Blog
New on the site this time, installment 1 of Gan Yang's interview with Zha Jianying in her classic volume The 1980s. Gan's interview is lively and revealing, but extremely long (35,000 words in English translation), so I'll publish it in more digestible chunks (with a pdf of the entire text at the end). This installment deals with Gan's childhood and the early years of the Cultural Revolution, in…
In 2024, Gan Yang published The Path Back to Culture, a collection of more than 30 articles written between 1984 and 2019. The book is divided into three parts: “Cultural China and Rural China,” “The Western Cultural Left and Global Culture,” and “The Path Back to a Civilizational State.” Matthew Dean and I have decided to work our way through the volume,…
New on the site this time:The introduction to Xiang Biao’s new book, Hello Stranger, appropriately titled “I am a Stranger.” Like his previous work Self as Method, Hello Stranger primarily addresses Chinese young people, although the themes of loneliness, alienation, and isolation evoked are in fact universal. Xiang’s introduction explains the project, which consists of…
New on the site this time: an interview Xu Jilin on Chinese young people, titled “Those Born in the 1990s and 2000s No Longer Believe in Great Narratives.” The pretext for the interview is the recent publication of Xu’s new book on generations in modern Chinese intellectual history, but Xu talks less about the book and more about China’s contemporary social and intellectual…
New on the site this time:Gan Ye, a young journalist working with Singapore-based Initium to produce a poignant piece on how ordinary Chinese people deal with the grief and anger produced by the many, many deaths that followed the end of China’s zero-covid policy in December 2022. The topic is taboo in China, but Gan explored it to great effect by visiting the bereavement groups people join…
New on the site this time:Three new texts, all on China’s mood as 2025 dawns. All are bleak.Sun Liping. “The Two Things People Are Most Worried About, Which Can Also Count as a Belated New Year's Wish” notes that everyone in China is stressed out, because the educational system has become an endless competition that dumps graduates into a rat race of a job world. People just want…
New on the site this time:Only one piece, unsurprisingly on Trump's re-election:Xiao Gongqin, "As Trump Assumes Power, How Will China Respond to the Challenge?"Personally, Trump's victory has me flirting with a vow of silence, so I will stop there.Enjoy!Click here to contribute and keep Reading the China Dream going. [...]
New on the site this time:Two pieces on the Chinese economy, both sparked by the massive intervention of China’s central bank into the Chinese stock market on September 24, the effects of which are being followed by China-watchers everywhere. I was in China for the month of September, and my broad impression is that people in general were less tense than last year, when many were still…
New on the site this time:Only one of my translations - Xu Jilin’s brief comments on the American election. In “What is the Meaning of Taylor Swift's 100 Million Dollar Ragdoll Cat?” Xu argues that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris will swing the election in Harris’s favor. The piece is not meant to be deep – Xu wrote it in his spare time while…
New on the site this time, a Chinese feminist reflection on the late Alice Munro's fall from grace, following revelations that Munro learned that her second husband had sexually abused her daughter from a previous marriage a decade or so after the fact, but remained with her second husband and kept silent about the abuse throughout the rest of her life. There is nothing distinctively Chinese about…