In this episode, we’re pleased to have had the opportunity to talk to Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean former diplomat who was Singapore’s representative to the UN in the 1980s and 1990s, and later Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore. Mahbubani is the author of ten books on Asia and the world, most recently Living the Asian Century (2024).Though the book has a broad scope, we focused more generally on China in this conversation, given our remit...

Our guest this month is renowned writer Peter Hessler, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of five books about China, most recently Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, published earlier this year by Penguin Press. In the book, Hessler details his most recent stint living in China, teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. Hessler talked to us about how the new generation of Chinese students differ from those he taught in the late 1990s; his experiences of Cov...

China’s edgy contemporary art exploded into global view over decades of China’s meteoric economic growth. Gone were the days of Mao Zedong insisting that art had to “serve the people", by which he meant, the Communist Party, with socialist realist propaganda. Freed from those contraints with Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, successive generations of contemporary artists in China worked through political trauma, explored Chinese identity, experimented with the styles...

Beijing is many things to many people, sometimes all at once – a mecca for migrants and artists, a tech hub, a proving ground for young graduates, a capital of politics and power, a smoggy, traffic-choked dystopia, a charming collection of lakes, leafy parks, narrow lanes and courtyard houses, an enduring city with 800 years of history and lore, and millions of stories to tell. Ten such stories are told in The Book of Beijing: A City in Short Fiction, an anthology in English translation ...

Who are the winners and losers in U.S.-China trade over recent decades, and what's a better way forward? Laying out a compelling argument in this episode is Peter Goodman, a former correspondent in China, current global economics correspondent at The New York Times, and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. He takes the supply chain snarls at the peak of the COVID pandemic as a jumping-off point to explore how China became the world's top exporter and ...

Tiananmen -- the place, the protests, the crackdown -- reverberates in memories and imaginations around the world, even 35 years after tanks rolled in Beijing’s streets, and the Chinese military’s crackdown on student demonstrators in the week hours of June 4, 1989, killed at least hundreds and wounded thousands of people. The protesters had been calling for political reforms, for a more open and less corrupt society, after decades of political upheaval under Mao Zedong’s leadership. Wha...

Genocide is not a word thrown around lightly by the U.S. government, but it uses that term to describe the Chinese government’s ongoing assaults on Uyghurs’ distinct culture, identity, rights, and freedom in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. China's government has long had an uneasy relationship with Uyghurs’ distinct Turkic Muslim identity, and has tried in various ways over time to control them, reduce and dilute their population, and make them assimilate.But lately, it’s gotten ...

China has bet big over the past couple of decades on how building up its renewable energy sector -- solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and their batteries, and the metals and minerals that make them all possible -- will help China achieve a dominant global position in an essential field.  So far, with intensifying climate change making the need to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables ever more urgent, China is winning that bet.  China's efforts, with fierce...

Acclaimed spy novelist Adam Brookes started out in China as a languge student in the mid-'80s, skipping class to travel in trucks and buses to Tibet and other parts of China that had just opened up after being shut off to foreign visitors for decades. He want back as a BBC China correspondent, informed by his earlier experiences in remote parts of China, and informing a huge global audience about China's transformation. He has since parlayed both of those early chapters in China into vivid...

The sizzle has come off of China's decades of economic growth, as the country contends with deflation, slumping consumer confidence, plummeting foreign investment, a cratered urban property sector, high local government debt, overcapacity in manufacturing, and a private sector cowed by government crackdowns, as well as a shrinking workforce and an aging population. For all that, China is still the world's second largest economy, the largest trading partner of most of the world's countries,...

A funny thing happened at the height of China's economic boom, as more and more Chinese women were getting college degrees, good jobs, and promising careers. The government launched a propaganda campaign, urging women to get married young, before they became "yellowed pearls".  Leta Hong-Fincher captured that phenomenon in her book Leftover Women (2014). A decade later, with a new updated edition of Leftover Women just out, Leta joins the China Books podcast to talk about why China's...

Dreams of a better future have driven many a revolution, but not all have turned out the way the dreamers imagined.    China's early revolutionaries, a century ago, aimed to rid the country of what they saw as corrupt capitalism and the world of colonialism and imperialism. Instead, they said, socialism would bring a future of peace, prosperity, equality, and social justice.  Not all of that worked out.  One of the dreamers was Chen Hansheng, a prominent Western-educated  public...

China's rise is one of the great stories of the past century, and China correspondents have told that story in myriad ways -- as a story of transformation, of falling poverty rates and rising power, of new wealth and old political elites, of new opportunities and unintended consequences, of abuses of rights and of power, of surveillance and censorship.  Together, these different pieces formed a complex and sometimes contradictory picture -- shaping understandings, and sometimes...

China's epic transformation over the past four decades has seen cities expand, fortunes rise, and expectations change. It has left Chinese people to either ride the waves of change, or scramble -- perhaps struggle -- to keep up. In the midst of it all, Chinese fiction has reflected and riffed on life on the ground, with humor, satire, pathos, and good old-fashioned story-telling. At times in the Reform and Opening Up era, Chinese fiction has even driven a national conversation. This...

Fresh ideas and thought-provoking conversations on fiction and non-fiction, about China and from China, with host Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for NPR and PRX's The World.  The China Books podcast is a companion of the China Books Review (chinabooksreview.com), co-published by Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations (where Mary Kay is deputy director) and The Wire China.   The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning...