https://www.scmp.com/rss/501509/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com All night the same rattling and creaking of the train; the Doppler fade of its horn; the occasional slowing as they passed through another station. This was Deng Xiaoping’s second night aboard his special train; the journey from Beijing to Shenzhen in 1992 was a near two-day slog, no matter how important you were. The interminable winter flatness of the North China Plain had been replaced. Outside the train’s windows now flashed a landscape of Guangdong province’s more limited horizons, defined... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3262190/do-not-turn-back-inside-chinese-leader-deng-xiaopings-history-making-shenzhen-tour-1992?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3262190/do-not-turn-back-inside-chinese-leader-deng-xiaopings-history-making-shenzhen-tour-1992?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 11 May 2024 23:45:11 +0000 Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea by Katie Stallard, pub. Oxford University Press “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia,” Vladimir Putin declared in a February speech arguing, falsely, that Ukraine was carved out of what was traditionally Russia. “This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution,” he went on “and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3175888/how-autocrats-weaponise-history-create-parallel?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3175888/how-autocrats-weaponise-history-create-parallel?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:15:15 +0000 Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua, Ballantine Books “Like boxes within boxes, and puzzles within puzzles”: this is how one American writer described the layout of old Beijing. At the heart of the city’s nested squares sat the Forbidden City, where the emperor ruled and resided, his ceremonial halls set along the “dragon’s vein” that runs north to south through the centre of the city. To the west of the palace, but still part of the “Imperial City”, were the lakes and gardens of Zhongnanhai – the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3175167/novel-gives-voice-girls-mao-zedong-had-sex-powerful?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3175167/novel-gives-voice-girls-mao-zedong-had-sex-powerful?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 22 Apr 2022 11:15:22 +0000 Speak Not by James Griffiths, pub. Zed Books One recent study suggests that just over 3,000 languages are currently endangered – nearly half of those in use today globally. What causes language death? The process is, generally, gradual: an accelerating shift from an old linguistic system towards one with greater perceived utility or status. But, as journalist James Griffiths argues in Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language, this process is often driven by malign... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3158220/will-cantonese-struggle-survive-welsh-hawaiian-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3158220/will-cantonese-struggle-survive-welsh-hawaiian-and?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 04 Dec 2021 08:15:11 +0000 The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin, pub. The Experiment Drinking at a Sydney bar in the 1990s, Linda Jaivin got into conversation with a fellow patron who, it transpired, worked in marketing. “You don’t have a brand,” he told Jaivin, after they had discussed her varied writing career. “That’s really terrible!” “I couldn’t figure out exactly why it was terrible!” she jokes via Zoom from locked-down Sydney, bright-blue haired and flanked by overstuffed bookshelves. She does concede,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3148243/shortest-history-china-author-linda-jaivin-her-goal?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3148243/shortest-history-china-author-linda-jaivin-her-goal?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 11 Sep 2021 10:15:14 +0000 Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor by Anna Qu, pub. Catapult Inked in typewriter font on Anna Qu’s forearm is the title of her debut memoir: Made in China. The tattoo came first, she says, and testifies to the deeply personal nature of this project for Qu. Ten years in the writing, Made in China is a skilful and emotive excavation of a traumatic childhood split between China and the United States. As well as playfully reclaiming an often pejorative tag, the title attests to a personal... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3142373/living-us-operating-chinese-bitter-childhood-recalled?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3142373/living-us-operating-chinese-bitter-childhood-recalled?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 24 Jul 2021 11:45:08 +0000 China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World by Liang Hong. Verso Over the past 40 years, China has urbanised at a faster rate than any country in history. By 2035, the government estimates that 70 per cent of the country’s population – around a billion people – will be living in cities. Astonishing, if uneven, economic growth has attended China’s reinvention, but in the decades since the process of reform and opening began, in 1978, the Communist Party has largely failed... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3137893/liang-hongs-bestseller-rural-chinese-life-lucid?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3137893/liang-hongs-bestseller-rural-chinese-life-lucid?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 19 Jun 2021 11:15:00 +0000 My Old Homeby Orville SchellPantheon In the hours before dawn on August 18, 1966, the vast expanse of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square began to fill with people. By the time Mao Zedong walked onto the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, clad in an ill-fitting People’s Liberation Army uniform, there were more than a million crammed into the square and the streets around it. Lin Biao gave a speech to the assembled crowd in which he cited Chairman Mao as the “greatest genius” of the age and... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3127779/my-old-home-academic-orville-schell-turns-fiction?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3127779/my-old-home-academic-orville-schell-turns-fiction?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 03 Apr 2021 03:45:08 +0000 Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en, translated by Julia Lovell Penguin Classics Five stars One of Xian’s landmarks is its Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, a buff-coloured tower built during the Tang dynasty (618-907AD), when the city – then called Chang’an – was the imperial capital. The pagoda was built to store the sacred Buddhist texts brought back to China by Xuanzang, a monk who, in the seventh century, undertook a 17-year pilgrimage to India. Today, in a square just to the south of the pagoda, a bronze... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3123127/monkey-king-brought-vibrantly-life-21st-century?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3123127/monkey-king-brought-vibrantly-life-21st-century?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 26 Feb 2021 20:15:16 +0000 The Story of China by Michael Wood, St Martin’s Press. 4/5 stars How do you tell the story of China? For all those historians who write on the subject, that remains a confounding question. Concentrate on the ebb and flow of dynastic rule, and you neglect the individual living through history. Focus too narrowly and you miss the grand, narrative drama. Write too accessibly and you dumb down the complexity; incorporate all the nuance and you have a work such as The Cambridge History of China,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3112881/story-china-historian-michael-woods-presents-sweeping?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3112881/story-china-historian-michael-woods-presents-sweeping?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 07 Dec 2020 09:45:13 +0000 Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas, W.W. Norton & Co. 3/5 stars “We’re just about to walk off the map,” George Mallory wrote in a 1921 letter from a reconnaissance trip to Everest, the mountain the British explorer would die on while attempting to summit in 1924 (or possibly having done so). Mallory was seeking an elegant phrase to convey his sense of the remoteness of this place, but the idea of the Himalaya as an inaccessible, unknown landscape has long been a trope of Western writing on... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3098771/himalaya-human-history-looks-beyond-stereotypes?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3098771/himalaya-human-history-looks-beyond-stereotypes?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 31 Aug 2020 08:15:07 +0000 The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, by Juan Du. Published by Harvard University Press. 4 stars Is Shenzhen now China’s most important city? In August last year, the country’s State Council released a statement announcing that Shenzhen was to be developed into a “pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, with the aim of it becoming a “global benchmark city”. The timing of the announcement was unsurprising and seen as a direct response to the... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3045485/real-rise-shenzhen-how-people-not-just-policies-shaped?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3045485/real-rise-shenzhen-how-people-not-just-policies-shaped?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:08 +0000 On a hot August day, I set out to walk across Beijing. My route was nothing if not straight­forward: west to east, along the No 1 Street of China: Changan Jie. Literal trans­lation, Long Peace Street. A more poetic reading might render it as the Avenue of Eternal Peace, but this road’s shoulders have rarely been peaceful for long. Bisecting the Chinese capital from the edgelands, where the city meets the mountains in the west, to the unremark­able eastern suburbs, it is arrow-straight, 32km long... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3021150/what-beijings-most-important-street-changan?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3021150/what-beijings-most-important-street-changan?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 03 Aug 2019 03:00:11 +0000