IP Law, Chinese Poetry and the Life of a Western Lawyer in China: An interview with Charles Stone

You may listen to this interview from HERE.

Charles Stone is an Of Counsel at a major Chinese law firm in China. He has extensive experience in a wide range of law, internationally and in China. He helps large and small Chinese online sellers navigate the US market and resolve IP disputes, especially those related to US trademark applications and infringement settlements. Charles also practices in the areas of general corporate law and M&A. Charles regularly speaks on Chinese legal and business topics, has taught Organizational Behavior in Chinese at a Chinese business school, and has recorded over 100 videos on Douyin (抖音) in Chinese on various legal topics, but especially recent changes in US trademark law. Charles has a JD from Marquette University and also obtained a PhD in classical Chinese literature from the University of Chicago.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

I am an American lawyer based in Shenzhen, China. I have been working in China for ten years, and have studied Chinese in Taiwan for five. In between I received a PhD in classical Chinese at the University of Chicago. These days I have been helping Chinese online sellers with their legal problems in the States, particularly their trademark problems.

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago I studied English literature and planned to go to law school after a couple of years. After graduation I worked at a computer company during the day and studied Chinese in the home of a Chinese professor a couple of nights per week. I thought that Chinese would be a valuable skill for anybody who was planning to be a lawyer.

After two years I asked my teacher what I should do if I wanted to learn more about classical Chinese. She said I should study in Taiwan, as they don’t use simplified characters and their educational system is still very traditional. So, a few weeks later I bought a one way ticket to Taipei. I studied at a language school for foreigners for two years, then became a regular student in the Chinese department of National Taiwan University for two more. I studied the Book of Changes for a whole year, as well as the History of Chinese Literature and other very traditional courses. I took all of the tests and did well. After being accepted at law schools in the States, I decided to visit some friends at the University of Chicago the summer before classes were to start.

I had just read the late Ming dynasty edition of the Jinpingmei cihua, or Plum in the Golden Lotus, which I thought was a remarkable work of fiction. When I mentioned this to a friend, she said that perhaps the world’s greatest expert on this novel taught at the University of Chicago and that his office was just two blocks to the south. I should go knock on his door and ask him about it. Before I knew it, I had decided to obtain a PhD in Chinese before going to law school, which was now going to be delayed for well over a decade.

Q2. Much has been written about intellectual property issues encountered by foreign firms in China, but little has been written about the IP problems encountered by Chinese firms outside the country. An interesting area of focus for you is on US trademark issues faced by Chinese online sellers. What exactly is the problem today and how did we arrive at this situation?

In 2014, 5,000 US trademark applications were filed by Chinese entities. Then, various levels of the Chinese government, for reasons yet unknown, started to pay subsidies to Chinese companies so that they would apply for more trademarks. The subsidies had the desired effect. Soon there were hundreds of thousands of applications per year, but the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) also noted a dramatic increase in problems. By 2017, in some categories 67% of the applications were fraudulent: the required proof of use in commerce had been illegally fabricated, among other problems.

So, in the summer of 2019 the USPTO changed the law and required that foreign applicants use a US licensed lawyer to file trademark applications. The purpose was to increase the accuracy of submissions to the USPTO and to decrease the illegal practice of law by foreign trademark agencies. This is still a work in progress. The USPTO continues to sanction US lawyers and Chinese trademark agencies for violating a host of trademark laws, and according to publicly available documents, it appears to be investigating at least 30 Chinese trademark agencies and is preparing to cancel at least 93,000 trademarks that were applied for fraudulently.

Q3. Following on the previous question, how is this problem going to be resolved and what will be the ramifications for Chinese businesses? What are the legal steps these businesses can take to protect their interests?

There are hundreds of trademark agencies in China, and in my experience very few comply with trademark law. To wit, I have yet to meet a single trademark agency that has even heard of the USPTO’s Rules of Professional Conduct. Local non-legal Chinese staff does all of the legal work, and the agency then sends thousands of completed applications to lawyers in the States who do not have the time to accurately review even a small fraction of them. The agencies then simply pay the US lawyer a nominal fee for signing the trademark applications. This is clearly fraudulent according to US law, but this is the procedure followed by most trademark firms in China. In my experience, the Chinese online sellers who apply through these agencies have no idea that their agent isn’t following the law. Chinese trademark law does not require proof of use in commerce, but it is at the heart of US trademark law: if the mark is not used in commerce in the US it cannot be registered. So many agencies illegally manufacture fraudulent proof of use in commerce and their clients do not know that their trademark is in danger of being canceled by the USPTO.

This problem will be solved after the USPTO has canceled a few hundred thousand US trademarks that have been filed for fraudulently. It is a target rich environment. Some of the biggest names in the business are already on the brink of bankruptcy after the USPTO published some details of ongoing investigations, but these investigations are very time consuming and the agencies under investigation can hire US counsel and delay the inevitable sanctions and cancellations for years.

All of these problems are easy to avoid. A trademark applicant merely has to sign a contract directly with a US attorney and communicate with him regarding all legal matters. In this case the local agency would not be illegally providing legal advice and the most important USPTO rules would not be violated. The trademark agency could still translate materials into English for the client and provide other non-legal services. The most important thing is that they refrain from offering any legal advice, as the USPTO is very serious about cracking down on the illegal practice of law.

Q4. Beyond trademark issues, what are your broader observations on the Chinese legal system? What has changed in the last 5-7 years that might not be obvious to those living outside the country?

It is old news that all Chinese lawyers have to swear an oath of allegiance to the CCP. It is still worth mentioning because few Americans have heard of this requirement. It is also official government policy that the Party provide guidance to the courts and that they not serve as checks and balances on the rest of the government. These statements are not controversial. They are official policy and the government is proud of them, as in their eyes they avoid the apparent turmoil inherent in the US legal system.

Another major difference between Chinese and American legal systems that is generally unknown to foreigners involves the issue of client confidentiality. American lawyers have a duty of confidentiality that survives even the death of the client, and it is drilled into every lawyer that they can never violate this duty. But in China it is common for attorney engagement letters to include provisions about the maintenance of client confidentiality because this duty is not as explicit as it is in the States. Many international law firms have left China in recent years, and some have specifically cited Chinese national security laws that in their opinion could endanger client confidentiality, as in some circumstances there appear to be no secrets that can be kept from the government. In the States, by contrast, it is usually not possible for the government to obtain confidential client information from a lawyer.

Q5. For readers without an academic background, what exactly did you study to obtain a PhD in classical Chinese literature?

I should first note that classical Chinese and modern Chinese are two different languages. They use the same characters, but the grammar is different and the meanings of the characters have changed greatly over the centuries. Almost all Chinese literature, history, philosophy, poetry, and drama written before the 20^th century was written in classical Chinese.

I studied under David Roy at the University of Chicago. He is famous for having translated the late Ming dynasty novel Jinpingmei cihua, or Plum in the Golden Vase, into English. Perhaps the best way to explain how a PhD student studies classical Chinese would be to describe how we read this novel in Professor Roy’s class.

It’s a very long novel, 3,000 pages in the original late Ming dynasty woodblock edition. We read a facsimile of this edition. There were only six students in the class. Each week we read one chapter, and as there are 100 chapters, this seminar lasted for two academic years. After we asked questions and discussed that week’s reading, the students would often be called upon to read and translate passages at random.

The Jinpingmei is written in classical Chinese, but it is not as dense as earlier texts like the Confucian Classics and dynastic histories. It is instead written in a kind of lingua franca that sometimes resembles modern Chinese. There are specialized dictionaries that explain most of the idiosyncratic expressions found in this novel, so at first glance it does not seem that difficult. However, this novel contains detailed descriptions of everyday life during the late Ming dynasty, including Buddhist liturgical services, Daoist ceremonies, traditional medicine, legal documents, architecture, business, and a wide variety of allusions to classical texts and poetry, and especially Yuan dynasty opera. A PhD student is expected to have read all of these classical texts in the original so that they can recognize this quoted material and interpret it correctly.

One aspect of late Ming dynasty fiction that in my opinion Western scholars understand better than Chinese scholars is the use of irony. It has been noted that late Ming fiction is very “modern,” that many voices may be speaking at the same time and that the reader often has to interpret what is happening without the help of an intrusive narrator. My favorite example is found in chapter 27 of the Jinpingmei. Because this novel contains some graphic descriptions of sex, most Chinese have labeled it pornographic, even though such descriptions comprise less than one percent of it. In any event, chapter 27 contains one of the most infamous sexual scenes. It is six pages long, and concurrent with the graphic descriptions of sex is an unexpected description of Daoist physiological alchemy that casts the sexual exploits of the protagonists in a different light. If you are not familiar with these Daoist concepts, the scene is simply a description of debauchery. What all this means is open to interpretation.

Finally, a PhD student studying classical Chinese has to receive a “high pass” in reading exams in French or German, Chinese, classical Chinese, and Japanese before they can graduate.

Q6. In addition to the general coursework, what did you focus on for your dissertation?

While I was taking David Roy’s class on the Jinpingmei, I read a short novel called Ruyijun zhuan, or The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction. It was one of the Jinpingmei’s most important sources, and was one of the strangest works I had ever read. One day I asked Prof. Roy what it meant, and he said that although he had been reading it for decades, he had no idea what the author was trying to say. As no other Chinese work had stumped him like this, I thought I would try to figure out what it meant.

The problem is that the Ruyijun zhuan is one of the most infamous works ever written in the Chinese language. It singlehandedly invented the genre of explicit pornography for Chinese literature, and it appeared to be for this newly minted vocabulary that the Jinpingmei extensively quoted from it. For 500 years everyone who mentioned this work did so with contempt and concluded that it was no more than a filthy book that nobody should read.

As this novel purported to tell the story of Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman to have ruled as emperor of China in her own right (r. 690-705), the first step was to read as many original historical sources about her reign as possible. This took two years and it turned out to be the key to understanding this strange work. To make a long story short, this novel’s treatment of Tang dynasty history turned out to be far more sophisticated than anyone had expected. Further research identified the probable author who unbelievably turned out to be a conservative Ming dynasty official who was also an expert in the sources of Tang history. His unlikely purpose for writing this obscene novel was to criticize the morals of his own day in the most bizarre manner possible. For example, there are no explicit descriptions of Empress Wu when she was conveyed to the palace at the age of 14 and had an affair with the emperor. Rather, explicit descriptions of her amorous exploits do not occur until she is in her 70s, and the first recorded descriptions of masochistic sex found in the Chinese language do not occur until Empress Wu is in her 80s and some of her teeth had fallen out. These details did not appear to contribute to the creation of an erotic atmosphere. Contemporaries saw these contradictions, as did the author of the Jinpingmei. This project turned into my PhD dissertation and was eventually published as The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica by the University of Hawaii Press.

Q7. How has studying classical literature helped you better understand Chinese culture? Have you found it useful in your work life? How do Chinese react when they learn about the depth of your interest and experience in such a field of study?

Westerners and Chinese have never lived in the same world. They do not even see the same physical world today. I think this is evident in the way the Chinese write poetry, and this seems to have been confirmed by modern anthropology.

Some years ago, an American professor decided to study how his American and Chinese students viewed the physical world. He hooked the students up to computers and recorded what they looked at when presented with a picture of a person standing in front of a building, among other pictures. He then asked them to describe what they saw. Americans typically focused on the person and described his physical characteristics. The Chinese, however, typically scanned the entire picture, including the background, and then described the relationship between the person and the context. This is how you read classical Chinese. Context is everything. If you try to analyze anything out of context you aren’t going to understand it.

As far as I’m concerned, this also explains the difference between Western and Chinese advertising. From time to time, I help colleagues fix English translations of their advertising. To the Western eye, Chinese advertising, online stores, and newspapers look like sheer chaos. Online shopping apps are a case in point. There is an overwhelming amount of detail, small icons are moving around, flashing, and there is more description than you can possibly read. It gives me a headache. Then there’s Western advertising like Apple’s. There might be a picture of one phone with a couple of words, you click on it and a couple more pop up. Western advertising is comfortable presenting a product in quiet isolation, while Chinese advertising generally requires a sea of noisy details.

I think this difference is also evident in Chinese poetry. When Wang Wei describes a natural scene, he is not presenting a series of individual elements. Everything in his poetry is already connected on a more profound level.

In terms of my daily life, my Chinese accent is pretty good, and I can say whatever I want in Chinese, so I have a lot of fun talking with people every day.

Q8. In your view, what is the state of traditional Chinese culture in China today? There is growing interest and social media attention on young people wearing traditional Chinese clothing (華服 / 漢服) and a plethora of historical drama series. However, is this reflected in more people studying poetry and classical literature? With so many important works written in Classical Chinese, is it even accessible to the average person who may not have much experience reading this old form of the language?

There is increasing interest in Chinese culture these days, and the government of course says that it wishes to promote Chinese culture so that even Westerners can appreciate it. Some younger Chinese wear traditional clothing from time to time, and many movies and videos tell stories of China’s glorious past, sometimes based upon famous old novels. These are all interesting, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that throughout China’s long imperial history no classical scholar would have been impressed by any of it. What really sets China’s culture apart is its extraordinarily sophisticated literary culture comprised of every kind of history, philosophy, poetry, essays, calligraphy, and drama. The poetry, for example, evolved into various unique styles over 3,000 years. The kind of poetry I write is called “modern style” poetry even though it is over 1,400 years old. You know you’re dealing with some serious culture when a style considered modern is over a thousand years old.

Many educated Chinese fully appreciate their literary culture and history, but this is unfortunately not very common. The old books are much harder for the average person to read than one would think. The old books were all printed in traditional full form characters, and today most people learn only simplified characters. This is but one major obstacle. If the government wishes to promote Chinese culture, I would encourage them to start by teaching the classics to their own people first. No traditional scholar before the 20^th century ever said a word about the need to promote Chinese culture. The superiority of Chinese literary culture was simply assumed because they understood it.

Q9. With the widespread use of mobile apps and AI, people can now write and appreciate poetry in interesting new ways. What are your thoughts on these new tools?

I know many people who write Chinese poetry in a classical style, and as far as I can tell most of them rely upon AI or apps that can be downloaded to your phone. The better poets use these tools only to confirm that what they have already written didn’t accidentally violate any of the rules. If you start with the rules first you are doing it backwards and in most cases it reads like it.

The last time I checked, classical Chinese poetry written by ChatGPT was a train wreck. When I asked it to write a quatrain composed of 5 character lines, it instead produced eight lines of seven characters. It couldn’t even count. The rhyme was wrong, and the tones were wrong too. But Baidu’s AI is very good and it instantly produces poems that follow the rules.

But from my perspective, these tools interpret the rules too strictly. This is not a surprise, as most modern guides that purport to teach you how to write five character quatrains are too strict as well. The rules regarding the rhymes are perhaps the easiest to explain. There are 106 rhyme categories in classical Chinese. The rhyme is not merely the vowel sound at the end of a word, as the tone must be identical, and the rhyming characters must be found in the exact same rhyme category or they will not be considered to rhyme. Just because the words sound like they rhyme doesn’t count in classical poetry. These 106 rhyming categories are grouped into two broad categories called ping 平 and ze 仄, or level and oblique tones. Almost all modern manuals that purport to teach you how to write quatrains say that the rhyme must always be in the level tone, and that rhymes in oblique tones violate a fundamental rule of prosody.

But this rule is obviously wrong. The Tang dynasty’s most famous poets like Wang Wei routinely violated this “rule.” Approximately 30% of Wang Wei’s quatrains use oblique rhymes, and thirty percent of the regulated quatrains found in the famous anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems use oblique rhymes as well. Even worse, if you type some of Du Fu’s most famous quatrains into some of these apps, you will be surprised to learn that Du Fu, who was perhaps China’s most technically proficient poet, didn’t understand these rules either.

Q10. I understand you are a writer of Chinese poetry with a particular focus on the classical 8^th Century style. Why did you choose to write poetry and specifically, this time period?

I started writing Chinese poetry in an ancient style because I had a sneaking suspicion that I probably didn’t really understand it. If I learned how to write it, my understanding would likely evolve.

The first and most important step was to figure out what the old poets themselves thought was a good poem. Old, annotated anthologies of poetry contain detailed observations made by many astute commentators. Sometimes they all like the same poem, or even the same line or word. Why? Their comments are often as difficult to decipher as the poems themselves, but after a while their aesthetic criteria gradually became clear.

Then I started learning the rules of five character regulated verse that was popular during the Tang dynasty. These are probably the strictest rules found in all of Chinese poetry, and I again suspected that learning how to apply these rules would help me understand what poets writing in this genre were actually trying to do. I learned these rules by studying the poetry of my favorite poets. Many modern textbooks purport to teach you how to write this genre of poetry, but they focus on the rules and say nothing about a poem’s beauty. This seems backwards to me. The rules are not the poetry, and may in fact be one of its most significant obstacles.

I have included a poem I wrote myself in question number 11 below that illustrates a defining aspect of this genre of poetry: the alternation of level and oblique tones. The pattern I chose is one of many traditional patterns, and it does not contain any exceptions to these rules. The basic idea is that the tones of the first two and last two lines are mirror images of each other. So, if the first two characters of the first line are oblique tones, the first two characters of the second line should be level tones. All of the remaining characters continue to follow this pattern. It’s like a medieval Chinese version of quantum entanglement: it doesn’t make logical sense, but if one is level the other must be oblique, that’s just the way it is.

The poem found in question 11 is not, however, the strictest form of regulated verse. In the poems that follow the rules most strictly, the tones of each line do not merely parallel the tones of its corresponding line, the grammatical functions of each character also parallel those of the corresponding character in the other line as well. Thus, if the first line begins with “adjective + noun,” the second line would also begin “adjective + noun.” Every character in the poem can follow this rule if the poet so chooses. Finally, these pairs of words would complement each other, or better yet, be opposites. For example, “heaven” in one line might be paired with “earth” in the corresponding line, or a mountain would be paired with a valley. Thus, in the most strict form of Tang poetry, each pair of lines can be said to be comprised of characters that simultaneously evince three different levels of parallel and opposing structures.

Needless to say, until I had learned how to write poetry like this myself, I didn’t have a clue what my favorite poets were doing. And although these rules can be quite strict, the best poets always make it look effortless, and they often break or modify these rules as required.

Q11. Would you mind sharing a poem that you wrote? In addition to a translation, can you explain what inspired you to write this poem and how it should be interpreted and understood?

I have rarely attempted to translate Chinese poetry, and have never attempted to translate my own. As you can see from my discussion of the various levels of parallel structure found above, I think some basic aspects of Chinese poetry are simply not amenable to translation.

In any event, this is a poem I wrote while strolling through my favorite park located minutes from City Hall in downtown Shenzhen. After the mid-autumn festival last year, one evening a flock of white egrets returned to some pine trees adjacent to a large pond:

《中秋後白鷺回蓮花山》After Mid-Autumn Festival white egrets return to Lianhua Mountain

細雨秋池靜 Gentle rain falls on the still autumn pond

東南白鷺飛 Southeasterly fly the white egrets

斜陽青未了 The sun sets beyond a verdant expanse

眾鳥舊棲歸 As flocks of birds return to their old perches

As described in paragraph 4 of question 10, this poem can also be viewed through the alternation of level and oblique tones, which I have included below.

仄仄平平仄

平平仄仄平

平平平仄仄

仄仄仄平平

On one level this poem simply describes the beauty of nature. From a classical Chinese perspective, maybe it’s a series of images that are fundamentally related to each other and to man in a way that modern people no longer see.

Q12. For anyone who has undertaken serious study of the Chinese language, it can be a daunting journey. What problems do foreigners encounter when studying Chinese and how can they progress to a stage where they can start to appreciate or even write classical poetry?

The first problem for foreigners is that Chinese is a tonal language. Modern Mandarin has four tones, and the same phoneme pronounced in a different tone means something completely different. In my experience, most students of Chinese learn the tones quickly enough, especially if they spend a few years living in China. But Chinese characters are another matter entirely.

If you want to read a Chinese newspaper well you need to know about 3,500 characters. After that you will be able to plow through most modern texts with the aid of a dictionary. That’s about a character per day for 10 years. If you are really serious you can learn up to two or three per day.

But if you want to read Chinese literature written before the 20^th century, you are going to have to learn classical Chinese. In imperial China, a scribe who merely copied texts had to pass a test that proved he had a working knowledge of at least 9,000 characters. But memorizing all these extra characters is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what these characters mean in context.

Classical Chinese grammar is different from modern Chinese and the characters usually have different meanings. It is also very dense, and it is common for classical texts to quote other famous works without attribution. The reader is expected to recognize and appreciate this quoted material, and if he doesn’t, chances are he is not going to understand what he is reading.

In classical Chinese everything depends upon context. For example, the Chinese character “one” 一 looks as simple as can be, but in classical Chinese it can be a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective. If it’s a verb, it can be in the past, present, or future tense, the subjective mood, and so forth. There is no extra grammar appended to these characters as in Japanese that tells you what they mean. So by itself, looking a word up in a dictionary most likely can’t tell you what it means, you have to figure out what it means by interpreting it in view of the whole context.

The way to figure out what a word means in context is to look up everything and read a lot so you develop a feeling for that particular kind of writing. Soon enough you discover that Chinese-English dictionaries are not precise enough, and you start using large unabridged Chinese-Chinese dictionaries. These reveal that old Chinese texts are stuffed with classical allusions that in many cases need to be identified before you know what a line means. Finally, when you are doing real research in original sources, many of the texts will be completely unpunctuated, and some will be hand-written in artistic calligraphy that can be quite a challenge to decipher.

Q13. As a foreigner living in China what are some of the interesting misperceptions people from outside of China have regarding life inside the country?

One misconception is that the Chinese are anti-American. The last time I returned to the States for several months I became a bit apprehensive about my return to China, as I had read several news reports about waves of anti-Americanism sweeping across the country. But upon my return I didn’t see any of that. In fact, I have never personally experienced anti-Americanism in China. I know that there are countless “little pinks” who say the most outrageous things online, but I have never met anybody who said such things in person. And of course, some Chinese officials have been known to say extraordinary things about the States, but again officials have never said anything of the sort in my presence.

Chinese officials do seem to be getting a bit wary of Americans these days because of conflicting signals they are receiving from the government, and they don’t know what their superiors want them to do. I suspect that many reporters who travel to China and report on China’s anti-Americanism are not experiencing the China that I do. Government entities keep a close watch on reporters, don’t want them speaking to regular people, are very suspicious of them, and would rather they just went away and didn’t come back. Then the reporters write something the government doesn’t like and things just get worse. No wonder they see anti-Americanism.

Q14. Conversely, what are some of the interesting misperceptions Chinese have about life in the US and other Western societies?

None of my Chinese friends realize that the most elite universities in the States have abandoned free speech and open inquiry. That is at least how the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression put it in its 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. Coming in dead last at number 248 is Harvard University. Yale and Georgetown are not far behind. My alma mater the University of Chicago is something of an exception among the more elite universities, but it is still only ranked number 13. The problem is most acute in the humanities, but even the STEM fields are now being affected.

Before my Chinese friends travel to the States to study I therefore inform them that, especially at the more elite universities, there is a list of acceptable opinions that cannot be contradicted without unfortunate consequences. Everybody knows what these opinions are so it is not necessary to recount them at this point. In any event, the days of open inquiry when educated people could politely disagree over a controversial issue are gone. My Chinese friends are always quite surprised by this. Fortunately, none of them have expressed an interest in discussing such topics in the first place. But they do need to know that traps will immediately ensnare them even if they unwittingly say the wrong thing.

Q15. As one of a relatively small group of Westerners still living and working in China, how have things changed with the exodus of so many foreigners? Do you see more people moving back?

The Chinese government is sending out mixed signals these days. On one hand they say they want 50,000 Americans students studying in China, but currently that number is stuck at only 700. They say they welcome foreigners, but all English language schools have been closed, and because foreigners don’t have Chinese identity cards, they can’t buy tickets online to most museums and events, and they can’t stay at many hotels either. And every time a Chinese cell phone receives a call from outside of China, it displays the message: “You have received a phone call from overseas! Beware! Somebody might be trying to cheat you! Do you want to accept this call, yes or no? Click here.” Then there are the omnipresent reminders in Chinese media that foreigners might be spies, and that the Chinese should be very wary of foreigners and not share any sensitive information with them. How do you know your boyfriend doesn’t work for the CIA?

But despite the government’s mixed signals, as I mentioned above, I have never experienced any problems in China. Some foreigners also appear to be returning. For the past two years when I extended my work visa I was not only the only foreigner applying for an extension, I was the only person standing in front of 15 empty windows. But last week when I renewed my visa there were perhaps a dozen foreigners waiting in line. It looks like things are gradually returning to normal.

Q16. Please share any favorite books, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of China, classical poetry/literature or any related topics.

William Overholt’s China’s Crisis of Success was published in 2018. He argues that China is “on the cusp of greatness, stagnation or tragedy.” Recall that Overholt is the one who throughout the 1980s wrote that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms would eventually turn China into a superpower, and that in 1994 he published The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower. Sinologists thought he was crazy. The US government thought that China was on the verge of collapse. But Overholt was correct. Is he correct again? He does not claim to know whether greatness, stagnation or tragedy will be China’s fate, as he doesn’t know what policies will be implemented, but it’s clear which road he thinks the Chinese government is currently on.

Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell’s Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise argues that China’s future as an economic powerhouse depends on its ability to develop human capital properly, but that in this regard today it resembles Mexico of the 1980s instead of Korea or Taiwan of that time period. They argue that China invested too much in physical infrastructure and not enough in rural education if the goal is a modern developed economy. As may be deduced from the title, Invisible China examines things that most people have not been paying attention to but probably should.

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