from New York Review of Books
I am proud and deeply moved to have this opportunity to speak with you here today; but at the same time, I am also filled with a sense of sorrow and shame. I am moved because you have chosen to honor me with the 1989 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights...
The NYRB China Archive
10.26.89
Stories from the Ice Age
from New York Review of Books
Since the Tiananmen Square killings it has become fashionable within the Chinese leadership to refer to dissident intellectuals as “scum.” That was Mao’s view, too. In 1942, the chairman, his armies besieged by both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese...
The NYRB China Archive
01.19.89
The Price China Has Paid: An Interview with Liu Binyan
from New York Review of Books
Liu Binyan is a sixty-two-year-old writer and journalist who is regarded as the preeminent intellectual advocating reform in China today. During the mid-1950s and again throughout the post-Mao period, he has strongly criticized Communist party...
The NYRB China Archive
02.18.88
Passing the Baton in Beijing
from New York Review of Books
Succession has become an omnipresent problem not only in China but throughout Asia. Long-lasting regimes under aging rulers are entering their twilight zone in North Korea, Burma, and Indonesia, and face a period of weakness and uncertainty, for the...
The NYRB China Archive
08.13.81
China: How Much Dissent?
from New York Review of Books
In the year 278 BC an aristocrat and poet named Qu Yuan took his own life by throwing himself into the waters of the Milo River. Qu Yuan had once been the powerful adviser to the ruler of the Chu kingdom, specializing in legal affairs and diplomacy...
The NYRB China Archive
12.16.71
Bringing Up the Red Guards
from New York Review of Books
Everyone who has studied the Chinese Cultural Revolution has his own favorite quotation from the Red Guard press. Those who want to make fun of it can always pick one of Mrs. Mao’s ridiculous pronouncements (“‘P'an T'ien-shou’ is a...
The NYRB China Archive
01.16.69
A Mao for All Seasons
from New York Review of Books
{vertical_photo_right}A 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...