Missing in Action: As China Readies for a Leadership Handover, Where are Marx and Mao?

Poor Marx. China is still ruled by the Communist Party, which will undergo a once-a-decade changing of the guard next month. But the ideas of Karl Heinrich,...

Amid Censorship, China’s Tiananmen Crackdown is Remembered Online

In the years immediately following 1989, the anniversary of the deadly June 4 crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing was marked by smaller memorial protests. At...

The Party's Over

China is undergoing its version of an election cycle, with a once-in-a-decade leadership change in its top ranks. It's a much more dramatic--and perhaps more...

Time For North Korea's Economy to Come Out of Isolation?

To the outside world, the next leader of North Korea is a blank slate, a fat-faced young man in his late 20s who, according to people he went to school with in...

A New Biography of Deng Xiaoping Gives Little Away

Pity the author who decides to write a biography of a senior member of the Communist Party of China. In an organization already legendary for obsessive secrecy,...

Is China's Ex-Leader Jiang Zemin Dead? Local Censors Don't Want Any Speculation

Is he or isn't he? Around 11 pm on July 5, China's blogosphere began trading in rumors that Jiang Zemin, the former leader of the People's Republic, had died. By...

Solving the Tibetan Problem

Tibet is everywhere these days. Its images are used to sell insurance; the Dalai Lama's face appears on billboards to promote computers; there are countless...

The Moment

The headline out of a conclave of the Chinese communist Party is that Vice President Xi Jinping has been named to the country's powerful Central Military...

The Last Emperor

He was a very small boy, but the village elders remember him distinctly because his family was descended from a mandarin, the most famous citizen of the humble...

Trading Places: China and the U.S.

It would not be fair to compare Mao Zedong to either President Bush or President Obama. Neither has swum the Yangtze River and neither was a rabid communist. Mao...