Wenguang Huang
Wenguang Huang is a writer, journalist, and translator whose articles and translations have been published in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of the memoir The Little Red Guard and the translator for Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and One Hundred Songs, The Corpse Walker, and God Is Red.
His latest book, with Pin Ho, is A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China.
From Wenguang Huang's Q & A with Matt Schiavenza for The Atlantic:
Are Chinese people getting more interested in politics?--Marshal Zeringue
After Tiananmen Square people got so busy making money that they became cynical and jaded about politics. But the Bo Xilai scandal has really energized people. When I visited China last year, almost everyone I met had heard something about the case on Weibo, and some were even using a proxy server to access foreign media to read about it. More Chinese people are now interested in the political process than before, something that makes the government nervous.
What ultimately did you want your readers to take away from your book?
What we tried to do was to take a step back from the scandal and look at it with a very detached way. We were interested in giving Western readers a broader context, a sense of how the inner Party apparatus works, to give them a very objective assessment of what's happening in China now. Through this, when they read about political events happening in China, they...[read on]
