ChinaFile Presents: The Other China, with Michael Meyer and Ian Buruma

Join writers Michael Meyer and Ian Buruma for a discussion of one of China's most historically complex and important regions. Meyer's new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, combines immersion journalism, memoir, exhaustive historical research, and a love story to create a portrait of the momentous changes underway in China's often-overlooked countryside.

Join writers Michael Meyer and Ian Buruma for a discussion of one of China's most historically complex and important regions. Meyer's new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, combines immersion journalism, memoir, exhaustive historical research, and a love story to create a portrait of the momentous changes underway in China's often-overlooked countryside. He spent three years in a rice-farming village, hometown to his wife's family, recording the rhythms of daily life, as the villagers make the transition from family farming to corporate agriculture. But he also traverses China's northeast, searching for traces its lost history, probing the legacy of its multiple foreign occupations, and capturing its aspirations for the future, with insight and great heart.

 

Michael Meyer first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. The winner of a Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing, Meyer has also won a Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His stories have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Slate, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. He is the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, which became a bestseller in China, and he divides his time between Pittsburgh and Singapore.

 

Ian Buruma is a journalist, writer, and academic. He is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He writes about politics and culture for a variety of major publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, Financial Times, and The Guardian. His books include Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, The China Lover, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and most recently, Year Zero: A History of 1945.