Miscellany

Our Top Ten Most Read Essays

China Channel

The China Channel is entering its second year with a reminder of our top posts

The Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel launched a little under a year ago, on September 25th 2017 – the anniversary of the birth of Lu Xun, whose iconoclasm and cultural interests we celebrated and identified with. Since then, we have published 215 posts, with praise from various quarters and top monthly readers in the tens of thousands. We’re taking September and the beginning of the new school year as our premature anniversary, to announce that we have continued funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional support from the US-China Long Institute at UC Irvine, for another year of operations.

Thank you for reading us, and below are the top ten most read essays on the China Channel from the last year. We look forward to the year ahead, and have some wonderful reviews, essays and more lined up, after a week's break to mark the end of summer.

Listicles

20 Best China Books

China Channel

Essential reading for your China library, in four categories

Third and last in our mini-series of summer listicles, after 12 must-read Chinese fiction books, and 12 must-watch Chinese films, comes this master list: 20 of the best general books about or from China. We are selective, of course, and these recommendations are far from comprehensive. We’ve also split it into four lists of five: books on contemporary China, books on Chinese history, books from Chinese voices, and Chinese classics.

We hope this is useful as an open sesame for new China watchers, or to encourage old hands to plug holes in their bookshelf. The lists are designed as all you need to pack your bag or Kindle with to grasp that aspect or perspective of China, without being overwhelming. Naturally, we have missed out a plethora of wonderful books. But, we hope, this is only the beginning of your reading.

Staff Picks

Back-to-School Staff Picks

China Channel

Another round of recommendations from the China Channel

After our previous fall and winter staff picks, we bring you a summer selection of reading, watching and listening from our extended masthead, in time for the new academic year. From a book about unfairly forgotten China hands, to contemporary Chinese music and a documentary about Buddhist mountain hermits, we hope it inspires you to widen your cultural horizon. – The Editors

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher

China in the middle of the 20th century attracted a large number of extraordinary Western writers.

Reviews

Living Without Fear

Joy Deng

Joy Deng reviews Qiu Miaojin’s coming-of-age novel Notes of a Crocodile

Largely unknown in the US, Qiu Miaojin is one of the most famous lesbian writers in Taiwan. Told from the perspective of a young woman crossing what she calls “the comma that punctuated being twenty-two,” the story begins a few years earlier. It is October 1987, three months after almost four decades of martial law have just ended in Taiwan. Nicknamed ‘Lazi,’ the autofictional narrator enters college, where she falls in love with a classmate named Shui Ling: “She and some friends…walked past me, and I managed to glance at her… it was as if my whole life had flashed before my eyes.”

Dispatches

Shower Business

Robert Foyle Hunwick

Last days of a Beijing bathhouse – Robert Foyle Hunwick

Hong Sheng, qigong master, can perform nude splits on a bridge of cracked tiles in a sauna the temperature of Mount Doom like a man half his age. That’s how some guys like to roll in China: the backslapping, the baijiu toasting, the bonobo displays of power. Beijing’s last old-style bathhouse isn’t the kind of place to worry about stray hairs, clean towels or a brace of someone else’s overripe cherries.

Just over a century old, the Shuangxingtang bathhouses in the far south Beijing suburb of Fengtai is one of the capital’s toughest buildings. So far it has survived a republic, various warlords, a full-scale occupation and a bitter civil war, followed by everything the Communist Party could throw at it. It’s fitting that property developers are most likely to finish this place off. A shame – there aren’t many hideaways where one can escape from decorum so cheaply. Napping, grumbling, smoking and masculine displays are all being pushed out to the suburbs.