When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this five-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the…
Category: Articles
Talking Heads: China Strikes Back | Vice Vice
In the first episode of Talking Heads, Orville Schell discusses his New York Review of Books essay, “China Strikes Back.” Schell recently joined Jimmy Carter on a visit to China, where the former president received a less-than-warm welcome by the…
Will China Crush the Hong Kong Protests? Wall Street Journal
For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared…
A Chinese Artist Confronts Environmental Disaster The New Yorker
What were all these sick animals—lions, wolves, camels, monkeys, gazelles, pandas, and zebras—doing on this dilapidated Chinese fishing boat, sailing past the famous frieze of colonial banks, trading houses, and clubs that make up Shanghai’s Bund? The city’s glass skyline…
Jung Chang’s ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’ The New York Times
For historians, there is no more powerful aphrodisiac than an exciting topic buoyed by a raft of unexploited sources, raising the prospect of a revisionist look at an important figure or even an entire era. There are few leaders in…
Why Is Prosperous China So Anxious? YaleGlobal
For those who look at China from afar, or see it on a visit through the lens of the towering new buildings, stunning airport terminals, state-of-the-art high-speed rail systems and dazzling architecture of monuments, museums, concert and municipal halls that…
A Rising China Needs a New National Story The Wall Street Journal
Every July, amid festivities and fireworks, the U.S. and France mark their birth as nations. Accustomed as we are in the West to histories that begin with triumph—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the storming of the Bastille—it may…
Chairman of the Board Foreign Policy
In his opening remarks at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, an annual meeting between high ranking U.S. and Chinese officials, Vice President Joseph Biden spoke about his first visit to China in 1976, the year that Chairman Mao Zedong died.…
Edward Snowden’s Leaks May Actually Strengthen U.S.-China Relations The Atlantic
The reason why both Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai breakthrough in 1972 is because that was the last time that Sino-U.S. relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most policy wonks on both…
How the Snowden Affair Might End Up Helping U.S.-China Relations ChinaFile
The reason why both Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai breakthrough in 1972 is because that was the last time that Sino-U.S. relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most policy wonks on both…