Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jan 7, 2025 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Many periodicals recently ran stories about Donald Trump’s second electoral victory leading to a burst of new sales for two old books: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). There was nothing unusual about the members of this dystopian duo showing up together in these reports, just as they had eight years earlier, the first time Trump headed to the White House.

Sep 12, 2024 | dissentmagazine.org | Nic Cavell |Jane Hu |Jake Werner |Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The Literature of Uyghur Disappearance Three recent books offer a searing portrait of the calculated brutality of the ongoing Uyghur genocide. ▪ Spring 2024 Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: An Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocideby Tahir Hamut Izgil, trans. by Joshua L. FreemanPenguin Press, 2023, 272 pp. The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiangby Perhat Tursun, trans. by Darren Byler and AnonymousColumbia University Press, 2022, 168 pp.

Sep 10, 2024 | insidehighered.com | Jeffrey Wasserstrom

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Courtesy of Jeffrey Wasserstrom | Mahka Eslami/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty ImagesA lot of scholars I know are historians based in the United States who work on cities that were either parts of the People’s Republic of China from the time it was founded in 1949 or became part of that country later, as Lhasa did in 1951 and Hong Kong did in 1997.

Jun 13, 2024 | chinabooksreview.com | Jeffrey Wasserstrom

What a prolonged dreadful dream! Who can tell it? It cannot be told, nor even imagined, but I will try to write something of our experiences. We kept getting into closer and closer quarters; the darkness thickened; still we kept hoping, looking, praying for our coming troops. … Some nights and days the firing has been most frightful. At first it was the Boxers who attacked us; now it is the armed Chinese soldiers with their small arms and large foreign guns.

Jun 4, 2024 | newlinesmag.com | Jeffrey Wasserstrom

When it comes to comedy, business and elections, it’s said that timing is everything. It’s also crucial when it comes to repression. The tragic transformation of Hong Kong, once defined by public spectacle, diversity of opinion and a cacophony of voices, into a place where only certain views and statements are allowed is a searing reminder of this. Some journalists and human rights organizations have described Hong Kong’s downward spiral as happening at lightning speed.