Good evening. In case you haven’t heard, China Books Review — a new sister publication of the Wire China in partnership with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations — launched this week. China Books Review is a space for China bookworms, publishing commentary on China writings new and old as well as excerpts, profiles, a books podcast, and a variety of book lists that keep you up to date. This week, to celebrate their launch, we’re offering China Books Review‘s essay from Perry Link about what we can learn from six decades of China writings. Going forward, please check them out at ChinaBooksReview.com and sign up for their biweekly newsletter to get the full round-up delivered straight to your inbox.
Elsewhere, we have infographics on China’s podcast industry; an interview with Ian Johnson on China’s voices of resistance; a reported piece on the struggle for satellite supremacy; and an op-ed about how Beijing is giving Chinese AI firms a competitive advantage over their American and European counterparts. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to The Wire, please sign up here.
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Mao to Now
Communist China, once all but impenetrable, opened up only to tighten politically again. Has Xi circled back to the Mao era? Perry Link — Professor of Comparative Literature/Chinese at University of California, Riverside, and an expert in 20th-century Chinese literature — kicks off the new China Books Review with an essay on what we can learn from six decades of China writings.
The Big Picture: How China Gets its Podcast Fix
One in ten Chinese people is expected to be listening to a podcast at least once a month by 2024. To understand China’s podcast industry and offerings, this week’s infographics by Ella Apostoaie look at Ximalaya, the online audio platform at the summit of China’s ‘ear economy’.
A Q&A with Ian Johnson
Ian Johnson is a senior fellow for Chinese studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He had a long journalism career in China, where he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2001, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Chinese government’s crackdown on Falun Gong. He is the author of The Souls of China (2017) and Wild Grass (2004), and this fall his latest highly acclaimed book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future. In this week’s Q&A with Katrina Northrop, he discusses how historians, film makers and others are fighting to provide alternatives to the Communist Party’s view of the past.
Ian Johnson
Illustration by Kate Copeland
China, Europe and the U.S. Struggle for Satellite Supremacy
The saga over who owns a German satellite maker demonstrates how quickly Western attitudes to Chinese investment have changed. Aaron Mc Nicholas reports.
Chinese Regulators Give AI Firms a Helping Hand
In this week’s op-ed, Angela Huyue Zhang argues that Chinese AI firms might have a competitive advantage over their American and European counterparts, which are facing strong regulatory headwinds and proliferating legal challenges.
China Books Review Launch
Join us for the launch event of the China Books Review, a new online publication of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire China. To usher in this new publication of commentary on China writings new and old, three generations of writers will talk about how the field of ‘China watching’ has changed over the decades. From the black box of the 1960s and 70s, to the opening of the 80s, to new realities post-Tiananmen, through the booming 2000s into the tightening 2010s and 2020s, what writers on China — both Chinese and outsiders — have witnessed and been able to document has changed dramatically. We survey these generational differences with three serial mini-interviews, in a whistle-stop tour of how the world of China writing got to where it is today.
EVENT DETAILS
IN-PERSON
Thu 12 Oct 2023
6:30 – 8 p.m.
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
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