Category: China
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Weekly Wanderings: February 9, 2025
Good morning and happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate. I’m not a football fan, but I am a forever Philadelphia fan, so Go Birds. Something I’ve been wrangling in my brain these past few weeks is how to approach writing and sharing and, well, living during a time that feels very unstable and…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 2, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin, “Taiwan’s next generation takes on its fear of the deep” Howard W. French, “What China Got Right About Big Tech” In 2023 alone, over 55 million tourists were reported to have visited Tibet—more than 15 times the Tibetan population. The Chinese Communist…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 26, 2025
I was supposed to leave New Orleans late Tuesday afternoon, but by Monday I knew there was little chance my flight would take off as scheduled. The forecast called for 4-5” of snow on Tuesday, in a place unprepared for those sorts of winter conditions. Schools announced closures, the mayor held a press conference, and…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 20, 2025
A raw wind swept down Baton Rouge’s North 4th Street, threatening to wrench the baseball cap off my head as I waited with 3,500 other people for the Louisiana Marathon to get underway. Wearing ankle-length leggings, a tank top, and a long-sleeved t-shirt, I wished I had brought gloves and a knit hat with me…
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Bookshelf: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom
Longtime China journalist John Pomfret regards the relationship between the United States and China as a grand, sweeping epic marked by many highs and lows. “If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity,” Pomfret writes in his 2016 history,* The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, “it…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 12, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Chinese leaders often proclaim that “the East is rising and the West is declining”; some U.S. leaders now also seem to accept this forecast as inevitable. Arriving at such a broad conclusion, however, would be a grave mistake. China’s progress and power are substantial. But it…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 5, 2025
Two weeks without recommendations meant I saved up a bumper crop for today—I hope everyone can find a story or two in the links below to read with their coffee on a cold winter Sunday. Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The recent shift in exile rhetoric suggests a realization by the…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 8, 2024
On the morning of Tuesday, December 3, I got up early and started writing right away. I was working on a book review and had suddenly hit the zone where words were flowing, so my focus was unusually unshakeable. At 9:00, I reluctantly left that document and switched to Zoom, where I spent the next…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 1, 2024
December! Well, Decem-brrrr here in Michigan … it was 19 degrees outside and snowing lightly when I woke up this morning. In addition to the links below, I have a new piece just up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: The creation of character input methods, and how thinking about them has changed our…
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Weekly Wanderings: November 24, 2024
Thanks for joining me this week. Recent Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Kelly Ho, “Benny Tai, Joshua Wong among 45 Hong Kong pro-democracy activists jailed up to 10 years in landmark national security case” Joyce Jiang and James Legge, “Young Chinese flock to ‘academic pubs’ as space for free expression shrinks” Dalia Parete, “For Mang…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 