‘The Rough Guide to the Music of Yunnan’ Explores Modern Borderland Folk
The Rough Guide to the Music of Yunnan is yet another admirable volume of the venerable Rough Guides series with its embrace of many forms of diversity and very catchy tunes.
china
‘Mien’ Showcases Powerful Cascades of Canon Singing From Southeast Asia
Sublime Frequencies’ Mien Yao may be a work of preservation and posterity, education, or meditation. Its careful production allows for all of these things.
How the Cultural Revolution Turned China Against Itself
Yang Jisheng's remarkable historical autopsy, The World Turned Upside Down, is scrupulous in detailing the Cultural Revolution's horrors and insanities but too often leaves out the human side of history.
Rock ‘n’ Roll with Chinese Characteristics: Nirvana Behind the Great Wall
Like pretty much everywhere else in the pop music universe, China's developing rock scene changed after Nirvana. It's just that China's rockers didn't get the memo in 1991, nor would've known what to do with it, then.
‘One Child Nation’ Illuminates One Horror, Reveals Another
Starting as a personal look at the damages wrought by decades of China's one-child policy, One Child Nation exposes a deeper, baser level of national corruption.
Poetry and Economics in ‘Everything is Broken Up and Dances’
A passionate first-hand account from two Italian writers depicts the ravages of neoliberal capitalism in poignant, poetic prose.
‘Empire of Glass’ Reflects on Outsider Status
Solomine chooses not to delve too deeply into Chinese complexity, even as naturally she strives to express the foreignness of the encounter she has had in fact and fiction.
Dancing the Tango Through Mao’s Cultural Revolution With Argentinian Pancho and His Orchestra
On Shanghai dance halls of the late '30s and a vinyl tango artifact that survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Life in the Interzone in Old Shanghai
The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai and Flowers of Shanghai capture a William S. Borroughs-like Interzone in Old Shanghai.
‘Tharlo’ Is a Slow-moving Allegory About Innocence lost
Pema Tseden's Tharlo presents an allegory of Tibet and China in the guise of a film noir story set in Thailand
Bingham Prize Winner Jack Livings on Imagining China
Award-winning fiction writer Jack Livings discusses his new book, The Dog, and the importance of writing with moral purpose.
Ai Weiwei on Truth, Beauty and Futility
According to What?, a retrospective of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.