Everything You Wanted to Know About China (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Bui Jones: 2026
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The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
Yi-Ling Liu
Knopf: 2026
.
The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism
Minxin Pei
Princeton University Press: 2025
.
Nothing in Lü Pin’s upbringing suggested she would one day become the most prominent feminist activist of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Born in Shandong in 1972, when the country was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, she was raised in modest circumstances by parents toiling at a local factory. She was smart and curious and a voracious reader, too, and that allowed her to win admission to university at the age of fifteen, when relatively few had the opportunity to do so. She read Chinese literature and, after graduating with a master’s degree, secured a position as a journalist with an outlet affiliated with the All-China Women’s Federation. Over time, however, she grew frustrated with the constraints of official media and, in 2004, she resigned to go freelance.

These were heady times. In the summer of 2001, China was selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. In December that same year, it joined the World Trade Organization. This turbocharged the economy, which grew by 10 per cent on average for the rest of the decade. Access to higher education was also expanding rapidly, especially for women. At the turn of the millennium, they accounted for a mere 20 per cent of the student population; ten years later, they made up a full half of it.

In Everything You Wanted to Know About China (But Were Afraid to Ask), an incisive and jargon-free primer on the PRC, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, recalls the excitement of that era. Each time he visited between the mid-1990s and the 2008 Olympics, he writes, there was “at least a bit more space for experimentation, for doing things that were not really part of the official order. There was more breathing room for religious expression of varied kinds, a wider range of foreign books being translated and published. … People year by year seemed to feel less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing.”

• Tags: China, Issue 45, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Martin Laflamme, Minxin Pei, Yi-Ling Liu