The last year has seen a dramatic uptick in press coverage of Chinese environmental issues. There have also been a number of books published on the subject, with more due out soon. So this seemed a good moment to get in touch with my friend Ralph Litzinger, an...

At the start of visits to China, I'm often awake in hotel rooms very early in the morning due to jet lag. With hours to kill until the street stalls selling steamed buns open, I flip through news channels comparing the way the stories of the day are treated on...

In mid-August, the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting feature in which a nicely diverse set of authors provided summer reading suggestions for the two main presidential candidates. The respondents flagged a lot of good books, some timeless and some timely, but one thing was missing: a book...

I recently caught up by email with Ian Johnson, an old friend and sometimes co-author, and asked him some of the sorts of questions I thought he might get when he is part of an upcoming Asia Society panel on contemporary China. Here are his responses:

All Eyes East: Lessons from the Front Line of Marketing to China's Youth, a new book by Mary Bergstrom, a Shanghai-based tracker of Chinese trends, has been getting a lot of positive attention lately. Dan Harris of the highly regarded China Law Blog describes...

Publisher's Weekly recently praised Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Frontlines of China's Great Urban Migration, the just-published first book by talented freelance writer Michelle Dammon Loyalka, for offering a "thorough and insightful examination of the gritty, arduous side of the Chinese economic miracle." I was fortunate enough to...

Next month, I'll be going to Toronto to take part in the Annual Meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, the organization whose flagship journal I edit. I'll be doing various things at this conference, all of which are likely to be interesting and many of...

Every society sees and treats its poorest members differently. The distinctive way that Victorian Britain dealt with poverty is a central theme in many novels by Charles Dickens, the prolific author whose books are getting even more attention as the bicentennial of his birth is being marked. For those more...

When I walked into an airport bookstore earlier this week, en route to Seattle to give a talk about the famous "Tank Man" photograph that has come to symbolize the Chinese events of 1989, one magazine cover immediately caught my attention, that of the most recent...

It was hardly a surprise when Time magazine announced in mid-December that "The Protester" was its 2011 Person of the Year. After all, outbursts of discontent had made headlines during each of the preceding months. Nor did stories of dramatic protest end when Time made its choice, for just as...

'Tis the season for best books lists, which -- to invoke a Chinese saying -- sprout up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Just in case somebody asked, I was prepared to offer my own: 2011's best books on recent Chinese political and cultural developments. No one asked. And...

One of China's most prolific, interesting, and hard to pigeon-hole authors, Yu Hua, is on a book tour in the U.S., promoting his latest work (the English language edition comes out next week), a collection of essays titled China in Ten Words. Best known for his novels, such as To...

I used to single out 1983 as the year of my best summer job. I was mid-way through a master's program in East Asian studies at Harvard that summer, when I saw that a junior faculty member in the Sociology Department had work study money to hire someone to help...

Tom Scocca's engaging new book, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future, which explores his experiences in China during its pre-Olympic and Olympic moments, has been getting enthusiastic reviews, including one by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post and one that yours truly...

I joined UCI's History Department five years ago, and one of the many ways my move West proved beneficial was that I got to start having extended face-to-face conversations with Ken Pomeranz, one of the world's leading specialists in my own field, Chinese history, and a longtime Irvine faculty member....

Henry Kissinger and Robert Bickers don't have much in common. One is a U.S.-based octogenarian; the other a U.K.-based scholar roughly half as old. Only one, Kissinger, has been characterized by Christopher Hitchens (among others) as a perpetrator of war crimes. And only one, ironically Kissinger again, has...

The good people at the excellent Browser.com website recently asked me to contribute a list of Chinese life stories (biographies and memoirs) to their "Five Books" feature. I was delighted to be able to do this, but quickly found it a challenge to...

A variety of events, from the Copenhagen environmental issues summit in 2009 to the controversy sparked by the Empty Chair in Oslo last year, have led to news stories in the American press that involve both China and a Scandinavian country. This led me to wonder what, if anything, was...

In this fast-changing, increasingly interconnected world, it's difficult to stay an informed global citizen. To remain on top of things, you need a strategy for swiftly getting up to speed whenever parts of the world you previously knew little about begin making headlines, as Haiti did last year and countries...

Except in the Windy City itself, where Hu Jintao heads today and will spend tomorrow, the reporting and speculative commentary on the Chinese leader's second visit to the United States has tended to focus on its just-concluding Washington leg. To me, though, the stop in Chicago seemed from the start...