Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book, as coauthor, is the updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2018). He is also the author of books such as the Eight Juxtapositions: China Through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin, 2016), and the editor or co-editor of several titles, including, most recently, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (also 2016). He is one of the co-founders of and an academic editor for LARB's China Channel, a member of the editorial board of Dissent Magazine, and a co-founder of UCI's Forum for the Academy and Public Life. He has written reviews and commentaries for newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, as well as for a wide range of magazines, journals of opinion, and literary reviews, including the TLS and The Atlantic. He is an adviser to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and has been a featured speaker at Internazionale's Ferrara Festival. Find him on Twitter at @jwassers.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
On Reading Expansively in Confining Times: Ten New Non-Fiction Books Not About Plagues
Just as the film Contagion has found a second life with news of the coronavirus outbreak, so too are novels about ...
Hong Kong on the Brink
Jeffrey Wasserstrom documents and reflects on the recent protests in Hong Kong....
Then They Came for the Bookseller
The ongoing threats to free expression in Hong Kong, which are again in the headlines, need to be placed in a long-term historical context....
The Odd Couple: On Political Dissent and the Remarkable Similarities Between Mark Twain and Yu Hua
Twain's and Yu's oeuvres are filled with works that demonstrate their keen eye for the small dramas of everyday life and keen ear for linguistic hypocrisy....
The People’s Pope and the Chairman of Everything
On the parallels between the way the Pope and the "Chairman of Everything" have been framed as public figures....
Hong Kong Visions
"I'm used to Hong Kong streets being noisy; instead it was eerily silent."...
A Tale of Two Summers
Following the News in 1900 and 2014...
Strangers in the Metropolis: Jeffrey Wasserstrom on Mara Hvistendahl
AND THE CITY SWALLOWED THEM, a foray into true crime reportage by the versatile and talented Mara Hvistendahl, a writer previously ...
China and the Nobel IV
Part IV of our series on China and the Nobel Prize for Literature. LARB's Asia editors Megan Shank and Jeffrey Wasserstrom ...
A Transnational, Translingual Writer: Claire Conceison on Gao Xingjian
GAO XINGJIAN became the first writer of Chinese ancestry to win a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. Initially making his ...
All I See Around Me is the Same Old Darkness: Gloria Davies on Lu Xun
THE NEED to include something about Lu Xun in this series was obvious to us from the start, since many inside ...
China and the Nobel III
On Gao Xingjiang and Lu Xun...
Why Hong Kong?
Snowden ran there; Wasserstrom combs through his own 25-year relationship....
Around the World in Eighty Ways: On Circumnavigation
Q: WHAT DO CHARLES DARWIN, Mark Twain, Nellie Bly, S. J. Perelman, Chinese customs service employee Li Gui, Monty Python’...
China’s Latest Laureate: Chinese Lit Scholar Answers Questions about Mo Yan
WHEN THE NOBEL PRIZE in Literature is awarded, commentators often wonder if it was given to recognize the quality of the ...
Punk and Protest in China and Russia
Fascinating things happen, the Pussy Riot trial reminds us, when music is used to give the finger to a stagnant government &...
The Future is a Different Country: On William Gibson
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." — William Gibson I NEED TO BEGIN with a confession: I ...
Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai’s World Fair
The idea that Orwell rather than Huxley was the one to turn to if one wanted a fictional lens through which to see China went virtually unchallenged.....
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