Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Thanks for joining me this week.

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China Stories

The results of an invasion would be catastrophic not just for Taiwan but the entire globe, with as much as $10 trillion in annual losses to the world economy, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg Economics. It could wipe out over ten percent of global GDP, largely because Taiwan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, the technological bedrock of our digital era.

— Brent Crane, “Fight of the Century”

Helen Gao, “The China That the World Sees Is Not the One I Live In”

Andrew Higgins, with photographs by Gilles Sabrié, “Where Mao’s Peasants Tilled the Soil, Tourists Now Pay for the View”

There are certain pieces of accepted wisdom about Xi Zhongxun: that he was relatively liberal when it came to the treatment of ethnic minorities; that he was instrumental to economic reform in the 1980s; and that he had qualms about the treatment of democracy protestors in 1989. Torigian acknowledges these assumptions and then adds detailed analysis to them all, to paint a portrait of a man whose ambivalence about how to move the communist revolution forward reflects complexities that his son rarely projects in the present day.

— Rana Mitter, “Sins of the Father” (review of The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, by Joseph Torigian)

Maria Repnikova, “The New Soft-Power Imbalance: China’s Cautious Response to America’s Retreat”

Afra Wang, “Reading Breakneck from China”

Wanderings Around the World

Dan Barry, with photographs By Todd Heisler, “After 167 Years in New York, a Priceless Coin Collection Heads to Toledo”

Lottie Joiner, “‘I was just going to school’: legacy of New Orleans’ other desegregation pioneers”

Alec Scott, with photographs and video by Tony Cenicola, “His Wampum Creations Help Keep a Centuries-Old Craft Alive”

Neha Singh, as told to Anuradha Nagaraj, “‘I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe’”

Featured photo: New York’s Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building at night, December 8, 2022.