The essay was originally published last year on the Chinese-language website Boston Review of Books. I had the honor of translating it into English and writing a thousand-word introduction.

The exercise took weeks of time, making me appreciate the work put into translating by professional Chinese-English translators like Michael Berry at UCLA–not just the literal translation but the interpretation needed so it makes sense for a new audience.

For that, I owe the editing staff at the Review a huge amount of thanks. They found inconsistencies, unclear points, and inelegant phrasing throughout the work. This is an online essay and people sometimes still think that online means some sort of slapdash “blogpost.” In fact, this was more carefully and attentively edited than most print articles I’ve written, for any publication.

The article is behind a paywall but you can access it by creating an account and enjoying one free article, or you can write me for a PDF. It will also be unlocked on the Asia Society’s Chinafile NYRB archive in a month, as part of an agreement with the Review. However, I’d encourage readers to try the NYRB site first–even just registering for a free trial helps the Review, which is a unique, family-run journal. Work like this involves a paid staff and it should be supported in any way possible!

In another era, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo would have been reviewed widely and my review–which appeared a year after the book was published–would have been embarrassingly late. But many societies around the world are focused inward, obsessed with populist concerns, and so this tour-de-force biography was essentially not reviewed in the mainstream press at all. A pity, because it gives us the prequel to Xi’s China–a time of bold efforts to build civil society in China and bold people like the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Read the review here. 

In this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations, I give my quick take on the recently concluded party congress, questioning whether Xi is really as powerful as people make him out to be, or if his omnipresence is a sign of looming weakness.