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Reading Round-Up: China, Coronavirus, and Quarantine Theater
For most of us who work in the China field, there’s a lull at some point in January or February as the entire country takes an extended vacation to celebrate Chunjie, or the Lunar New Year. Factories shut down, foreign correspondents and businesspeople go on home leave, and the streets of Chinese cities are uncharacteristically…
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2019 Top 9 (And Another Top 3)
Happy New Year! As is my regular practice, I’m kicking off 2020 with a renewed resolve to write more, in both volume and frequency. Will I? We shall see. I’ve set a relatively modest goal of writing for 30 minutes every non-holiday weekday and so far I’m four for four on meeting that, so if…
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Three Tips for Nonfiction Authors
In the space of only a few days, Michigan’s fall has gone from “crisp, sparkling, riot of color” to “gray, raw, endless rain,” meaning that we’ve now entered the season of meeting people for long afternoon talks in cozy coffee shops. That’s exactly what China media scholar Aynne Kokas and I did Wednesday afternoon, chatting…
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Screen: Angels Wear White
Pouring cups of tea and speaking in the practiced staccato common to tour guides and salespeople across China, a young woman wearing a nurse’s uniform outlines the advantages of hymen-reconstruction surgery. Lily, a newly single hotel receptionist in her early twenties, listens nervously. The nurse ends her pitch with the assurance that Lily will find…
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May Fourth at 100: A Reading Round-Up
On May 4, 1919, university students gathered in the center of Beijing to protest the Treaty of Versailles. China had sent 100,000 laborers to Europe in support of the Allies during World War I*, and many in the country had expected that in return the postwar negotiations would deliver German concessions on the Shandong Peninsula…
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Weekly Wanderings: Still Wrapping Up 2018 Edition
■ I have a minor flurry (a squall?) of new pieces to share this week, as several things I wrote in late 2018 got published all at once: At Dissent Magazine (subscribe!), I have a long review essay about new books by Carl Minzner (End of an Era) and Elizabeth Economy (The Third Revolution) that…
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Sweet Home Chicago
I spent the first weekend of 2019 in Chicago, attending the American Historical Association annual conference. Chicago is, relatively speaking, not that far from Ann Arbor—about four and a half hours by train or bus, somewhat less if you can bear the drive, which I can’t—but I have not been there once since moving to…
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Further Reading: Three 2018 China Books to Check Out
Readers of the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know will have seen the extensive “Further Resources” section that Jeff Wasserstrom and I included at the end of the book. In that section, we recommend many dozens of books and articles that interested readers should seek out for more…
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Looking Back, Moving Forward
Happy New Year! January 1, of course, is a day traditionally spent thinking about the year that has just ended and making plans for the one that lies ahead, and I have been doing exactly that. I feel like 2018 was several years crammed into one: both in my own life and in the world…
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Learning from Lei Feng in the Shanghai Metro
Historians usually do most of their research in libraries and archives, but sometimes you stumble on material in unexpected places. Like, for example, a subway station. As I was making my way to Shanghai Disney at the beginning of this month, I had to switch metro lines at the Oriental Sports Center station, a large…
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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 