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Reviews

“The Secret Sexual Life of Zhou Enlai and the Limits of Historical Knowledge,” LA Review of Books China Blog

February 22, 2016

Retroactively outing a historical figure remains problematic, not because of the sex — Zhou Enlai may well have had erotic relations with other men — but because such studies are often methodologically flawed. Too often, contemporary understandings of romance and sexuality, gay or straight, are read into texts from another time period. But doing so can prejudice the data and lead to shaky conclusions. It is an error of perception when we use present-day standards to judge or categorize evidence of past behavior. [Read More...]

“Out of Autocracy, Off the Shelves”

January 7, 2016

It is an unfortunate axiom of publishing in China that the best way for your book to gain international attention is to have the Chinese government make it unavailable to domestic readers. Such is the fate of Out of Imperial Autocracy (Zouchu dizhi), the latest book by the eminent public intellectual and economic historian Qin Hui, published earlier this year. [Read More...]

Wealth and Power at Capital M

March 22, 2014

Historian John Delury gave an excellent talk at Capital M today about wealth and power as defining recent Chinese history, but how to fit a search for modernity into that equation? [Read More...]