Inequality has been one of China’s central problems, writes author and journalist Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. There is no shortage of efforts to fix it, she argues, and while China has dealt with poverty successfully, getting to common prosperity, as it is called, seems much harder to achieve.Read More →

Book reviews of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by China veteran and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson start to come in, rightfully, like this overview in Public Discourse by Robert Carle. “In Sparks, Ian Johnson tells the stories of people such as Lin Zhao and Hu Jie—Chinese journalists and filmmakers who explore the darkest episodes of Chinese communism, often at great risk to themselves.”Read More →

China’s aging population is leaving the labor force while dropping consumer confidence discourages youngsters from marrying or having children. Business analyst Shaun Rein tells Reuters the country is heading for a demographic disaster, and raising the pension age is one inevitable measure the government should take.Read More →

In an in-depth account of his book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, author Ian Johnson explains how China’s rulers have been changing the country’s history to solidify their position. He quotes extensively the current generation of so-called underground historians, who use new technologies to reinstate their views on their history, for a talk at USC China Institute.Read More →

Author Ian Johnson recently published Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, and discusses the dominance of women as underground historians with Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. Women are relative outsiders in China’s power structures which puts them in a good position to document the country’s history, he says.Read More →

China journalist, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson discusses his time as a foreign correspondent in China since 1994. He was expelled in 2020 but returned to finish his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, in 2023. At the Asia Society for the China Books Review Launch, he is interviewed by his former colleague Dave Barboza.Read More →