Category: Reviews

Aaron Fox-Lerner reviews Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born

It says a lot about China's top-selling novelist that nobody in the West seems to know how to describe him. Anna Holmwood's translation of Jin Yong's 1957 novel Legend of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born marks the first commercial release of his work in English, and the first new translation since The Book and the Sword, translated by Graham Earnshaw, and Olivia Mok's translation of Fox Volant of Snowy Mountain. The going line on Jin – the pen name of the Hong Kong writer and newspaper publisher Louis Cha – is that he's the Chinese Tolkien. Publications from the Guardian to Quartz have compared the book to Lord of the Rings as a handy reference to Jin's longstanding popularity and influence on Chinese pop culture.

If anything, the comparison may be underselling Jin. Legend of the Condor Heroes alone has spawned a slew of TV series, multiple video games and at least four movie adaptations of varying fidelity, including Wong Kar-Wai's elliptical Ashes of Time. That might not seem to rival the footprint left by Tolkien until you consider how prolific Jin was as a novelist, penning 14 major works, many of which have spawned their own long list of TV shows, movies, comics, video games and parodies. Estimates of total books sold vary – especially when piracy is taken into account – but many put the figure at 300 million or more.

Jeremiah Jenne reviews Robert Bickers’ Out of China

In the summer of 1945, during the final months of World War II, a concert at the Grand Theater in Shanghai hosted a jazz symphony inspired by American composer George Gershwin, played by an orchestra founded by the British consisting of Chinese musicians as well as Russian and Western European Jewish refugees. The music was contemporary, with a boogie-woogie beat, performed in a modernist hall designed by a Hungarian architect. The principal vocalist was Li Xianglan, a famous singer born Yoshiko Yamaguchi to parents who had settled in Manchuria from Japan. Such an improbable mashup is a fitting tableau in Robert Bickers' new book Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination.

Mike Cormack reviews Cracking The China Conundrum by Yukon Huang

The opening of the Chinese financial and service sectors – or at least, the Chinese government’s pledge to do so – and the sometimes cynical, sometimes overeager response to it serves as a reminder of the fallibility of Western economic analysis. Never in the history of prognostication have so many people been so wrong about so much so regularly as with the modern Chinese economy. But this is understandable. The Chinese economy presents a huge number of difficulties for analysts.

For one, the scale and length of its growth is unparalleled, leaving those who predict downturns looking ill-informed if not ideologically driven. Its closed capital account means it can withstand external shocks that would knock most countries for six. It is run by an authoritarian government which nonetheless leaves most sectors mostly free to make profits. Its state-owned enterprises are lumbering behemoths, inefficient but largely profitable, albeit able to access capital with velvet ease. The banking industry is huge, if largely cosseted from competition, and run for the good of the state, rather than for financial imperatives. And the whole system is underpinned by a Leninist party structure which moves state executives from position to position for political concerns rather than managerial or business motives.

Josh Freedman reviews Philippe Paquet’s biography of the iconoclastic sinologist

If there is a single climactic moment in Philippe Paquet’s exhaustive, colorful account of the life of the writer Simon Leys, it occurs on a staid French television show about books. It was 1983, and Leys had recently published his fourth collection of acerbic essays on China’s ruling party; yet the host of the popular show Apostrophes had to work hard to cajole Leys into coming to Paris to talk about his book on the air. Leys had no interest in doing publicity for his books, and rarely granted interviews to the media; plus, in this instance, he knew that any discussion on the show would inevitably stir up controversy. Paris had been the epicenter of pro-Maoist sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s, and Leys had spent more than a decade as one of the few critics unswervingly standing up to the tide of revolutionary fervor in the Francophone world. He was, for many Parisian China-watchers, public enemy number one.

Grace Jackson reviews Leftover in China by Roseann Lake

First coined in the Chinese media over a decade ago, “leftover women” (剩女 shengnü) is the epithet in China for those women who have failed to attract a husband by their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties, and are considered by their parents and Chinese society at large to be flirting perilously with spinsterhood. Much ink has been spilled in the Anglophone sinosphere over this invented category, and the latest addition – plagued by accusations of using uncredited inspiration from an earlier work – is Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower by Roseann Lake. A vibrant survey of marriage and dating in contemporary Beijing, the book is supported with research and interviews, and peppered with personal insights into the romantic lives of China’s educated, urban and doggedly unwed young women.