"Am I Being Played?"

Something a little different on the site this week: an essay, “Am I Being Played?​” that I composed over the past two weeks, inspired by a question that arose as I was working on Ren Jiantao’s text for last time. The question has to do with the extent to which Chinese establishment intellectuals mean what they say when they publish in mainland Chinese venues.

In addition, the translation of another text by Ren Jiantao, “The Periodization of Reform,” that grew out of research for the above-mentioned essay.

Also an addition to our Spanish-language translations: Yuan Peng, “La pandemia de Coronavirus: Un cambio que solo sucede una vez por siglo.” Thanks to Ugo Armanini, my former student at the Université de Montréal, now at the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid, for revising the Spanish-language text.

A recording of a talk I gave at the Hoover Institution on February 10 is available here. For those just discovering the site, the short talk (30 minutes followed by discussion and questions) might serve as a good introduction to what the project is about.
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Finally, for French-speaking readers, I am pleased to announce the recent publication on Gallimard of Penser en Chine, a collection of essays under the direction of Anne Cheng, with the collaboration of Éric Vigne, to which I contributed a modest translation of an essay by Qin Hui.