Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

April 30 marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces. I have a special little reading round-up here at the top on reflections and analysis published to commemorate the anniversary.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Vietnam, 50 Years After the Fall of Saigon

Minh-Thu Pham, “50 Years After Saigon: My Refugee Plea to Preserve American Greatness”

Damien Cave, “How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America”

Damien Cave and Tung Ngo, with photographs and video by Hannah Reyes Morales, “Vietnam on the Move”

Matthew Kendrick, “Saigon’s Last Day: The fall, the flight, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War”

Mary Kay Magistad, “An Irishman’s Love Letter to Saigon”

The Verge, “The American War” — special series on “the legacy and mythmaking of the Vietnam War”

Recommendations

China Stories

Under Xi’s regime, the investigation found, the U.N. compound in Geneva has become a hostile environment where dissidents and minorities seeking to protest Beijing’s policies face harassment and intimidation from nongovernmental organizations aligned with the Chinese government. Reporters found that Chinese authorities also used Interpol to pursue not just criminals but also dissidents, businesspeople and Uyghur rights advocates, in apparent violation of the organization’s rules. Taken together, the evidence reveals a coordinated and systematic effort by the Chinese government to neutralize dissent in all its forms by individuals the world over.

— Scilla Alecci and ICIJ, “Inside China’s machinery of repression — and how it crushes dissent around the world”

Michael Berry, “Cautioning His Students to Stay Quiet, A Scholar of China Hears Echoes of Its Past in America’s Present”

Helen Davidson, “‘For a better life’: CIA releases videos to lure disgruntled CCP officials to spy on China”

Helen Davidson and Jason Tzu Kuan Lu, “Taiwan cracks down on holders of Chinese ID amid fears over propaganda and espionage”

Shawn Donnan, “Made-in-USA Wheelbarrows Promoted by Trump Are Now Made in China”

Celebrating RFA’s imminent demise on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform, a former editor in chief of the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times wrote, “Such great news.” By letting RFA go totally dark at this crucial moment, the U.S. government would cede the information space to China, playing into the hands of President Xi Jinping.

— Bay Fang, “China Wants to Silence My Organization. Why Is Trump Doing It?”

Emily Feng, “Radio Free Asia announces mass layoffs amid funding fight with Trump administration”

Jeremy Goldkorn, video interview at ChinaFile with Joseph Torigian about his forthcoming book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

Jessie Lau, “‘We’re All Chinese, Aren’t We?’” — a review of Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China, by Emily Feng

Karen Ma, “Yan Geling: Crossing the Red Line”

Wanderings Around the World

Kriston Capps, “At Bryn Mawr, a Monumental Plaza Traces the Steps of Black History”

As he recounted his ordeal, he told me his fellowship at Georgetown was partially subsidized by the Scholars at Risk program. This is a U.S.-based network that works with American universities to temporarily host international scholars facing threats in their home countries. Badar never imagined that a country with a Scholars at Risk program would one day pose a risk to scholars, he told me.

— Nader Hashemi, “Teaching Gandhi in a Texas Detention Center”

Lyz Lenz, “The world wants you to be smaller — But Casey Johnston wants you to get swole”

Anne Helen Petersen, “The Pitt is a Show About”

Jennifer Schuessler, “Mellon Foundation Announces $15 Million for Humanities Councils”

Adria R. Walker, “The Underground Railroad went all the way to Canada – and a new photo exhibit preserves that legacy”

Standout Story

The machine is called MingKwai: ‘clear and fast’. Invented by the renowned Chinese scholar and writer Lin Yutang in 1947, it was the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard. Its ingenious design inspired generations of language-processing technology, but only one prototype was made and had long been assumed lost. In recent years, engineering teams and design studios have tried to re-create the device based on available documentation, with limited success. The legendary typewriter, like Lin himself, was inimitable.

— Yangyang Cheng, “Lost and Found: The Unexpected Journey of the MingKwai Typewriter”

Featured photo: Exhibit on the April 30, 1975 evacuation of Saigon at the Gerald R. Ford Museum, Grand Rapids, MI, March 22, 2023.