Watching China Watching 剖幽析微 In Broken Engagement — US-China Experts in Recovery (China Heritage, 12 July 2025), I observed that the timing of the publication of Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America by David Shambaugh, academic and sometime government adviser, is delicious.… Read

Celebrating New Sinology 殷鑒不遠
在夏後之世   In Broken Engagement — US-China Experts in Recovery, the previous chapter in our series Celebrating New Sinology, we commented on veteran China watcher David Shambaugh’s speculation in March 2015 that: We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase.… Read

Celebrating New Sinology 自擺烏龍 Paris taxi drivers are notoriously sophisticated in their use of invective. ‘Hé, va donc, structuraliste!’ is one of their recent apostrophes — which makes one wonder when they will start calling their victims ‘China Experts’!… Read

This is the sixty-first chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.… Read

Empires of Tedium 硅。熵。硅。熵。硅。熵。   Given who he is and what he writes, I realise how random my initial encounter with Sam Kriss was. It was in The New York Times — given his style it was the most unlikely of places — although the subject of his essay in the Times weekend magazine in September 2016 did make it make sense.… Read

Contra Trump 禍起蕭牆 In the midst of the Iran–US military crisis of June 2025, US President Donald J. Trump gestured towards a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence that he had ordered to be mounted on the wall of the Oval Office, and observed: [I] see the Declaration of Independence and I say I wonder if you—you know the Civil War?—it… Read