How is it that a Communist Party organized along Leninist lines remains in charge in Beijing so long after its counterparts in cities such as Budapest and Bucharest were toppled? Why hasn't there been a sequel to the Tiananmen Uprising, ending this time not in a massacre like that of...

Needless to say, the Shanghai-Disney story, which has just taken a dramatic turn, is one that I've been following with great interest. How could I not, when the University of California-Irvine, where I teach, is closer to the original Disney theme park than any other major research university?...

Back in October 2007, with the Olympics still almost a year off in the future, I devised a twelve-step reading plan for Outlook India, the goal of which was to help interested observers (and maybe even journalists who would be covering the event) get ready to make sense of...

Many things have happened in the PRC this year that echo phenomena discussed in China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, a book I co-edited with Kate Merkel-Hess and Kenneth L. Pomeranz (both of whom, like me, are historians based at UC Irvine who sometimes write for the...

The overall California state budget crisis has received a lot of play in the media, some of which has focused on the UC system. And yet, at least from this faculty member's point of view, some key factors of that story-within-the-story have been consistently underplayed or overlooked. My goal here...

I've already had my chance, via both print and online pieces, to offer my thoughts about the protests that erupted in scores of Chinese cities twenty years ago, the June 4th Massacre that crushed that upheaval, and how China has changed in the last twenty years. Meanwhile, though...

Predictions relating to China are notoriously error-prone--just think of all the times when the imminent demise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been announced and then failed to materialize--but here's a safe one. Five months from this Sunday, when Chinese officials mark the first anniversary of 08/08/08...

This is the second year in a row that China-related stories about boycotts (or dizhi, to use the Chinese term) have been making headlines, only some of them the standard economic sort, which involves refusing to buy certain kinds of products. Last February, for example, one kind of dizhi debate...

No, there hasn't been any indication that the new President will be heading to China anytime soon, though it does seem likely that Hilary Clinton will make it there during her first trip abroad as Secretary of State. And I do realize that the new President's got plenty to...

Due to the Beijing Olympics and a string of unexpected headline-grabbing events, from the Tibet riots and Sichuan earthquake to the melamine milk scandal, this year has seen China garner an extraordinary amount of attention in the Western media. There has been a clear contrast even with 2007, when China...

Americans associate bottom-up challenges to Deng Xiaoping with images of the massive 1989 protests. But those demonstrations were not the first acts of dissent Deng had to deal with by any means once assuming the reins of power in China. More than a decade before the June 4th Massacre,...

I told readers of the "China Beat" (the place I blog most) that my next few posts would all deal with my recent trip to Beijing and Shanghai, but news about the long-awaited Guns N' Roses release, "Chinese Democracy," stirring up controversy in the PRC is something that I...

When the media spotlight shifted instantaneously from Beijing to Denver last week, it was easy to focus on things that the Olympics and the Democratic Convention had in common as spectacles, especially since each ended with a big party in a stadium where rock music played and fireworks exploded....

China and America, according to much U.S. Olympic commentary, currently offer a study in contrasts. Not surprisingly, we've been hearing repeated references of late to the stark differences between our young land and their old one when it comes to religious freedom and press censorship. And we've seen some novel...

Last October, with the start of the Games still ten months off, I wrote a piece for Outlook India that spelled out a "twelve-step" reading regimen for anyone planning to go to Beijing this August. My argument was that just as athletes take steps to get in shape, so...