Zhao Yanjing on Real Estate, Fertility, and Ukraine

New on the site this time:
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Three texts by Zhao Yanjing, a professor of urban planning at Xiamen University and a frequent commenter on national and international affairs. I first noticed Zhao right after the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 when he published an interesting piece warning China to “get its narrative right” on the virus. This month I noticed a piece by Zhao on China’s current real estate crisis, and in the process of working on that text, stumbled on two other interesting essays by him on China’s fertility crisis and the war in Ukraine. So we have “China’s Real Estate at a Crossroads,” “Fertility, Elder Care, Employment, and Urban Planning,” and “China’s Choice in the Russia-Ukraine War.” Enjoy.

Thanks to the kind invitation of Professor Anne Cheng, Chair of Chinese Intellectual History at the Collège de France, I will be spending most of June in Paris, giving a series of public lectures at her institution. The lectures are free and open to the public, and I would be delighted to see any of you who might happen to be in Paris. Because of this commitment, I may well put aside my translating chores aside for a bit, so if there is no mid-June update, you will know why.