Taili Ni

6 days ago | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Rachel Cheung

In 2020, one of China’s leading private-sector book publishers, Beijing Motie Book (磨铁图书), bought the Chinese-language rights to Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). Motie thought the book was perfectly timed for the Chinese market. The Amazon founder was then the world’s richest man, and his Chinese technology billionaire peers were also riding high.

2 weeks ago | chinabooksreview.com | Taili Ni |Kevin Schoenmakers

Reviewed:Cheng Li, Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2025)April 3 was, presumably, a busy day for China’s leadership. Donald Trump had just announced a sweeping round of tariffs on Chinese imports, posing a major threat to their economy. Yet the Politburo Standing Committee and other senior officials had another important task to attend to that day — planting trees.

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.

2 months 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 Below is an unpublished oral history, recorded by Liao in 2002 and translated by Michael Martin Day for China Books Review, in which a victim of the Strike Hard campaign of 1983 tells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].