Unlike the remembrance of the former colonial forces in Africa, China’s current geopolitical adventures into the continent “Africans’ view of China “is still positive, but not as exuberant as it was”. says Howard French, author of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa to Today Online.Read More →

A relative slow growth, a rapidly aging population in an unprecedented demographic transition, and no serious social safety net. Author Howard French of Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power calls at the Asia Society the next 10, 15 years the most dangerous for China.Read More →

Shocking footage of a traffic accident, where nobody came to the rescue of the female victim, triggered off a national debate on the state of morality in China. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao looks at the different viewpoints of the debate, for the New York Times.Read More →

Western analysts often miss the point, when they look at the way China conducts business, says China watcher Andrew Batson at his weblog, and he points at an interesting aside in Ian Johnson’s book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao , when he writes about soft openings in China. Case in point: comments on China’s One-Belt, One-Road initiative. Batson: ” It’s already clear it’s the China book of the year.”Read More →

The Times Literary Supplement reports on an evening with author Zhang Lijia of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China recently in London. One of the subjects: how did Chinese women fare under the market economy, introduce by Deng Xiaoping. About the government as a big boys’ club.Read More →

President Trump’s rather simplistic views on foreign affairs have waken up many observers. Trump’s approach to push China on North-Korea might be just an example where easy solutions do not work, tells political analyst Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® at the South China Morning Post.Read More →

Often reviewers tend to look at the emergence of world religions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, when they summarize Ian Johnson’s book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. But the most moving chapter is that on the 80 pilgrim associations from Beijing, writes professor Richard Madsen in the Washington Post.Read More →

Explaining China’s position on a global stage, that is the underlying purpose of Howard French’s book Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power. As an emerging world power, we need to understand China, in a similar way we now understand the US, Britain, Russia and other current and past global powers, he explains to the South China Morning Post. “Tianxia” is the key concept to understand.Read More →

Prostitution is a mirror of society, tells Beijing-based author Zhang Lijia at the BBC. Her book Lotus: A Novel shows some of China’s most urgent problems related to prostitution: migration, the gap between men and women and moral decline.Read More →

Journalist Ian Johnson documented in this book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao how an estimated 350 million Chinese citizens found solace in religion, despite a ambiguous governments. In TimesOut Shanghai he tells how he feels that movement will develop in the future.Read More →

Sarah Mellors reviews for the LA Review of Books Zhang Lijia’s Lotus: A Novel. The novel is a telling story of how China’s society works, she says, and both main characters Lotus and Bing illustrate many issues: rural-urban divide, economic development without political liberalization, the post-Mao moral vacuum and money worshiping, and the tension between so-called traditional Chinese values and modern concerns.Read More →