Delve into China's economic challenges from deflation to overcapacity, with insights from leading economists. Explore youth unemployment, state sector dominance, and future projections. Unravel the complexities of China's economic growth amidst global shifts and geopolitical implications.

A funny thing happened at the height of China's economic boom, as more and more Chinese women were getting college degrees, good jobs, and promising careers. The government launched a propaganda campaign, urging women to get married young, before they became "yellowed pearls".  Leta Hong-Fincher captured that phenomenon in her book Leftover Women (2014). A decade later, with a new updated edition of Leftover Women just out, Leta joins the China Books podcast to talk about why China's Communist Party leaders are still so focused on micro-managing the personal lives of women. President Xi Jinping himself made an explicit appeal at China's National Women's Congress in November 2023, calling on China's women to stay home and have babies. The draconian one-child policy, enforced from 1979 to 2016, had led to a plummeting birthrate, a contracting workforce and an aging population. Now the government is urging women to marry early and have three children. But many of China's women -- about one in five now have college degrees -- seem none  too keen on giving up on dreams to have a career, and perhaps more independence than they would in a marriage. China's fertility rate continues to plummet, and is now about half the replacement rate. The number of marriage licenses granted per year in China has dropped for nine straight years, and is now half of what it was a decade ago.  Faced with inequality of opportunity and of protection under the law when it comes to marriage, property rights, and domestic abuse, women in China are engaged demographic revolution voting with their feet, with potentially profound implications for China's economic and political future.Leta Hong Fincher is the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2023, 10th Anniversary Edition) and Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (2018). She is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University's Department of Sociology in Beijing and is currently a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Dreams of a better future have driven many a revolution, but not all have turned out the way the dreamers imagined.   China's early revolutionaries, a century ago, aimed to rid the country of what they saw as corrupt capitalism and the world of colonialism and imperialism. Instead, they said, socialism would bring a future of peace, prosperity, equality, and social justice.  Not all of that worked out. One of the dreamers was Chen Hansheng, a prominent Western-educated  public intellectual who wrote, lectured, and taught in the United States while secretly working for the Soviet Comintern and Communist Party of China, who worked over time with Zhou Enlai and more briefly with Soviet spy Richard Sorge, and who was close friends Agnes Smedley, an American journalist who supported China's Communist revolution, and with Soong Ching-Ling, the widow of Sun Yat-Sen. Chen's comprehensive surveys of rural regions of China in the 1930s painted a vivid picture of the realities on the ground for China's farmers and villagers, who China's Communist revolution ended up helping in some ways and hurting in others, particularly in the preventable Great Famine of the late '50s and early '60s, when as many as 50 million people starved to death. Chen died in 2004 at age 107.  He lived through a century of epic change in China and in the world that brought some of what he wanted, but not in the way he expected, and a lot of disillusionment. In this  episode, Chen's biographer Stephen R. MacKinnon, lays it all out. Stephen R. MacKinnon is an emeritus professor of 20th Century Chinese history and former director of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University. He has lived and worked in the People’s Republic of China, and has focused on China in his work since the early 1960s. He has written dozens of articles and edited volumes, and is the author of five books on China, including Chen Hansheng: China’s Last Romantic Revolutionary (2023), Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (2008), and Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1987).  The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

China's rise is one of the great stories of the past century, and China correspondents have told that story in myriad ways -- as a story of transformation, of falling poverty rates and rising power, of new wealth and old political elites, of new opportunities and unintended consequences, of abuses of rights and of power, of surveillance and censorship.  Together, these different pieces formed a complex and sometimes contradictory picture -- shaping understandings, and sometimes misunderstandings -- about how China is changing, and is changing the world.   American correspondents have been a big part of this effort. In this episode, former CNN China correspondent Mike Chinoy talks his book and documentary film series Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic, about how the work of American China correspondents has changed over seven decades, about why China correspondents matter, and what we lose when fewer are in the field. The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

The podcast discusses the power of Chinese literature after the Cultural Revolution, shifts in Chinese literature during the Reform and Opening Up era, the influence of daily life and ordinary values in China, the grim situation of dissent in China, and the challenges faced by Chinese writers.