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Hu Jia is one of China’s best-known political activists. He participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a fifteen-year-old, studied economics, and then worked for environmental and public health non-governmental organizations. A practicing Buddhist, Hu spent three and a half years in prison between 2008 and 2011 for “inciting subversion of state power” and currently is under house arrest for having launched a commemoration of the June Fourth massacre in January. But on his way back from a rare unsupervised hospital visit, I met up with him for a talk about his work and the twenty-fif...

Last week, the American Association of University Professors joined a growing chorus of voices calling on North American universities to rethink their relationship with Confucius Institutes, the state-sponsored Chinese-language programs whose policies critics say are anathema to academic freedom. We asked contributors to discuss the debate. Specifically: the costs and benefits of having a Confucius Institute on a university campus; the economic forces at play; and the role of China in university life more broadly.  Update: Several readers have noted with dismay that this Conversation does ...

A Detective in China: A Memoir of Sleuthing Out Trade Cheating SpyTalk I first realized we were going to China while sitting at a bus stop outside the Commerce Department. It was late on a sunny spring afternoon in 1990. The Washington Monument rose high above as snarled rush-hour traffic inched along Constitution Avenue. I was reading Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng. Not really a beginner in Chinese but still struggling, I had an English copy and a Chinese version of the book balanced on both knees, comparing their otherwise identical passages about her arrest in 1...