Mekong Review

Tag: China

Unforgettable blood

Muyesser Abdul’ehed

Unable to write openly about repression, Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun resorted to symbolism, invoking visceral descriptions in his novel The Backstreets to convey a sense of disconnect and despair.

Ghosts of a red Ferrari

Yangyang Cheng

More than a conventional detective story, The Soul of Beijing unfolds into a vivid portrayal of the bustling metropolis, filled with colourful characters from all walks of life.

Life’s choices

Kevin Yam

Murong Xuecun fled China after writing his book Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, COVID’s Ground Zero. Today, he’s living in exile in Australia. It was never obvious that his life would go on such a trajectory. Kevin Yam chats to him about his writing and his choices.

China’s sharp power

Richard Heydarian

While his predecessors chose to downplay China’s power, Xi Jinping has led an overhaul of China’s domestic political landscape and foreign policy. A review of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World by Joshua Kurlantzick.

Engineering away dissent

Nicholas Yong

What can a government achieve when given maximum access to public data? Josh Chin and Liza Lin of the Wall Street Journal do a deep dive into the impact of China’s panopticon in Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.

Reworking narratives

Jonathan Chatwin

The repressive era of Xi Jinping is often contrasted with the 1980s, when the question of what China could become seemed remarkably open. But it is during the fourteen years between 1978 and 1992, delineated in Julian Gewirtz’s Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s, that the foundations for Xi’s rule were laid.