Taili Ni

1 month ago | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Emily Feng |Eva Dou |Nicholas Kristof

Zhou Liqi (周立齐) grew up without the internet, or much of anything at all. His family was the poorest in a poor village. Their fortunes were tied to their crops, and when the weather brought rains or long, arid stretches, as it did frequently, their crops failed. Zhou was known as Ah San, or Number Three, because he had been born third in a string of brothers. Together, they all lived in a crumbling brick home with a dirt courtyard and a leaking roof in China’s southern Guangxi province.

1 month ago | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Christopher A. Cottrell |Andrew Peaple |Rachel Cheung

While many books have been written on Kublai Khan, none have framed him in terms of sea power.Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024) is anthropologist and author Jack Weatherford’s latest historical account of the vast Mongol empire that rampaged across the 13th and 14th centuries, from Baghdad to Beijing, with control of the oceans as its central theme.

Nov 27, 2024 | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Liao Yiwu

Ed: Liao Yiwu is a Chinese writer best known for his collection of oral histories The Corpse Walker (Anchor, 2008). Below is an unpublished oral history, recorded by Liao in 2002 and translated by Michael Martin Day for China Books Review, in which a victim of the Strike Hard campaign of 1983 tells his story of imprisonment and escape. Also read our own profile of Liao’s life and work. I was imprisoned for four years for writing a poem [about the Tiananmen Square massacre].

Nov 14, 2024 | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Nicholas Kristof |Matt Pottinger

The New York Times bureau chief’s apartment in Beijing was a large, well-bugged suite in Building Seven of a guarded government-run compound called Jianguomenwai, reserved for foreign diplomats and journalists. Jianguomenwai was the kind of soulless compound that Communist governments were good at erecting, but it was comfortable, quiet and air-conditioned. Within the paper, it was often said that the correspondent you wanted to follow in any bureau was John Burns.

Nov 5, 2024 | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Mary Kay Magistad

This is an episode of the China Books Podcast, from China Books Review. Subscribe at your favorite podcast platform, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, where a new episode lands early each month. Or listen right here, and browse our archive of past episodes.