Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Says Zhou Enlai, Chinese Premier, May Have Been Gay

By MICHAEL FORSYTHE

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, in 1973. A new book offers a radical reinterpretation of Zhou’s life: He was probably gay. Credit Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

HONG KONG — He was a towering figure of the 20th century, instrumental in building the Chinese Communist Party from the battlefield to the halls of power. He worked alongside Mao Zedong for decades, and was revered for his rich intellect and even temperament. Continue reading

The Cultural Revolution at 50: A Q&A with Four Specialists (Part One)

By Alexander C. Cook

[Editors’ note: This is the first of a two-part roundtable interview we invited Alexander C. Cook, editor of the well-received Cambridge University Press book Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, to conduct with four scholars who have been doing important work on the final decade of Mao Zedong’s rule and were part of a recent American Historical Association panel that he chaired.] Continue reading

China saw the mess coming

TCA Ranganathan

Sumita DawraA civil servant explains the growth model, ‘Likonomics’ and efforts at rebalancing Continue reading

Zha Jianying:China: Surviving the Camps

Wang Yilun

Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, being criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard with the accusation “counterrevolutionary revisionist element,” Harbin, China, August 23, 1966

By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly. Continue reading

China Bans New Book by Late Scholar of Communist Party History

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, arrives in Yan’an, Shaanxi province, after the Long March, Oct. 15, 1935. Pigiste/Xinhua/AFP

The ruling Chinese Communist Party has stopped publication of a collection of essays by a well-known historian whose books have never yet been available outside Hong Kong. Continue reading

The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature

Yunte Huang, Editor

The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese LiteratureGuggenheim fellow and Edgar Award–winning author Huang (Charlie Chan) edits and does much of the translation in this superb and suitably massive compendium of Chinese literature that stretches from the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 to the present. In his introduction, Huang calls this a “search for the soul of modern China.” That search takes readers from the sometimes giddy works of the republican era through the constrained literature of Maoist times to the broad range of styles in the post-Mao period. Among the many novel excerpts are selections from Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum, full of vibrant colors, odors, sounds, and action, and from Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s thoughtful Soul Mountain. Continue reading

Stanley Yu: China’s most literary cities and most popular books of 2015

red_guards_readingChina has released this year’s stats for book sales, and the results are somewhat surprising. Pretty much all of the cities that made the top ten list of most literary cities were third or second-tier cities located in the south of China. Continue reading

The best feasts quotes in literature

From Keats to Harry Potter to Christina Rossetti to Wind in the Willows, we have mouthwatering quotes from the greatest literary feasts to whet your appetite for Christmas indulgences.

favourite literary feast

What’s your favourite literary feast? Photograph: alamy

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