A couple of weeks ago, I received a request from a New York Times reporter to talk about publishing in China. The topic has been in the news lately, with the BookExpo in New York, where Chinese publishers were the guests of honor. In May, the PEN American Center released “Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship,” an excellent and
It’s hard to believe, but ChinaFile is almost two years old. It’s been an exciting year for us, and, as ever, an eventful year for China. It was a year of muscular leadership from Xi Jinping, who has now been in office just over two years and who appears to be successfully consolidating his power within the Chinese Communist Party as he tightens his grip on a whole range of
This piece was first published in the May 7, 2015 issue of
One night in September, three hundred people crowded into the basement auditorium of an office tower in Beijing to hear a discussion between two of China’s most popular writers. One was Liu Yu, a thirty-eight-year-old political scientist and blogger who has written a best seller explaining how American democracy works. Her fans call her “goddess” for her writings and her stylish looks.
But this evening, Liu was just a foil for the other writer: Peter Hessler, a low-key
New Yorker journalist. Based in China until 2007, he later wrote on the American West and now lives in Egypt. Hessler has written three books on China and a collection of essays, all published in the U.S., and been recognized with a MacArthur fellowship.