Intersecting with Eternity   Lao Shu 老樹 is the nom de plume of Liu Shuyong (劉樹勇, 1962-), a Beijing-based artist, writer, critic and professor in communications. His artistic voice is unique and personal, its tenor, whimsy and profundity evoke what for decades we have called The Other China — a cultural noosphere that is as undeniably local as it is universal.… Read

The Tower of Reading 念樓中秋   The Fifteenth Day of the Eighth Month of the lunar calendar, a day that in 2024 falls on the 17th of September, marks the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節.… Read

Watching China Watching   Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a historian who, among other things, is noted for his scholarship and media engagement regarding student protests, both past and present. As I noted in May Fourth at 105 — Protest, Resistance, Repression: Jeff and I got to know each other when working on The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documentary film about the 1989 Protest Movement in China.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium 二十八畫先生忌日   In 2024, we mark the anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death in the company of Dai Qing (戴晴, 1941-), a renowned writer, environmental activist and China’s first post-Mao historical investigative journalist.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Chapter VII 人一走 茶就涼   In the first Chaguan column in The Economist on 13 September 2018, David Rennie featured the teahouse culture of Chengdu in Sichuan.… Read

Intersecting with Eternity  絕交 In the essay On Heritage we offered the Rationale behind China Heritage. We noted that the character 遺 yí — the leitmotif of our journal — in the hand of the Tang-dynasty artist Li Huailin 李懷琳 is taken from his grass-script 草書 version of a ‘Letter to Shan Tao’ 與山巨源絕交書, a famous epistle by Xi Kang, one of the celebrated Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢. … Read