Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

At the AAS #AsiaNow blog, I interviewed sociologist Bin Xu about his 2021 book, Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China. In the later years of Mao’s rule, 17 million young Chinese were sent out of their urban homes to labor with and learn from rural peasants, in what was termed the “up to the mountains, down to the countryside” movement. (Most notably, Xi Jinping was among those 17 million—he has often spoken of that time as a formative growth period in his life.) Chairman Mao’s Children is the first extended, in-depth look I’ve seen at how those years in rural China have had a lasting effect on the lives of the people who got caught up in the movement.

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On my recent vacation, I was able to read a lot of books—several with a Michigan connection. Links to my recent reads and short Goodreads reviews:

Jim Harrison, True North (2 stars)

Erin Carlson, No Crying in Baseball (2 stars)

Recommendations

China Stories
Chris Buckley, “China’s Economic Pain Is a Test of Xi’s Fixation With Control”
Mary Hui, “Hong Kong’s new public enemy: the Cantonese language”
Lily Kuo, Meg Kelly, Vic Chiang, Nilo Tabrizy, and Pei-Lin Wu, “Rural areas sacrificed for Xi Jinping’s new city, satellite imagery shows”
Vivian Wang, “China’s Economic Outlook: Pep Talks Up Top, Gloom on the Ground”
Vivian Wang, “China to Its People: Spies Are Everywhere, Help Us Catch Them”
Lingling Wei and Stella Yifan Xie, “Communist Party Priorities Complicate Plans to Revive China’s Economy”
Li Yuan, “She Rose From Poverty as China Prospered. Then It Made Her Poor Again.”

Wanderings Around the World
Daniel Brook, “Narendra Modi’s New New Delhi”
Zach Buchanan, “How the first Orthodox Jew in an MLB organization is making it work”
Rachel Corbett, “The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty”
Timothy Garton Ash, “Putin, Pushkin and the decline of the Russian empire”
Christopher Heaney, “Why we need to address the Peruvian skeletons in the Smithsonian’s closet”
Michael Kimmage, “The Godfather in the Kremlin”
Danielle Kurtzleben, “A Eulogy for Twitter”
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “How the East India Company made its first maps and conducted land surveys in India”
Tara Subramaniam, “Afghan women once worked in this popular national park. Now they’re not even allowed to visit”

Standout Story

Taylor Swift is currently the same age, thirty-three, that I was when I was arrested. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” Swift sings, and I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?

Joe Garcia, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison”

Feature photo: The A2 Community Bookfest at the Downtown Ann Arbor District Library, September 10, 2023.