Category: China
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4/30, New York: Women’s Rights Activism in China Today
On April 30, I’ll be the guest speaker at an after-work gathering of China Hands NYC, talking about the topic of women’s rights activism in China today. The jumping-off point for my talk will be, obviously, the five feminists who were detained in China just before International Women’s Day last month and finally released earlier…
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Two Upcoming Events in SoCal
I will be back in California for a week at the end of this month—first to San Francisco for work, then to Irvine for … well, a working vacation? I originally intended my three days in Southern California to be pure vacation—visiting friends, going to the beach, eating my annual In-N-Out burger. But then I…
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The Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Past and Present
I spent last weekend in Chicago attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS, shorthand for both the association and the annual meeting). On the night before I left for the conference, my boss handed me something she had found in her office—the program for the 1971 AAS. Promising to treat it…
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LA Review of Books China Blog: “Inconvenient Truths”
I have a new post up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, about two documentaries that were recently censored in China and India: It’s not every week that China-and-India-watchers have parallel stories to chew over, but that’s what’s been happening for the last few days. In both countries, a documentary film about an…
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Winter in Beijing
China had just celebrated Chunjie, or the Spring Festival—otherwise known as Chinese New Year—when I arrived in Beijing in mid-February 2005, but spring felt very far away. Since Beijing and Philadelphia are at practically the same latitude, I hadn’t expected the winter weather to be anything I couldn’t handle. I’d packed a ski jacket, gloves,…
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Ten Years Ago In China
One of the side effects of finally moving into a (hopefully) semi-permanent living situation is that I can finally reclaim the random boxes of my belongings that have accumulated in my parents’ basement over the past decade. In unpacking one of those boxes, I found that it contained souvenirs from my first trip to China—a…
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LA Review of Books: Q&A with Michael Meyer, Author of In Manchuria
Now up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, my interview with Michael Meyer, author of a wonderful new travelogue/history/memoir about life in China’s Northeast called In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China: MEC: You write that you first voiced the idea of moving from Beijing to Wasteland “after…
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My New York Napkin Collection
At first I wanted the napkins. Anyone who has eaten a few meals at mid- or lower-end restaurants in China knows that getting table napkins can require the persistence and negotiating skills of a senior diplomat. You’d think the waitstaff were personally paying for each napkin out of their own paychecks (wait, maybe they are?)…
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Gone Grant: UC Pacific Rim Research Program Ends
I have a very clear memory of finding out that I’d been awarded a UC Pacific Rim Research Grant, because I thought I’d been rejected. I was kind of on a break from grad school in the spring of 2012, working on ChinaFile at the Asia Society and living in Princeton. As I rode the…
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Welcome to New York
“Which do you like better, the United States or China?” I grew accustomed to answering this question when I met new people while traveling in China; it came right after the inquiry into my monthly salary (and expression of horror at the figure named) and shortly before the alarm over my unmarried state past the…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 