Category: Weekly Wanderings
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Weekly Wanderings: March 8, 2026
Happy International Women’s Day! And boo to daylight saving time. This is not a weekend when I can easily lose an hour—because on Tuesday I’m flying to Vancouver for the start of my own personal Super Bowl, the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference. My AAS colleagues and I are in full-tilt “get it done…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 1, 2026
Does anyone else feel like the first two months of 2026 have included enough activity and events for a whole year? I suspect I’m not the only one who has already maxed out. Let’s keep the chaos and upheaval to a minimum in March, hmmm? Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews This…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 22, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Susan Blumberg-Kason, “Social Mobility and Stagnation: How the university entrance exam and residency permits structure life for in China.” Omkar Khandekar, Emily Feng, and Pankaj Dhungel, “India has long promised ‘vibrant’ border villages, as China speedily builds up” (audio) Joseph Torigian, “Did Peng Zhen Rebel Against Mao?” Decades…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 16, 2026
I love to write book reviews. I find it incredibly enjoyable when I’m reading a book and feel something spark—an interesting bit of history, or a new perspective, or a wonderful turn of phrase—that makes me impatient to tell everyone else about what I’m reading. I get excited about a book and I want other…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 8, 2026
I have a new review at The Wall Street Journal, discussing a wonderful and very engaging book by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. I’ve written a lot over the years about the Chinese Party-state’s imposition of internet controls, so it was a refreshing change to…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 1, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The AI race is being waged with the top 1% of the 1% of talent in China; the rest of the 99.9% and the humanities majors have much less to look forward to. In the fourth and fifth-tier cities, one of most arresting problems in China…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 25, 2026
WHAT A WEEK We’ve truly made the final transition from news cycle to news tornado. As the number of links below indicate, I spent way too much time every evening sitting on my couch doom-scrolling on Bluesky. I need to do less of that, but it’s hard not to feel an obligation to read and…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 18, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories The conviction of Lai, the self-made entrepreneur and pro-democracy media publisher, was in fact an anti-climax — a footnote in a long and carefully orchestrated exercise to silence one of the Party’s most stubborn and effective critics in the nominally autonomous special administrative…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 4, 2026
So … 2026. What a year, huh? 🤨 One good thing: I had the pleasure of serving as moderator for my friend Joseph Torigian at a discussion of his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, at Three Cats in Clawson, MI this afternoon. Three Cats is…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 21, 2025
Here we are—the shortest day of the year, and the final regular Weekly Wanderings post of 2025, although I’ll pop into your inboxes next Sunday with a year in review sort of thing. Thank you to everyone who has read, clicked, liked, subscribed, etc. I already have some writing lined up for 2026, both here…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 