Episode Updates and Behind the Scenes musings for the Living History series
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Zhang Huan 張洹 had already traveled a considerable distance by the time he arrived in New York in the mid-1990s. Born in Henan Province in 1965, he came of age as an artist in Beijing’s East Village, informal, semi-underground community where a small group of young artists pushed the limits of what could be made and shown in the days of the post-Tiananmen crackdown, when China’s experimental art…
In 1984, the Pearl River Delta was a region in the midst of rapid change. Shenzhen’s population had surged from roughly 300,000 to more than 1.2 million residents as the new Special Economic Zones transformed the area. It was radically different from cities like Nanjing or Beijing, where newly arrived foreigners often found themselves the only outsiders amid a sea of curious locals. There, merely…
These days, the idea that world-class wines can come from China no longer provokes much argument among serious critics and sommeliers. In places such as Ningxia and Yunnan, producers have quietly built estates of international standing, accumulated the field’s most competitive awards and shown that their wines can age and perform in blind tastings. What sets China’s winemakers apart is not…
A great demographic pivot is underway, one that will reshape the balance between China and the West. Around 2030, the median age of the United States is expected to fall below that of China, a threshold that would have seemed unthinkable at the turn of the century. From there, the shift accelerates. Europe follows, and by the middle of the century China overtakes Japan as the world’s oldest major…
(Click the video above to watch the interview on Youtube .) Janet Yang was sitting in her office on the Universal Studios lot when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg’s powerhouse producer, calling with an unusual request. Spielberg had fallen hard for a novel set in wartime Shanghai and wanted to film the story in the city itself. There just was one…
The inside story of the making of Beijing’s first Western five-star hotel—and the Americans and Chinese who dared to build it in the 1980s.
In Episode 27 of Living History we're speaking with Ilja Poepper, who built and managed luxury hotels in China for more than twenty years.
A conversation with the man who almost became China's first NBA athlete, scheduled to play against no less than Michael Jordan, and how Chinese basketball officials derailed that.
It all began with an unusual job interview where the young Belgian engineer discovered that nobody wanted to take a seemingly plum assignment in China. The reason revealed itself quickly...
One day in 1979, Frank Hawke decided to call his parents back home. At the time, he was one of the earliest American PhD students in China and on this day he was in Kunming, Yunnan Province—a beautiful but perhaps not world-famous city. Frank’s father had been in the Joint Strategic Target Planning Group, a part of Strategic Air Command that “basically wrote the nuclear war plans.” Reaching him,…
