Category: China
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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 29, 2023
Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang suffered a fatal heart attack late on Thursday night, passing away at the age of 68. An economist with a reputation for being something of a reformer (relatively speaking, for a senior Chinese Communist Party official), Li spent his decade as premier getting increasingly sidelined by Xi Jinping. As 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 15, 2023
Only links from me this week—thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your Sunday. China StoriesSophie Beach, “Interview with Lhadon Tethong on Tibet’s Colonial Boarding Schools: ‘They Are Stealing an Entire Generation’”Rachel Harris, “China has sentenced Rahile Dawut to life in prison and would like the world to forget her. We must not.”Michelle Kuo,…
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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: October 1, 2023
No commentary and only a few recommendations from me today because for the past week I’ve been mostly occupied with preparing for and then attending the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. It’s been years since I’ve written and presented a conference paper based on original research, and happily I haven’t forgotten how to do so—but…
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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 17, 2023
For all the talk of spring cleaning, mid-September is when I like to get organized. I’m full of back-to-school energy, determined to wrangle my to-do list into submission and read through the stack of library books I’ve renewed multiple times already. I’m doing some actual cleaning, too, filling a bag for Goodwill with t-shirts that…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 