Podcast appearances and mentions of alec ash

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 the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@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 hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@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 hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Tiananmen -- the place, the protests, the crackdown -- reverberates in memories and imaginations around the world, even 35 years after tanks rolled in Beijing's streets, and the Chinese military's crackdown on student demonstrators in the week hours of June 4, 1989, killed at least hundreds and wounded thousands of people. The protesters had been calling for political reforms, for a more open and less corrupt society, after decades of political upheaval under Mao Zedong's leadership. What they got instead from Deng Xiaoping was a brutal ‘no' to the call for political reform, but with a green light to instead focus on making money and growing China's economy. China's Communist Party leaders insist to this day that China's economic rise couldn't have happened without the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, and the hopes for political reform of many Chinese people. Still, the Party has tried to erase the Tiananmen crackdown from public memory in China, even as many Chinese remember the protests and all they stood for, with some dedicating their lives to working toward those same goals.  The guest for this episode, Xiao Qiang, is one such person. He talks about his life before, during, and after the protests, and recommends books for anyone interested in better understanding what the Tiananmen demonstrations and crackdown meant, and still mean, in China and beyond. Xiao Qiang is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website launched in 2003 to aggregate, organize, and recommend online information from and about China. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley, and director of the school's Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on the intersection of digital media, counter-censorship technology and cyber-activism.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Genocide is not a word thrown around lightly by the U.S. government, but it uses that term to describe the Chinese government's ongoing assaults on Uyghurs' distinct culture, identity, rights, and freedom in China's far western region of Xinjiang. China's government has long had an uneasy relationship with Uyghurs' distinct Turkic Muslim identity, and has tried in various ways over time to control them, reduce and dilute their population, and make them assimilate.But lately, it's gotten much worse. Within the past decade, about a million Uyghurs – almost one in 10 – were sent to reeducation camps. Under international pressure, the PRC says it closed the camps in 2019, because the "trainees" graduated. But it  transferred many of the Uyghurs in the camps to prison or forced labor, sending some to other provinces as part of a policy meant to reduce the concentration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.  Those still in Xinjiang are under constant high-tech surveillance, with some forced to let security personnel live in their homes, to better indoctrinate and surveil them.In the midst of all this, a few Uyghur women in exile have proven especially effective at speaking out on their people's plight, and advocating for international action . This episode is a conversation with two of them, about  their experiences growing up Uyghur in  China, going into exile in the United States, and becoming advocates for Uyghur rights.Gulchehra Hoja is the author of A Stone is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope and Survival, named by The New Yorker as a best book of 2023. An award-winning Uyghur American journalist who has worked with Radio Free Asia since 2001, she grew up in Urumqi, studied Uyghur language and literature and, working for state-run Xinjiang TV, created and hosted China's first Uyghur language children's television program for five years.  Jewher Ilham's two memoirs, Jewher Ilham: A Uyghur's Fight to Free Her Father (2015) and Because I Have To: The Path to Survival, The Uyghur Struggle (2022), tell the story of how a Uyghur teenager who grew up in Beijing as the daughter of prominent economics professor and Uyghur rights advocate Ilham Tohti, went into exile in the United States and became an effective advocate for her father's release from a life sentence in prison in China. She now also works with the Worker Rights Consortium in Washington, D.C. as forced labor project coordinator and spokesperson for the Coalition to End Uyghur Forced Labor.  The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

China has bet big over the past couple of decades on how building up its renewable energy sector -- solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and their batteries, and the metals and minerals that make them all possible -- will help China achieve a dominant global position in an essential field.  So far, with intensifying climate change making the need to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables ever more urgent, China is winning that bet.  China's efforts, with fierce competition within its private sector spurred by government incentives, have driven down the global cost of solar panels and electric vehicles, and have given China a near-monopoly globally on processing rare earths, and in mining and processing nickel, cobalt, magnesium and more.  This episode focuses on the story of how China achieved this lead in the green energy 'gold rush', and what the West is now doing to try to catch up, with guest Henry Sanderson, author of VoltRush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.  A former correspondent in China for the Associated Press and Bloomberg, a commodities reporter for The Financial Times and current executive editor for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence,  Sanderson reported on the ground for from lithium fields in Chile to cobalt mines in the Congo, on the environmental trade-offs of mining minerals for renewable energy, on promising alternatives, and on what the West and the rest of the world can learn from China's experience as an early leader in green energy.  Sanderson is also co-author, with The New York Times' Michael Forsythe, of China's Super Bank: Debt, Oil, and Influence -- How China Development Bank is Rewriting the Rules of Finance.  The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

In this episode, we welcome back to the podcast our good friend, Alec Ash, who has written a fascinating book recounting a year spent in the city of Dali, Yunan Province. Unlike Alec's previous book, Wish Lanterns, his new book, The Mountains are High, is a highly personal account of his attempt to find solace and healing after a pivotal emotional crisis and his decision to disentangle himself from his urban Beijing life and escape to a simpler life in mountainous Yunnan Province. But Alec's life in Dali was not completely hermitic. Quite the contrary, Alec found his new life interwoven with a peripatetic group of fellow escapees, a kaleidoscopic array of religious seekers, hippies, stoners, and disenchanted white-collar elites, all seeking solace or salvation through Buddhism, psychedelics, New Age mysticism, or just a simpler, more meaningful life. We discuss the process of writing the book, the challenge of living off the grid, the struggle to resist the distracting allure of the Internet, and the hard work of transforming oneself to achieve a sense of contentment and peace.  Previous episodes featuring Alec Ash:“China's New Youth” October 01, 2020 “Back to the Land: Author Alec Ash on escaping to Dali, rural retreats, and a return to England” October 30, 2022Alec's website information about The Mountains Are High

Acclaimed spy novelist Adam Brookes started out in China as a languge student in the mid-'80s, skipping class to travel in trucks and buses to Tibet and other parts of China that had just opened up after being shut off to foreign visitors for decades. He want back as a BBC China correspondent, informed by his earlier experiences in remote parts of China, and informing a huge global audience about China's transformation. He has since parlayed both of those early chapters in China into vivid and thought-provoking writing, both in his spy novel triology Night Heron, Spy Games, and The Spy's Daughter, and in his narrative non-fiction thriller Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City. In this episode, he talks about how, with each form of writing, he has tried to bring China to life for his audiences, and deepen understanding of a complex place and people, and China's impact on the world. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

The sizzle has come off of China's decades of economic growth, as the country contends with deflation, slumping consumer confidence, plummeting foreign investment, a cratered urban property sector, high local government debt, overcapacity in manufacturing, and a private sector cowed by government crackdowns, as well as a shrinking workforce and an aging population.For all that, China is still the world's second largest economy, the largest trading partner of most of the world's countries, and one of the world's biggest bilateral lenders. And China listed its economic growth rate in 2023 as a respectable 5.2 percent, causing more than one economist to raise a eyebrow.  How to make sense of all this, and get an idea of what China's options are to sustain a future path of comfortable economic growth?  Settle back, put your earbuds in, and listen as the two respected China-born economists in this episode lay out the challenges, choices, and possibilities that could shape China's future.Tao Wang, author of Making Sense of China's Economy  (2023) is chief China economist, managing director, and Head of Asia Economic Research at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong, and was formerly an economist at the International Monetary Fund.  Her research on China covers a wide range of topics including monetary policy, the debt problem, shadow banking, local government finance, US-China trade disputes, supply chain shifts, RMB internationalization, the property bubble, the demographic challenge, the urban-rural divide, and the long-term growth potential. Dr. Wang has been consistently ranked as one of the top China economists by institutional investors. She is an invited fellow of the China Finance (CF) 40 Forum and a member of the China Global Economic Governance 50 Forum. Yasheng Huang, author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008, now being updated), The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline (2023) , and nine other books in English and in Chinese, holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, and founded and runs MIT's China Lab, India Lab, and ASEAN Lab.  Dr. Huang is a 2023-24 visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. The National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States. He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and OECD.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

A funny thing happened at the height of China's economic boom, as more and more Chinese women were getting college degrees, good jobs, and promising careers. The government launched a propaganda campaign, urging women to get married young, before they became "yellowed pearls".  Leta Hong-Fincher captured that phenomenon in her book Leftover Women (2014). A decade later, with a new updated edition of Leftover Women just out, Leta joins the China Books podcast to talk about why China's Communist Party leaders are still so focused on micro-managing the personal lives of women. President Xi Jinping himself made an explicit appeal at China's National Women's Congress in November 2023, calling on China's women to stay home and have babies. The draconian one-child policy, enforced from 1979 to 2016, had led to a plummeting birthrate, a contracting workforce and an aging population. Now the government is urging women to marry early and have three children. But many of China's women -- about one in five now have college degrees -- seem none  too keen on giving up on dreams to have a career, and perhaps more independence than they would in a marriage. China's fertility rate continues to plummet, and is now about half the replacement rate. The number of marriage licenses granted per year in China has dropped for nine straight years, and is now half of what it was a decade ago.  Faced with inequality of opportunity and of protection under the law when it comes to marriage, property rights, and domestic abuse, women in China are engaged demographic revolution voting with their feet, with potentially profound implications for China's economic and political future.Leta Hong Fincher is the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2023, 10th Anniversary Edition) and Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (2018). She is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University's Department of Sociology in Beijing and is currently a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Dreams of a better future have driven many a revolution, but not all have turned out the way the dreamers imagined.   China's early revolutionaries, a century ago, aimed to rid the country of what they saw as corrupt capitalism and the world of colonialism and imperialism. Instead, they said, socialism would bring a future of peace, prosperity, equality, and social justice.  Not all of that worked out. One of the dreamers was Chen Hansheng, a prominent Western-educated  public intellectual who wrote, lectured, and taught in the United States while secretly working for the Soviet Comintern and Communist Party of China, who worked over time with Zhou Enlai and more briefly with Soviet spy Richard Sorge, and who was close friends Agnes Smedley, an American journalist who supported China's Communist revolution, and with Soong Ching-Ling, the widow of Sun Yat-Sen. Chen's comprehensive surveys of rural regions of China in the 1930s painted a vivid picture of the realities on the ground for China's farmers and villagers, who China's Communist revolution ended up helping in some ways and hurting in others, particularly in the preventable Great Famine of the late '50s and early '60s, when as many as 50 million people starved to death. Chen died in 2004 at age 107.  He lived through a century of epic change in China and in the world that brought some of what he wanted, but not in the way he expected, and a lot of disillusionment. In this  episode, Chen's biographer Stephen R. MacKinnon, lays it all out. Stephen R. MacKinnon is an emeritus professor of 20th Century Chinese history and former director of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University. He has lived and worked in the People's Republic of China, and has focused on China in his work since the early 1960s. He has written dozens of articles and edited volumes, and is the author of five books on China, including Chen Hansheng: China's Last Romantic Revolutionary (2023), Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (2008), and Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1987).  The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

China's rise is one of the great stories of the past century, and China correspondents have told that story in myriad ways -- as a story of transformation, of falling poverty rates and rising power, of new wealth and old political elites, of new opportunities and unintended consequences, of abuses of rights and of power, of surveillance and censorship.  Together, these different pieces formed a complex and sometimes contradictory picture -- shaping understandings, and sometimes misunderstandings -- about how China is changing, and is changing the world.   American correspondents have been a big part of this effort. In this episode, former CNN China correspondent Mike Chinoy talks his book and documentary film series Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic, about how the work of American China correspondents has changed over seven decades, about why China correspondents matter, and what we lose when fewer are in the field. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

China's epic transformation over the past four decades has seen cities expand, fortunes rise, and expectations change. It has left Chinese people to either ride the waves of change, or scramble -- perhaps struggle -- to keep up. In the midst of it all, Chinese fiction has reflected and riffed on life on the ground, with humor, satire, pathos, and good old-fashioned story-telling. At times in the Reform and Opening Up era, Chinese fiction has even driven a national conversation.This episode offers a conversation on all of this with two deeply knowledgeable guests: Jianying Zha is a contributor to The New Yorker, and the critically acclaimed author of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and  Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture (1996), Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (2011), and other books and writing, both fiction and non-fiction, in both English and Chinese. Jianying was born and raised in Beijing, where she studied Chinese literature before moving to the United States in the early 1980s to study English literature. She has, in most of the years since, split time between China and the United States.Perry Link is a deeply respected expert in Chinese language and literature,  Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University.  His books include Stubborn Weeds: Popular and Controversial Chinese Literature After the Cultural Revolution (Chinese Literature in Translation)  (1984), Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (1992), The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (2000),  An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (2013), and I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo (2023). The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Fresh ideas and thought-provoking conversations on fiction and non-fiction, about China and from China, with host Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for NPR and PRX's The World. The China Books podcast is a companion of the China Books Review (chinabooksreview.com), co-published by Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations (where Mary Kay is deputy director) and The Wire China. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, they added to the country's intellectual richness by introducing western philosophy and science; and on the other, these contributions often came accompanied by guns and gunboats. And today, out of a country of 1.4 billion, there are fewer than one million foreigners living there. So what is it like to try to make China one's home if you were British or anything else? On the episode, Cindy Yu speaks to two long time China hands. Mark Kitto is a writer and actor who lived in China for 16 years, setting up two businesses in succession there but now back living in Norfolk. Alec Ash is the author of Wish Lanterns, all about Chinese millennials. He moved to China around the time that Mark left, and has just moved back to the UK after a decade there. She speaks to them about what it is like to be foreign in China given the country's complicated history with Brits and other foreigners; and whether the Chinese identity itself is particularly hard to penetrate as a foreigner.

Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, they added to the country's intellectual richness by introducing western philosophy and science; and on the other, these contributions often came accompanied by guns and gunboats. And today, out of a country of 1.4 billion, there are fewer than one million foreigners living there. So what is it like to try to make China one's home if you were British or anything else? On the episode, I speak to two long time China hands. Mark Kitto is a writer and actor who lived in China for 16 years, setting up two businesses in succession there but now back living in Norfolk. Alec Ash is the author of Wish Lanterns, all about Chinese millennials. He moved to China around the time that Mark left, and has just moved back to the UK after a decade there. I want to find out from them what it is like to be foreign in China given the country's complicated history with Brits and other foreigners; and whether the Chinese identity itself is particularly hard to penetrate as a foreigner.

In this week's episode, we catch up with our old friend Alec Ash, writer, journalist, and author of the Wish Lanterns, a portrait of six diverse members of China's “post-80s” generation. Having resided in Beijing since 2008, Alec migrated to the mountain valley of Dali in Yunnan province in 2019, where he encountered other like-minded Chinese and ex-pats who had fled the big cities for the relative tranquility of the Chinese countryside. His experiences in Yunnan became his latest book project, which depicts the aspirations and lifestyles of this diverse group of migrants. The podcast conversation covers the results of the recent 20th Party Congress, the evolution of Beijing under Xi Jinping, and China's ongoing Covid-19 policy (what else?). 

On Today's podcast, we have one of the best writers on contemporary Chinese youth, Alec Ash. Alec wrote an excellent book on Chinese young adults called Wish Lanterns. It was renamed China's New Youth for the American book market. Alec joins us today on the podcast to talk about one of Lu Xun's shortest stories. We debate how close Lu Xun is to the narrator of the story and what it says about the China of the early 20th and early 21st Century. 

Confident, vocal, and performative, China's patriotic fervor has grown up a lot over the past decade. And with self-interest coexisting with sentiment, it will be dismissed or underestimated at our peril.Read the article by Alec Ash: https://www.thewirechina.com/2021/08/08/chinas-new-nationalism/ Narrated by Kaiser Kuo.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Seeking enlightenment and energy drinks in Shangri-la.Read the article by Alec Ash: https://chinachannel.org/2021/03/15/shangri-la/Narrated by Kaiser Kuo.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Stephanie Studer, China correspondent for The Economist, who recently published a special report in the magazine about China’s “Post-90s” generation; and with Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns, which looks at a cohort of Chinese youth born between 1985 and 1990. The two explore the apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism and socially progressive attitudes of young Chinese today and, on the other, their increasingly assertive national identity. 9:15: Social liberalism and nationalism10:55: Less impressed by the west27:38: China’s millennials and their western counterparts38:06: A progressive generation and regressive regime 43:12: How state actors affect post-90’s discourseRead more about China’s new youth here on SupChina, by Alec Ash. Recommendations:Stephanie: Frank Dorn’s jigsaw map of 1936 Beijing, available on the Beijing Postcards website.Alec: He recommends traveling to Dali, Yunnan, as well as trying the provincial cuisine. Kaiser: The column Beijing Lights, published on the Spittoon Collective website.

'The robot's ability to learn was unparalleled, and with the help of its creators it analysed its databank of stories to create a set of scientific laws for storytelling – a model that would later become world-famous. But the mathematical nature of this model was so overwhelmingly complex that only the robot could make head or tail of it.' this is episode 3 of 7 in our Chinese Science Fiction Season In the nineteenth episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, we are looking at Fei Dao's The Storytelling Robot (讲故事的机器人/jiǎng gùshì de jīqìrén), translated by Alec Ash.   This is a thoughtful tale told by a writer with a melacholic, existential tendency. My favourite! Helping me out here is Matt of the Spectology Podcast. A very chill fellow who really knows a lot about Chinese SF. This story may also be read online in the original Chinese   // Discussed in this Episode // An End of Days Story by Fei Dao The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales by Fei Dao Fei Dao interview referenced by Matt (in Chinese) Chinese Mythology Podcast   // Handy TrChFic Links // Buy Me a Coffee Bonus Shows on Patreon  The TrChFic Map INSTAGRAM // TWITTER // DISCORD // MY SITE

Few generations in the world face a reality as dramatically different from all that have come before, as China's one-child generation. Since the one-child policy started in the early '80s, China has gone from aspiring developing country to powerful global player. It has shifted from being majority rural to majority urban, with per capita annual GDP rising from $300 to over $8,000 now. Young Chinese are more connected with the world than previous generations, thanks to the internet, smartphones, films, television and travel and study abroad, with some 330,000 studying in the United States alone. What does all this mean for the kind of power China might become in this century? Host Mary Kay Magistad talks with Alec Ash, long-time Beijing resident and author of "Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China," in this final episode as a coproduction with PRI's The World (but not the last of the podcast — details in the episode).

Alec Ash is a young British writer who lives in Beijing, who has covered “left behind” children in Chinese villages, the “toughest high school exam in the world” and internet live streaming among many other subjects. He is the author of Wish Lanterns, which the Financial Times called a “closely observed study of China’s millennials.” The book tells the stories of six Chinese people born between 1985 and 1990. The characters have very different backgrounds and aspirations, including a rock musician named Lucifer, an internet addict named Snail, and a patriotic Party official’s daughter.   In this episode of the Sinica Podcast, Alec discusses his book with Kaiser, Jeremy, and David Moser. He talks about contemporary youth culture in China, the concerns of Chinese millennials, how he met the six characters in the book and what we can understand about China’s changing culture from their stories. Recommendations: Jeremy: Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported, by John Simpson. David: The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Alec: The Barbarians at the Gate podcast. Kaiser: Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson — ”the best single-volume history of the American Civil War that I know of” — and Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping, by Stephen R. Platt.  

There are over 320 million people in China aged between 15 and 30. This generation is often derided by their elders as well as the media. Depending on who you ask they’re shallow and materialistic, apathetic or overly patriotic. Beijing based journalist Alec Ash thought this stereotype might be missing the full picture, so he set out to do some research. Over four years, he followed the lives of 6 millennials growing up and pursuing their aspirations in new China. His debut book ‘Wish Lanterns’ chronicles their experience. It was released last month in the UK to widespread acclaim, winning an interview in the New York Times and glowing endorsements by veteran China writers. I met up with Alec last weekend at the Shanghai launch of his book, and interviewed him for half an hour. Here’s the edited recording where Alec discusses his book, and the challenges and rewards faced by foreigners who write about China. http://intrepidtimes.com/2016/07/wish-lanterns-interview-china-writer-alec-ash/

Joining Jeremiah in this episode is Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China to look at three of youth movements from the 20th century: The May Fourth/New Culture Era, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1980s.

Joining Jeremiah in this episode is Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China to look at three of youth movements from the 20th century: The May Fourth/New Culture Era, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1980s. The post Barbarians at the Gate Podcast: Are the Kids Alright? appeared first on Jottings from the Granite Studio.

This week, Kaiser sits in the guest chair and tells us about his 20-plus years of living in China. He recounts being the front man for the heavy metal band Tang Dynasty and the group's tour stops in China's backwater towns, shares his feelings on moving back to the United States with his family, and discusses the future of the Sinica Podcast. The conversation with Jeremy, Ada Shen and David Moser is one of many 'exit interview' episodes with journalists who are departing China after a long stay. It took place in June 2016, shortly after Kaiser's reentry to the U.S. Recommendations: Kaiser: The films of Sam Dunn about heavy metal. Ada: The End of a Golden Age in China-Taiwan Relations? by Shelley Rigger. When We Were Kings, a documentary about Muhammad Ali. Ralph Stanley, bluegrass musician. David: Wish Lanterns by Alec Ash. Jeremy: Overcast app for podcast listening on iPhones.

When Ernest Hemingway somewhat presciently referred to Paris as a "moveable feast" ("wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you"), he captured the feelings of many long-term China expats rather concisely. So why exactly does everyone like to compare life here to Paris in the 1920s? And if life is so romantic here, where are the writers in our midst and what are they producing? This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are delighted to host the editors of While We're Here: China Stories from a Writers' Colony, a compilation of short stories, poems and more, lovingly assembled by Alec Ash and Tom Pellman of The Anthill. Join us to listen to some selections as well as unapologetic gossip about the writers in question. If you want to pick up the book, you can find it for your Kindle here on Amazon or drop by The Bookworm in Beijing for a physical copy. Recommendations: The Anthill http://theanthill.org/ While We Were Here: China Stories from a Writers’ Colony, Edited by Alec Ash and Tom Pellman http://www.amazon.com/While-Were-Here-Stories-Writers-ebook/dp/B019136EXI/ Unsavory Elements http://www.amazon.com/Unsavory-Elements-Stories-Foreigners-Loose/dp/9881616409 How to Dress to Buy Dragonfruit http://www.amazon.com/How-Does-One-Dress-Dragonfruit-ebook/dp/B00K21ZXF4 Alec Ash on "Shanghai Cocktales" http://beijingcream.com/2015/05/shanghai-cocktales-and-the-curse-of-the-expat-memoir/ Incarnations http://www.amazon.com/The-Incarnations-Novel-Susan-Barker/dp/1501106783 Rock Paper Tiger http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Tiger-Ellie-McEnroe-Novel/dp/161695258X/ Up to The Mountains and Down to the Countryside, by Quincy Carol http://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Down-Countryside-Quincy-Carroll/dp/1941758452 Radio Lab Episode on CRISPER http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/ Alec Ash The Search for a Vanishing Beijing, by M. A. Aldrich http://www.amazon.com/The-Search-Vanishing-Beijing-Capital/dp/9622099394 Voice Map – Walking Guided Tours – Check out the tours of Beijing, by David French and Alex Ash https://voicemap.me/ Tom Pellman Dispatches from Pluto, by Richard Grant http://www.amazon.com/Dispatches-Pluto-Found-Mississippi-Delta-ebook/dp/B00UDCNM82 David Moser 逻辑思维 Logical Thinking – Video Series on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/logictalkshow Kaiser Kuo China’s Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals, by Christina Larson http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-bold-push-into-genetically-customized-animals-1.18826

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be. These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters hints at China's great diversity. Chinese Characters is a collection of portraits by some of the top people working on China today. Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent for a major Indian newspaper, and scholars. Their depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion. This volume contains some of the best writing on China today. Contributors include: Alec Ash, James Carter, Leslie T. Chang, Xujun Eberlein, Harriet Evans, Anna Greenspan, Peter Hessler, Ian Johnson, Ananth Krishnan, Christina Larson, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, James Millward, Evan Osnos, Jeffrey Prescott, Megan Shank, with cover photos by Howard French. -- Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist and editor in Los Angeles. She has reported from across Asia, including China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, and was a South Asian Journalists Association Reporting Fellow in 2007-8. She is a former editor of the online magazine AsiaMedia and a consulting editor to the Journal of Asian Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones Online, Pacific Standard, the LA Weekly, TimeOut Singapore, and Global Voices. She is the co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (UC Press, 2012). Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of four books on China and the editor or co-editor of several more, including most recently Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, which contains chapters by both fellow academics and such acclaimed journalists as Peter Hessler, Leslie T. Chang, Evan Osnos, and Ian Johnson. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He is also the Asia editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an Associate Fellow of the Asia Society, and a co-founder of the "China Beat" blog. James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the author of a history of Harbin and of Heart of China, Heart of Buddha: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk (Oxford 2010), and is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China. He is a past president of the Historical Society for 20th-Century China and a Public Intellectuals Program fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.

An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be. These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters hints at China's great diversity. Chinese Characters is a collection of portraits by some of the top people working on China today. Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent for a major Indian newspaper, and scholars. Their depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion. This volume contains some of the best writing on China today. Contributors include: Alec Ash, James Carter, Leslie T. Chang, Xujun Eberlein, Harriet Evans, Anna Greenspan, Peter Hessler, Ian Johnson, Ananth Krishnan, Christina Larson, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, James Millward, Evan Osnos, Jeffrey Prescott, Megan Shank, with cover photos by Howard French. -- Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist and editor in Los Angeles. She has reported from across Asia, including China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, and was a South Asian Journalists Association Reporting Fellow in 2007-8. She is a former editor of the online magazine AsiaMedia and a consulting editor to the Journal of Asian Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Mother Jones Online, Pacific Standard, the LA Weekly, TimeOut Singapore, and Global Voices. She is the co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (UC Press, 2012). Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of four books on China and the editor or co-editor of several more, including most recently Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, which contains chapters by both fellow academics and such acclaimed journalists as Peter Hessler, Leslie T. Chang, Evan Osnos, and Ian Johnson. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He is also the Asia editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an Associate Fellow of the Asia Society, and a co-founder of the "China Beat" blog. James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the author of a history of Harbin and of Heart of China, Heart of Buddha: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk (Oxford 2010), and is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China. He is a past president of the Historical Society for 20th-Century China and a Public Intellectuals Program fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.