Ian Johnson

The Road to Miaoxi

Ruins of Mao-era “reform-through-labor” camps remain scattered throughout the mountains of Sichuan. Five years ago I decided to retrace one former prisoner’s path. 

Lessons of the Father

New biographies of Xi Zhongxun and Hu Yaobang provide insights into the opaque culture of the Chinese Communist Party and the political ascent of Xi’s son, Xi Jinping.

China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

Loot Under the Lindens

The museums in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum fall short in their efforts to explain that many of the objects on display were plundered.

China: Back to Authoritarianism

Xi Jinping, who is about to be granted an unprecedented third term as China’s leader, has turned out to be an ambitious strongman who has remade the political system and expanded his own power.

Hong Kong from the Inside

Four books about Hong Kong show how the city’s once-thriving culture of political engagement has been obliterated under Chinese control, though it may still retain its position as a global financial capital.

Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards

One doctor’s mission to show that traditional healing arts could help in a national crisis.

A Most Adaptable Party

The belief that history brought it to power is one of the few ideological constants in the Chinese Communist Party’s hundred-year saga.

How China Beat Its Covid Crisis

China’s bureaucracy controlled the pandemic. But some Chinese see flaws in the authoritarian state.

A Difficult Birth in Britain’s Stressed Health Service

The NHS, for example, has one of the lowest ratios of emergency-room beds per capita in the developed world. The battle was lost before it began.

Pandemic Journal, March 30–April 5

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Danny Lyon in Bernalillo, Andrew McGee in New York, Nicole Rudick in South Orange, and more.

An Interview with Yuan Ling

Ian Johnson: What is the best way to approach Wuhan in your writing? Yuan Ling: During normal times, people aren’t free but they don’t feel it, but now everyone feels their unfreedom. 

The Flowers Blooming in the Dark

China’s Rise, Hong Kong’s Decline

The international headlines proclaimed a triumph for the pro-democracy movement in the district council elections. Beijing, though, will spin recent events as another staging post in its policy of “strategic patience.”

The Eastern Jesus

R.S. Sugirtharajah’s ‘Jesus in Asia’

What Holds China Together?

A Realist View of Tibetan Buddhism

Probably only the Rubin, with its extensive collection of Tibetan art and its deeply informed curatorial staff, could pull off such a show. The exhibition and catalog offer an unsentimental, non-Orientalist perspective on Tibet, in which violence is a normal part of the political and religious discourse, as elsewhere in the world.

China’s ‘Black Week-end’

A case study in how the Communist Party has managed to keep itself in power

An Interview with Chen Hongguo

Chen Hongguo: My main view is: no secrets. You have to realize they’ll hear everything, even our conversation right now. They will know. Absolutely. Don’t think you can keep a secret from them. They really do know everything. It’s a system. It’s not one guy following you.

The Specter Haunting Xi’s China

Enter Xu Zhangrun. A fifty-six-year-old professor of constitutional law at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, Xu is well known in Beijing as a moderate and prolific critic of the government’s increasing embrace of authoritarianism.