New on the site this time, installment 2 of Gan Yang's interview with Zha Jianying in her classic volume The 1980s.  Gan's interview is lively and revealing, but extremely long (35,000 words in English translation), so I'll publish it in more digestible chunks (with a pdf of the entire text at the end).  This installment deals with Gan's time in the countryside as a sent down youth.  The next installment deals with his life as a student once the Cultural Revolution has concluded.

New on the site this time, installment 1 of Gan Yang's interview with Zha Jianying in her classic volume The 1980s.  Gan's interview is lively and revealing, but extremely long (35,000 words in English translation), so I'll publish it in more digestible chunks (with a pdf of the entire text at the end).  This installment deals with Gan's childhood and the early years of the Cultural Revolution, in which he was an active participant.  The next installment will cover his years as a sent-down youth.
Enjoy    

New on the site this time:

​The introduction to Xiang Biao’s new book, Hello Stranger, appropriately titled “I am a Stranger.”  Like his previous work Self as Method, Hello Stranger primarily addresses Chinese young people, although the themes of loneliness, alienation, and isolation evoked are in fact universal.  Xiang’s introduction explains the project, which consists of conversations with five prominent members of China’s artistic/intellectual world, including Liu Xiaodong – an internationally renowned painter – Li Yifan, whose documentaries on marginal subgroups have received some attention outside of China, and Shen Zhijun, the head of the Nanjing zoo, included here because many Chinese young people have come to prefer pets to human company, and Shen speaks to the larger relationship between humans and animals. 
 
If the themes Xiang wants to address are weighty, the conversations are less philosophical than hands-on.  Xiang is looking for “handles,” life-hacks which might help young people to see, touch, and engage with the offline world.  The book project was put together in collaboration with Sanlian Life Weekly, one of China’s best-known mainstream journals, which is helping the market and mediatize the work, illustrating that Xiang is not an obscure intellectual working in Germany but instead an important figure in China.
 
The English-language version of Hello Stranger is nearing completion, and we will begin looking for a publisher early in 2026.  We will of course approach the usual suspects, but if readers have ideas or contacts, we’re all ears!

New on the site this time:  an interview Xu Jilin on Chinese young people, titled “Those Born in the 1990s and 2000s No Longer Believe in Great Narratives.”  The pretext for the interview is the recent publication of Xu’s new book on generations in modern Chinese intellectual history, but Xu talks less about the book and more about China’s contemporary social and intellectual scene, which he views as quite bleak.  Appropriately, I guess, the interview was taken down by censors shortly after it was posted. 
 
On a personal note, over the past few months I largely stopped translating so that I could finish up my book manuscript based on Reading the China Dream, and I submitted the manuscript in July.  Publishing can be a risky business, so I’ll say no more about the details of publication at this juncture.  Returning to Reading the China Dream after finishing up my manuscript, I admit to a certain project fatigue.  Like the marathoner who takes the winter off only to find that their muscles resist the road when spring rolls around, I feel a near physical resistance when my fingers approach the keyboard.

I have not stopped translating entirely.  I am working with Xiang Biao and his team to translate the follow-up to Self as Method, a volume called Hello Stranger which should come out in translation some time in 2026 (and which echoes some of Xu Jilin’s concerns about China’s young people).  I am hopeful that this will lead me to more diaspora literature.
So Reading the China Dream will soldier on, if at a more sedate pace. 

​At the same time, I am looking for a retirement home for the site.  As things stand, were I to perish tomorrow, the site would disappear as soon as no one paid the bills my platform sends every few months.  I don’t think it’s just my ego talking when I say that site has done some good in the world and should continue to be available in something like its present form (in other words, 10 volumes of printed translation gathering dust on some library shelf would not be very useful).  I am in discussion with a number of institutions but am open to suggestions from readers as to where to park the site.
 

New on the site this time:
Gan Ye, a young journalist working with Singapore-based Initium to produce a poignant piece on how ordinary Chinese people deal with the grief and anger produced by the many, many deaths that followed the end of China’s zero-covid policy in December 2022.  The topic is taboo in China, but Gan explored it to great effect by visiting the bereavement groups people join on WeChat and interviewing members who wanted to talk.
We are of course living in tumultuous times, as President Donald Trump seems determined to overturn the geopolitical and economic order built up since WWII.  This of course has produced a great deal of commentary in China, which may well stand to benefit if Trump’s moves do not produce the desired results.  I may or may not devote my post-retirement attention to this; I am still deciding.  But there are many more open source blogs and Substacks than when I started Reading the China Dream in 2018.  I’ll try to work up a complete list of them for a future post, but if you are hungry for such material, I can suggest:
Thomas Des Garets Geddis’s Substack, Sinification, as well as Zhang Qianfan’s on Trump and America’s Cultural Revolution, translated and posted on Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage site.
​

New on the site this time:
Three new texts, all on China’s mood as 2025 dawns.  All are bleak.

Sun Liping. “The Two Things People Are Most Worried About, Which Can Also Count as a Belated New Year's Wish” notes that everyone in China is stressed out, because the educational system has become an endless competition that dumps graduates into a rat race of a job world.  People just want a normal life, he argues, and China surely has enough wealth to make that possible.

Lao Dongyan, “My 2024, in which I Learned to Start Over” tells the story of Lao’s recovery from burnout and depression.  Lao, a law professor at Tsinghua, has been outspoken in the past few years, only to be criticized because “her values are no longer in tune with the times.”  She spent a sabbatical year in Canada and got her motivation back.

Youthology, “China’s Vulnerable Generation” paints a bleak picture of everyone under 30.  China’s higher education system democratized just as China’s growth rate stalled, flooding the job market with frustrated young people.  The China Dream has stalled, and no one knows what to do about it.
​
Enjoy!

New on the site this time:

Only one piece, unsurprisingly on Trump's re-election:

Xiao Gongqin, "As Trump Assumes Power, How Will China Respond to the Challenge?"

Personally, Trump's victory has me flirting with a vow of silence, so I will stop there.

Enjoy!
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New on the site this time:

​Two pieces on the Chinese economy, both sparked by the massive intervention of China’s central bank into the Chinese stock market on September 24, the effects of which are being followed by China-watchers everywhere. 
 
I was in China for the month of September, and my broad impression is that people in general were less tense than last year, when many were still reeling from the effects of the sudden end of China’s zero-covid policy at the end of 2022.  At the same time, many Chinese seem definitively convinced that the boom is over and hard times are coming. 
 
Sun Liping’s blog post, “Rethinking Some of My Ideas in the Light of the Current Situation,” reflects this pessimism.  He seems resigned to the possibility that China may go through something like Japan’s “30 lost years,” during which China can solve its overcapacity problem and rethink what kind of economy it wants.  By contrast, Zhao Yanjing (“With the Huge Turmoil in the Stock Market, China’s Economy Reaches its Most Perilous Moment”) remains confident that if the central bank holds firm, government intervention can shock China’s economy out of the moribund state in which is currently finds itself. 
 
Enjoy!