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In this review-essay for Foreign Affairs, I review Xu Guoqi s new book, The Idea of China: A Contested History, and try to answer the question of what is today s China in other words, why is China s national identity so confused? Is it simply a continuation of the Qing empire in other words, an amalgam of conquered peoples [ ] The post Who is China? appeared first on Ian Johnson .
Today, The New York Review of Books has published a 10,000-word essay by Ai Xiaoming, one of China s foremost public intellectuals. Echoing Hayek s Road to Serfdom, “The Road to Miaoxi” is a plea against unfettered state power, which she sees as increasing in China and in fact around the world. It comes in the form [ ] The post Avoiding the road to serfdom appeared first on Ian Johnson .
From December 19-21 I ll be speaking at the inaugural Damn True Sinophone non-fiction writing conference in Tokyo. Why Sinophone and why Tokyo? Over the past decade or so, two things have happened. One, the space for independent Chinese-language writing in China has shrunk to virtually nil. Once, China boasted a vibrant scene of independent non-fiction [ ] The post Damn True appeared first on Ian…
I recently interviewed Sai, the Burmese curator of a show in Bangkok that was partially censored by request of the Chinese embassy. We talked about how artists from authoritarian state are trying to counter the dictators club. This was published in 民間檔案館/China Unofficial Archives as a newsletter. Available via Substack on on the CUA website, [ ] The post Constellation of Complicity appeared first…
I m honored to win the 2025 Kukula award issued by Washington Monthly for my 2024 review in the New York Review of Books of I Have No Enemies, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi s biography of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate. This award is named after an influential book [ ] The post 2025 Kukula Prize for Non-fiction Book Reviewing appeared first on Ian Johnson .
In this ChinaFile dialogue with several experts on Chinese religion, I posit that two Dallai Lamas are likely to emerge in the coming years: China’s playbook for the Dalai Lama’s succession will be quite straightforward: Beijing will ignore everything that the current Dalai Lama says and try a rerun of the Panchen Lama succession in [ ] The post Get ready for two Dalai Lamas appeared first on Ian…
In this review for the New York Review of Books, I look at two new state-of-the-art biographies of Chinese Communist Party leaders: the former party secretary, Hu Yaobang, whose firing and death led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, and Xi Zhongxun, father of the current leader of China. These two books are outstanding [ ] The post Lessons from his father appeared first on Ian…
This is the first in-depth interview I ve given on the China Unofficial Archives, the online non-profit that I set up in 2023 to promote independent Chinese writing and films. The interview is by Hsiaofan Su of the 田間 Tian Jian newsletter. You can read it here: The interview is in Chinese, but I ve machine-translated the [ ] The post Interview in 田間 on the China Unofficial Archive appeared first…
In this concise interview, Filip Noubel of the news service Global Voices, interviews me about the evolution of the China Unofficial Archives and our efforts to create a platform for independent Chinese Voices. As I mention to Noubel, Our users are primarily Chinese or overseas Chinese communities in other words, we aim primarily at the Sinophone [ ] The post Global Voices on the China Unofficial…
In Sparks, I wrote about Fang Fang s novel Soft Burial but at the time it hadn t been translated into English. Now, thanks to the effort of UCLA professor Michael Berry, it has just been published by Columbia University Press. In this review for The Atlantic magazine, I explain why Fang s novel is so important. The [ ] The post The PRC s Original Sin appeared first on Ian Johnson .
