Seeds of Fire at Forty 蜀犬吠日 In 1996, three decades ago, I was commissioned by Wired Magazine to undertake the first survey of ...

Mythopoetic China 口服、手服、心服 China’s party-state is underpinned by a culture of submission. During the Yan’an Decade ...

In this celebration of the northern autumn of 2026, the Beijing artist Lao Shu again plucks virtual chrysanthemums at the imagined home of Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, China’s most famous poet-recluse. Elsewhere ...

time will pass with the revolving sun and moon. I never cared for praise in my lifetime, and it matters not at all what eulogies are sung after my death. The poet-recluse Tao Yuanming wrote these ...

For two years, we’ve been trudging through sludge, trapped in Trump’s MAGgoty reality-show rerun. We wake up every morning to the dread realization that a demented conman in a mangy rug still occupies ...

On 22 December 1972, the government of New Zealand cut off its decades-long diplomatic relationship with the Republic of China, which had been based on the island of Taiwan since 1949, and recognised ...

In this chapter of Contra Trump, a series devoted to the second presidential term of Donald J Trump and its resonance with Xi Jinping’s China, we mark the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration ...

Political power struggles in the People’s Republic of China have an ineluctable rhythm. Every five to ten years the quotidian thrum of wrangling reaches a dramatic crescendo as the contention between ...

Journalist Marije Vlaskamp’s essay on the Gao Brothers 高氏兄弟 — Gao Zhen 高兟 and Gao Qiang 高强 — reproduced below, is all but unreadable, even unbearable. That’s because Vlaskamp describes dilemmas and ...

In ‘China’s Political Silly Season’ we quoted an anonymous petition calling on Xi Jinping to retire at the Twentieth Party Congress. It read in part: From the Eighteenth Party Congress [in November ...

The 29th of October 2025 is the Ninth Day of the Ninth Month in the traditional lunar calendar 農曆九月初九. It marks the Double Ninth or Double Brightness Festival 重陽節. The Double Ninth, which follows ...

‘Mao’s Abiding Legacy’ is Part II of ‘China’s Heart of Darkness’, Jianying Zha’s coruscating reflections on the legacy of the ancient thinker Han Fei and the Legalist school in Xi Jinping’s China. It ...