We talked to the author of "Tongueless" about how Cantonese is disappearing from Hong Kong schools, and what literature can do to raise awareness.

Our guest this month is Lau Yee-Wa, one of Hong Kong's most exciting emerging fiction writers, whose debut novel Tongueless (The Feminist Press, 2024) came out in English last summer, translated by Jennifer Feeley. Lau studied literature and then philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she also started writing poetry. She worked as an editor in a publishing house, and her 2016 short story "The Shark" won the Hong Kong Champion Award for Creative Writing. Tongueless (失语) is her first novel, published in 2019 in Chinese. We were delighted to be joined by Lau Yee-wa to talk about the novel, Hong Kong identity, language and education, and the changes that has been undergoing in recent years.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

As 2025 gets into gear, all eyes are on the year ahead, with a degree of trepidation (or excitement, depending on whom you ask) for the early impacts of the incoming Trump administration on U.S.-China relations, and global politics at large. From the Ukraine war to possibility of conflict across the Taiwan Strait, not to mention economic and diplomatic conflict across the Pacific, it’s a fresh era of uncertainty.

To unpack these risks, our guest this month is the academic and author Oriana Skylar Mastro, whose research focuses on Chinese military policy and Asia-Pacific security. She is Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), tells the story of China’s rise and it’s military modernization, as well as the challenge that presents to the U.S. She talked about China’s switch from emulation to entrepreneurship; her thoughts on relations with China under Trump; and why she thinks war over Taiwan is unlikely in the next four years.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

The American socialite Wallis Simpson is best known as the wife of former British king Edward VIII. When they announced their intention to marry, her status as a divorcée (and an American) caused a constitutional crisis that led to Edward's abdication in 1936. But long before that, Simpson's adventures had led her to spend a year in interwar China, from 1924-25, while fleeing her abusive first husband and allegedly transporting U.S. diplomatic documents. Later maligned by the British press for this "lotus year," the truth of Simpson's China sojourn reveals much about the chaotic state of the nation in the 1920s, and attitudes toward it — and foreigners living there — from outside.

Our guest on the podcast this month is Paul French, a British writer who lived in Shanghai in the 1990s and 2000s, where he ran a market research firm. He is the author of several books on modern Chinese history, including the bestselling Midnight in Peking (Viking, 2012) and City of Devils (Picador, 2018). His latest title, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St Martin’s Press, 2024), tells the full story of Simpson's China year, long before her tryst with King Edward VIII caused a scandal worthy of Harry and Megan. French talked to us about the political backdrop to this personal drama, what it shows about the status of foreigners in China, and the state of the “China book” in general.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

In this episode, we’re pleased to have had the opportunity to talk to Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean former diplomat who was Singapore’s representative to the UN in the 1980s and 1990s, and later Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore. Mahbubani is the author of ten books on Asia and the world, most recently Living the Asian Century (2024).

Though the book has a broad scope, we focused more generally on China in this conversation, given our remit. Mahbubani talked about the legacy of colonialism in Asia; how Singapore became a success story; China’s model of non-interference in the region; its peaceful intentions overseas and at home; and anti-China bias in the West — though we pushed back on all points in a lively discussion.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Our guest this month is renowned writer Peter Hessler, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of five books about China, most recently Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, published earlier this year by Penguin Press. In the book, Hessler details his most recent stint living in China, teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. Hessler talked to us about how the new generation of Chinese students differ from those he taught in the late 1990s; his experiences of Covid in 2020; the circumstances in which he left China in 2021; and the uncertain future of China writing.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

China’s edgy contemporary art exploded into global view over decades of China’s meteoric economic growth. Gone were the days of Mao Zedong insisting that art had to “serve the people", by which he meant, the Communist Party, with socialist realist propaganda. Freed from those contraints with Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, successive generations of contemporary artists in China worked through political trauma, explored Chinese identity, experimented with the styles of modern masters in other parts of the world, and found their own voices, in ways that drew global attention, and drove a hot art market in the early 2000s and 2010s. How did that all happen, and what’s happened to it now, under Xi Jinping’s reassertion of the idea that art – and journalism, and film, and pretty much everything – should serve the Party’s interests? In this episode, Barbara Pollack, an art critic, curator, and author who has focused on contemporary Chinese art since the late 1990s, shares her thinking and experience.

Barbara Pollack, author of The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China (2010) and Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (2018), is an award-winning writer, art critic, and curator, and a respected voice on contemporary Chinese art for a quarter century. As a curator, she created My Generation: Young Chinese Artists (Tampa Museum of Art and Orange County Museum of Art, 2014-2015); Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity (Asia Society Museum New York, 2022), and Multiply: Strength in Numbers (Modern Art Museum Shanghai, 2024). She is cofounder of Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit organization that provides platforms for artists and curators to respond to current events and social crises.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Beijing is many things to many people, sometimes all at once – a mecca for migrants and artists, a tech hub, a proving ground for young graduates, a capital of politics and power, a smoggy, traffic-choked dystopia, a charming collection of lakes, leafy parks, narrow lanes and courtyard houses, an enduring city with 800 years of history and lore, and millions of stories to tell.

Ten such stories are told in The Book of Beijing: A City in Short Fiction, an anthology in English translation by 10 Chinese writers, many of them award-winning, all of whom live in Beijing or have a close and enduring connection to it. The stories were all previously published in Chinese in China, including one in which a young woman wonders what her older boyfriend saw in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and another, in which a pre-teen boy – left alone after his older siblings are sent to the countryside – gets caught stealing, and fears the consequences. Other stories include speculative fiction from Gu Shi, who’s shortlisted for a 2024 Hugo Award for a different story, and a tale from Xu Zechen, translated by Paper Republic founder Eric Abrahamsen, about how a counterfeiter who sells fake IDs gets smitten with a fellow seller of fake IDs and toys with the idea of settling down into a normal life.

The book is part of the acclaimed "A City in Short Fiction" series by Comma Press in the UK, which has included The Book of Jakarta, The Book of Istanbul, and The Book of Gaza. The Book of Beijing brings a reader in to this complex city through intimate, textured, and at times jarring tales, of ordinary people navigating extraordinary times.

In this episode of the China Books podcast, The Book of Beijing ‘s editor, Bingbing Shi, shares her thoughts on Beijing, on how she brought the book together, and on the impact she hopes it will have on readers outside of China.

Bingbing Shi earned her PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, adaptation studies, memory studies, translation studies, and feminist writing. She has a BA and MA in Chinese literature from Beijing Normal University. Her fiction in Chinese has appeared in People’s Literature and Youth Literature.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Who are the winners and losers in U.S.-China trade over recent decades, and what's a better way forward? Laying out a compelling argument in this episode is Peter Goodman, a former correspondent in China, current global economics correspondent at The New York Times, and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. He takes the supply chain snarls at the peak of the COVID pandemic as a jumping-off point to explore how China became the world's top exporter and top trading partner of most countries, why "just in time" outsourcing to China long made irresistible sense to U.S. companies and investors but came with steep hidden costs to workers and a dangerously widening wealth gap, and how the answer is not a wholesale U.S. 'decoupling' from China's efficient supply chains, but making better choices at home to build resilience and restore faith among disillusioned Americans in the U.S. economy and democracy.

Peter Goodman, the global economics correspondent atThe New York Times, has also been the Times' London-based Europe economics correspondent, and U.S. national economics correspondent. He was earlier the Washington Post's China-based Asia economics correspondent (2001-06), and its telecommunications reporter. His other books are Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (2022) and Past Due: The End of Easy money and the Renewal of the American Economy (2009).

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.