Why Are There No Biographies of Xi Jinping?
“Living in China is confusing now,” the novelist Yan Lianke said, “because it can feel like being in North Korea and the United States at the same time.” I recall smiling and nodding when he made the remark, during a roundtable discussion at Duke University’s campus outside Shanghai three years ago. In one brief sentence, he captured just how special and strange China can seem—a country that has both gulags and Gap stores.