I’m honored to win the 2025 Kukula award issued by Washington Monthly for my 2024 review in the New York Review of Books of I Have No Enemies, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

This award is named after an influential book review editor at the magazine, Kukula Kapoor Glastris. Book reviews thrive under iconoclastic and curious editors such as Kukula, and also the editors that I have worked with at the NYRB, especially the late Robert Silvers, and my current editor, Michael Shae. They push for reviews but are also patient and take chances on review that might not pan out.

This is especially true of this article, which had two aims: introducing Liu Xiaobo and this book to general audiences, while also offering a sharp critique of how we view China today.

          For me, it was one of the easiest reviews I ever wrote because the book was so absolutely

 outstanding, necessary, and yet almost completely ignored by the mainstream press. Think of it: the most influential dissident in the nearly eight-decade history of the People’s Republic of China, a Nobel prize winner, written by two outstanding experts in the field, a tour-de-force intellectual history of the post-Mao era—and yet it was completely ignored.

           As I wrote in the review:

This remarkable biography prompted me to reflect on how the outside world thinks about China. Although it is widely regarded as a powerful rival to free societies around the world, people seem uninterested in exploring it. We are bombarded with policy analyses—on important topics, to be sure, but impossible to formulate intelligently without understanding the country’s deeper trends.

Consider I Have No Enemies. It has been all but shunned by the mainstream media, with substantive reviews only appearing in two publications, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the China Books Review, and there was a one-paragraph review in Foreign Affairs. Could it be that at more than 550 pages, the book is too long? Certainly it could have been trimmed. But during the Cold War, it would have been inconceivable for mainstream newspapers and magazines not to cover a comparable biography of a major Soviet dissident. Michael Scammell’s 1,050-page biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, was widely reviewed when it was published in 1984.

The question of neglect goes beyond this one book. In researching China’s counterhistory movement, I was struck by the lack of attention paid in the English-speaking world to the Chinese equivalents of the famous Central and Eastern European filmmakers and writers. China’s greatest independent director, the Nanjing-based Hu Jie, has never had a retrospective at a major film festival, nor has the feminist scholar and prolific documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. Many of China’s political authors have likewise not been translated.

         To read the review, check out the New York Review from last year at this link. It’s paywalled but register and you’ll get one free article. Or you can read it unpaywalled via the Review’s partner organization, the Asia Society’s ChinaFile website, which makes available all of its China book reviews from Simon Leys in the early 1970s to Orville Schell, Perry Link, and others today. 

How I got to know Wang Yi, the jailed pastor of Pray for Early Rain Covenant Church. This article in Christianity Today (简体字 / 正體字）is an introduction I wrote to a collection of his theological writings, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement, which has recently been published in the United States.

His thoughts go far beyond the specifics of China, raising universal questions about how religions and governments act. But they also illuminate the party’s new stricter policies on religions, and explain why he chose to go to jail for his belief.

Spending time with Wang Yi (which I describe in detail in The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao) was a privilege, and it still sickens me to think of him in jail, far from his wife and son. I can only hope that he makes it through to the other side and is reunited with them.

Thanks to Christianity Today for reprinting this introduction, and Hannah Nation and others for their editing of his writings