We're pleased to announce a shortlist of five books for the Baifang Schell Book Prize: Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China or the Sinophone World – selected by an independent jury. Books by Michelle King, Thomas Mullaney, Minxin Pei, Edward Wong and Yuan Yang. Read

Our jury of five judges read over 50 books to come up with these five. It’s a great list, and one of them will win a $10k award. Follow China Books Review to find out which one next month

Thread: see the shortlisted books for the $10k Baifang Schell Book Prize: Award for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language. Winner and honorable mentions announced in May! Follow our newsletter for updates buff.ly/zFeSMII

"The Chinese typewriter as an exotic impossibility is but one cultural manifestation of the long, charged debate over the relationship between modernity and the Chinese script." chinabooksreview.com/2025/04/17/chi…

Those in DC, come listen to me talk at JF Books (and check out their impressive calendar of other speakers) 在DC的朋友们来听听

"At least 44.1 million users managed to break through China’s Great Firewall weekly to read and listen to RFA .. Yet today, as part of President Trump’s administrative cuts, RFA stands on the brink of extinction." nytimes.com/2025/05/02/opi…

Congrats to the winners! We were honored to see this prize through the gate, and the juries spend a lot of time reading and considering. Nominations for next year’s awards begin in Nov..

For those in DC, come next Friday to JF Books to hear me talk about my Dali book (and upcoming Chinese edition of it) with Emily Feng

#JFSALON #RSVP The Mountains Are High: A Year of Escape and Discovery in Rural China Speaker: Alec Ash Alec Ash Moderator: Emily Feng Emily Feng 冯哲芸 5/30 Fri, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm, English The Mountains Are High is a vivid memoir of a year in Dali's diverse mountain village,

"Human frailty is one of Han Song's themes his writing explores as he faces his own health struggles" nytimes.com/2025/05/27/wor…

Our first print edition of China Books Review has landed, hot off the press! With a selection of our best articles and illustrations from the past year. Come to our events or email to get your copy..

"In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren’t all that different from us: See, they play football too! ... But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

This is my first (of many, I hope) contribution to the wonderful China Books Review Asia Society a pleasure indeed being edited by Alec Ash

Thanks Alec Ash for your perceptive questions. Latest interview on “Strangers in the Land” is with China Books Review. Worth a listen! chinabooksreview.com/2025/07/01/ep-…

“You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.” great piece by Chris Beam nytimes.com/2025/07/06/bus…

"The tragedy is not that America “won and lost” China, nor that engagement died of naïveté; it is that a scholar of genuine insight chose to package retrospective self-justification as prophecy." ctexp.substack.com/p/turning-agai…

This was a filthily fun archive pick by Paul French for us: chinabooksreview.com/2025/07/22/arc…

This was a real question in the New York state pre-licensing course quiz to get a driver's license. There was no other information on the page. I'm stuck in the twilight zone.

"American reading appetites, when it comes to China, skew towards conspiracy theories and analyses of Cold War redux." Great piece by Alexander Boyd chinabooksreview.com/2025/08/19/ncb…

Despite the difficulty of translating Chinese cuisine for Western readers, Chinese cookbooks continue to sell. But just as their form has changed over the decades, so too has their mission. Read Jen Lin-Liu's essay on the trouble with Chinese cookbooks: chinabooksreview.com/2025/08/21/chi…