“Luxury Off the Rails,” review of The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China, by James M. Zimmerman. Wall Street Journal (April 2023).
“A Woman’s Life in Letters,” review of Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by Amy Stanley. Wall Street Journal (July 2020).
“Money, Power and China,” review of Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China, by Jung Chang. Wall Street Journal (December 2019).
“A Glimpse of a Far Land,” review of The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by Nancy E. Davis. Wall Street Journal (July 2019).
“A Chinatown Safe House,” review of The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Julia Flynn Siler. Wall Street Journal (June 2019).
“The Chinese Cyber-Padlock,” review of The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet, by James Griffiths. Wall Street Journal (March 2019).
“After Repression, Revolt?,” review of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, by Elizabeth C. Economy, and End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise, by Carl Minzner. Dissent (Winter 2019)
“Chicago on the Huangpu,” review of City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai, by Paul French. Wall Street Journal (July 2018)
“China’s Great Awakening,” review of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao, by Ian Johnson. Financial Times (April 2017).
“The Faulty Logic of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” review of One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, by Mei Fong. Ms. Magazine blog (February 2016).
“Driving Toward the Chinese Dream,” review of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, by Dan Washburn. Los Angeles Review of Books (September 2014).
“Northern Girls: Life Goes On,” by Sheng Keyi. Los Angeles Review of Books (August 2013).
“Ai Weiwei’s eighty-one days,” review of Hanging Man: The arrest of Ai Weiwei, by Barnaby Martin. Times Literary Supplement (June 7, 2013).
“Forgetting and Remembering: New Books on China and the West in the Nineteenth Century.” Review essay at World History Connected 9, no. 3 (October 2012).
“Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves,” by Shehzad Nadeem. Asian Review of Books (December 2011).
“Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong,” by Gordon Mathews. Los Angeles Review of Books (October 2011).
“The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past,” by Gail Hershatter. Ms. Magazine blog (September 2011).
“It’s a Boy,” review of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl. Time Asia (July 4, 2011).
“China Voices,” by Oxfam Hong Kong. Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (July 2011).
“How Chinese Women Dismantled the Master’s House with the Housewife’s Tools,” review of Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China, by Helen M. Schneider. Ms. Magazine blog (April 2011).
“Chinese Whiskers,” by Pallavi Aiyar. Asian Review of Books (February 2011).
“Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China,” by Frank Dikötter. World History Connected (March 2009).