Something a little different on the site this week: an essay, “Am I Being Played?​” that I composed over the past two weeks, inspired by a question that arose as I was working on Ren Jiantao’s text for last time.  The question has to do with the extent to which Chinese establishment intellectuals mean what they say when they publish in mainland Chinese venues.

In addition, the translation of another text by Ren Jiantao, “The Periodization of Reform,” that grew out of research for the above-mentioned essay.

Also an addition to our Spanish-language translations:  Yuan Peng, “La pandemia de Coronavirus: Un cambio que solo sucede una vez por siglo.”  Thanks to Ugo Armanini, my former student at the Université de Montréal, now at the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid, for revising the Spanish-language text.

A recording of a talk I gave at the Hoover Institution on February 10 is available here.  For those just discovering the site, the short talk (30 minutes followed by discussion and questions) might serve as a good introduction to what the project is about.
​
Finally, for French-speaking readers, I am pleased to announce the recent publication on Gallimard of Penser en Chine, a collection of essays under the direction of Anne Cheng, with the collaboration of Éric Vigne, to which I contributed a modest translation of an essay by Qin Hui.

New on the site this fortnight, three texts that, paradoxically, remind us of the role of the market in the lives of contemporary Chinese public intellectuals.  Legal scholar Liang Zhiping flogs two new books he published last year on the relationship between law and China's tradition in an excellent interview in The Shanghai Review of Books (the equivalent of NYRB); sociologist Sun Liping talks to fund managers about what to expect in 2021; and political scientist Ren Jiantao talks to a think tank about the crisis in Chinese values.
​
One housekeeping note.  At the request of the author, I removed from the site my translation of Li Tuo's piece on "The Pandemic and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism" because he had already made separate translation plans.  The text is available here.