Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Last weekend, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen traveled to China for a series of meetings. Among those Yellen talked with were a group of female economists and entrepreneurs, with whom she shared stories of being “almost the only woman in the room.” Unfortunately, the women who met with Yellen then became targets of an internet pile-on. As Bloomberg News reports, members of the group “have been blasted by online nationalists for betraying their country by interacting with the US official.”

As this episode demonstrates, people-to-people interactions in the U.S.-China relationship right now are still fraught, on both sides. High-level officials—all the way up to Xi Jinping himself—have welcomed Bill Gates and Elon Musk in recent months, and Yellen is one of three leading American government representatives to make an official visit this summer. Some China scholars are in the country, doing research for the first time in years; University of Pennsylvania law scholar Neysun Mahboubi talks about his recent trip to Beijing and Shanghai on the latest episode of the Sinica Podcast. Foreign journalists, however, largely remain in visa limbo or are outright barred, and not all academics feel comfortable conducting research in the more constrained environment of Xi’s China. Lili Pike writes about the situation at The Messenger, in a story that encapsulates the blend of pessimism and cautious optimism I hear from many of my colleagues in the field.

---

I just finished reading a recent book by historian Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and it has immediately become one that I want to share with others. Pennock takes the usual story of European exploration and colonization and flips it around, focusing on the Indigenous Americans who interacted with the foreign visitors and traveled to Europe—often finding it far less “civilized” than their hosts presumed. On Savage Shores is an ambitious, impressive, and beautifully written work of history that I can’t recommend enough. Here’s my glowing review of the book at Goodreads.

Recommended Reading

China Stories
Choe Sang-Hun, “For North Koreans in China, Seeking Freedom Is More Perilous Than Ever”
NPR’s Here and Now interviews Aynne Kokas, “Vietnam bans ‘Barbie’ movie over South China Sea map”
Shibani Mahtani and Joshua Irwandi, “Winning friends by training workers is China’s new gambit”
Ian M. Miller, “Masts like a forest: How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries”
Andrew Peaple, “Zongyuan Zoe Liu on the rise of China’s Sovereign Wealth Funds”
Sophie Richardson, “I was disinvited from a congressional hearing about China’s threats to free speech”

The One to Click
Smitten Kitchen, carrot salad with harissa, feta and mint

Back in the first pandemic summer of 2020 I splurged on a deluxe Cuisinart food processor, which I’ve since used countless times to make hummus and perhaps half a dozen times in total to prepare anything else. The food processor finally justified itself this week by shredding two pounds of carrots in about a minute as I mixed together this Smitten Kitchen recipe for carrot salad with harissa, feta, and mint, which is easily now one of my quick summer favorites. I used the salad as a base for Moroccan-spiced turkey burgers in my lunch, but I think it would work just as well as a main dish, perhaps with a drained and rinsed can of chickpeas added. Maybe some chopped pistachios, as well.

(My minor changes to the recipe: Rather than buy harissa I used a teaspoon of Korean gochujang paste that I already had on hand; similarly, my Kroger didn’t have caraway seeds in stock so I substituted fennel.)

Feature photo: A fragrant pile of parsley, July 2023.