Linda Jaivin is a Sydney-based essayist, translator and novelist. Her latest book is The Shortest History of China (Black Inc., 2021).
Books & arts
How to resist a tyrant
Linda Jaivin
18 July 2025
If democracy is the goal, non-violence is a better bet
Books & arts
Mao’s suave controller — or enabler?
Linda Jaivin
1 October 2024
Once described as the Zelig of Chinese politics, Zhou Enlai had an uneasy relationship with the Great Helmsman
Books & arts
China’s underground historians
Linda Jaivin
5 January 2024
A veteran China watcher uncovers a network of counter-historians
Books & arts
Stolen moments
Linda Jaivin
21 November 2023
Caught between their home villages and the city, a generation of Chinese migrant workers struggles for intimacy
Books & arts
Slapped by reality
Linda Jaivin
1 September 2023
A fascinating examination of the Chinese economy leaves one big question unanswered
Books & arts
The silence that makes sense of modern China
Linda Jaivin
13 June 2023
Two new books excavate everyday experiences of the Cultural Revolution
Books & arts
China’s forgotten reformer
Linda Jaivin
14 December 2022
A historian rescues a former leader from the party’s airbrushers
International
Little Pinks and their achy breaky hearts
Linda Jaivin
3 December 2021
China’s army of easily offended young internet-watchers is attracting its own critics
International
Last call for China’s drinking culture?
Linda Jaivin
28 October 2021
China is waking up to the downside of its world-beating level of alcohol consumption
International
Shooting down the “girlie guns”
Linda Jaivin
4 October 2021
Beijing’s crackdown on niangpao reflects anxieties dating back to Europe’s nineteenth-century incursions
Books & arts
Death in Shanghai
Linda Jaivin
16 September 2021
How Xu Shangzhen’s suicide gripped a city
International
First kisses and invisible red lines
Linda Jaivin
3 September 2021
Chinese podcasts offer revealing, moving and sometimes funny insights into life in the People’s Republic
From the archive
Shanghai, July 1921
Linda Jaivin
30 June 2021
When communist delegates met secretly in Shanghai in July 1921, their individual fates — as well as their party’s — were impossible to foresee
Books & arts
Everything under heaven
Linda Jaivin
17 May 2021
How do you squeeze China’s history into 250 pages?
International
Engineers of human souls
Linda Jaivin
5 November 2015
Xi Jinping has made clear the Party’s views about the role of artists, writes Linda Jaivin. But it’s unclear what they will mean in practice
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