Category: Books
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Weekly Wanderings: November 12, 2023
On Monday night I was scrolling through Bluesky when a post from Jeremy Goldkorn caught my eye: The China Project (founded in 2016 as SupChina), a leading digital magazine and media organization in the China world, would be closing up shop—effective, it seemed, more or less immediately. An announcement at the site explained that a…
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Bookshelf: Red Memory
A rally at Tiananmen Square: Chairman Mao standing on the rostrum above, thousands of cheering participants below. A struggle session: the accused bent and bowed, surrounded by Red Guards screaming out their victim’s purported crimes. A loudspeaker, an orchestra, a chorus: incessant sources of “The East Is Red” and other songs lauding Mao and the…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 5, 2023
Recent Goodreads review from me: Recommendations China Stories But even as it remained in keeping with the Party’s terse traditions, Li Keqiang’s paint-by-number treatment in the official Party-state media, including the brief initial announcement on the 27th and the official obituary on the 28th, closely mirrored the former premier’s sidelining by the leadership under Xi…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 22, 2023
“What do you have in here?” Dad asked as he hefted my bulging suitcase into the back of my parents’ Subaru Outback outside the Richmond, Virginia airport last Sunday. “Well, you know …” I hedged. “I might have packed a few books.” (Also way too much clothing, as I vastly over-estimated my level of interest…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 8, 2023
About a year after I moved to Michigan, one of my co-workers—who must have noticed that I spent nearly every lunch hour reading—invited me to join her book club. She hastened to add, though, that the book club actually didn’t ever meet, nor did its members ever discuss the books they read. A veteran of…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 24, 2023
Even as Twitter crumbles into irrelevancy, it remains populated enough to set one’s mentions aflame in reaction to a quick post—as David Brooks learned this week. But I was also reminded of this when on Friday I retweeted a photo from the Shanghai History Museum, tweeted by Lingnan University historian Peter Hamilton, and have spent…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 10, 2023
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…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 27, 2023
I’m usually a fast reader, but I took my time last week with a collection of essays by historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash. In Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Garton Ash blends his firsthand observations of political movements in various European countries (mostly in the former Soviet bloc) with broader analysis of European…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 20, 2023
Following freelance journalist Jen A. Miller on Twitter (whatever, X) and Instagram led me to purchase a “Passport to Your National Parks®” a few weeks ago. Why? First of all, I love both notebooks AND checklists. More seriously, Miller’s posts made a convincing case that filling her book with passport stamps helped her expand the…
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Weekly Wanderings: August 6, 2023
Just links this week—I’ve been in Philadelphia, visiting with family and friends, and am getting ready to head home to Ann Arbor. China StoriesKeith Bradsher, “Anger Builds in Towns Deliberately Flooded, in Part, to Save Beijing”Chang Minxiao and Fan Yiying, “In China’s Dance Schools, a Dangerous Obsession With Weight Loss”Kit Fan, “‘I don’t know if…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 