Saturday Good Reads – June 6, 2026

A Chinese state photographer took the pictures. The film rolls were locked in a metal box. Somehow, the rolls made their way to the United States and placed in the hands of The Epoch Times. And now the photos on the films are being published – never-before-seen photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. 

As we get closer to July 4, the stream of articles and posts about the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution is becoming a flood. Keli Holt at Just Enough History writes about the fall of Philadelphia and that winter at Valley Forge. Yuval Levin at The Coolidge Review explains why 1776 was both radical and conservative. John Barnes at The Imaginative Conservative draws a line from Runneymede in 1215 to Philadelphia in 1776. If you’re in the mood, you can visit an exhibition that lets you tear down (virtually) a statue of George III. And you can find more links below.

 

Today is the 82^nd anniversary of D-Day. Two relatively little-known things helped make it possible. One was the Higgins boat, designed by a man who lived in my hometown of New Orleans. The other was a man named Juan Pujol Garcia, who went by the code name of “Garbo.”

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

In the Ranks of the Revolution: James Johnston’s War – Lori Amos Doss & Harred Marlowe at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Thomas Jefferson’s Last Wish – Jane Kamensky at The Free Press.

 

Five Great Books on the American Revolution – Thomas Kidd.

 

Virginia Leads the Way, All the Way – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

The Undoing of Benedict Arnold and the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Language of Drought and Duty – Colin Gillette at Front Porch Republic.

 

American Stuff

 

Can We Restore the Republic? – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Long History of Gerrymandering in American Politics – Jerald Stubbs at Real Clear History.

 

Poetry

 

A Review of The Future of Love by John Poch – Benjamin Myers at New Verse Review.

 

Poetic Justices: The Poetry of United States Supreme Court Justices – Adam Sedia at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“Pied Beauty,” poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Welcome and Farewell – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Noble North – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

British Stuff

 

Police policies must be reformed – David Spencer at The Critic Magazine.

 

Britain’s Reverse George Floyd Moment – Dominic Green at The Wall Street Journal (unlocked).

 

Faith

 

Strong to the End – Tim Challies.

 

Winston Churchill: Mentor for Our Times – Stephen Mansfield at Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Sunday is Coming – Phil Wickham

 Painting: Oil Woman Reading a Book, oil on canvas by Pieter van den Bosch (1613-1673), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 

"The Backstreets" by Perhat Tersun

Perhat Tursun is a writer and poet. To read his short novel The Backstreets is to be reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s a disturbing, unsettling kind of book, and it becomes more so when you realize it’s largely autobiographical. 

Tursun (born in 1969) is a Uyghur, the large Muslim minority that for generations were farmers and herdsmen in Xinjiang in western China. Life became difficult under Chinese communist rule, until the death of Mao Zedong. Life became easier, until about the turn of the century. Then began what became a systematic effort by the Chinese government to submerge the Uyghurs into Chinese culture and life and, barring that, eradicate their society. Persecution began in earnest when the Chinese began to borrow the language of the global “War on Terror.” The Chinese deny the charges of genocide, but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to say it’s anything but that. The evidence is too strong, and it’s growing stronger. That the Uyghurs occupied land that contained sizable energy reserves didn’t serve their security in a Chinese state desperate for energy to power factories.

 

Tersun had been one of the favored few to be educated at a Chinese university in Beijing, but he began to arouse the government’s concern with the publication of his work, like his poetry collection One Hundred Love Lyrics, his novella collection Messiah Desert, and his novel The Art of Suicide which led to his blacklisting as a writer for the next 15 years  The manuscript of The Backstreets was completed in 2015 but never published in China.

 

The main character, a man, is never named. Trained at a university in the east, he works in a western Chinese city that is dominated by ethnic Chinese, although it wasn’t always so. His boss is the “smiling man,” whose smile increases the angrier he gets. And he gets very angry with the narrator, who intentionally and unintentionally doesn’t conform to expectations. 

 

Perhat Tersun

The man spends a great deal of the novel walking the backstreets of the city, trying to find his room. He’s frustrated by both a thick, almost impenetrable fog and the fear of the few people he meets. The search for his room symbolizes the search to find (and understand) his place and thus his own identity. But it never happens, and he never learns who he is, because it’s been taken away. He has memories, pleasant and unpleasant of his childhood, but his family seems to exist only in a distant past. 

 

The novel draws from Tursun’s own life – his education, his childhood, and his work in the city of Urumchi in Xinjiang. And he’s lived the experience of the Uyghurs in China. In early 2018, he disappeared. It was heard later that he’d been sentenced to 16 years in prison; the charges were unknown. 

 

The book has its own story. The translator, Darren Byler, teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and has published several books on China. He met with Tursun before the writer’s disappearance, a meeting arranged by a source only known as D.M. Another person, known as A.A., was helping with the translation. Both D.M. and A.A. also disappeared.

 

Reading The Backstreets is a sobering experience. Tursun depicts the alienation, the fear, and the persecution that happens when a person, and a people, are objectified by the state as terrorists or extremists. It’s a difficult book to read, but a necessary one.

 

Related:

 

A Uyghur Author and Translator Were Detained. Now Their Novel Speaks for Them.

“The Cultural Revolution” and “Mao Zedong”

There’s considerable renewed interest in the Chinese Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and didn’t officially end until the death of Mao Zedong in 1975. For those of us alive at the time, the reports were initially sparse; China was a closed society, and the U.S. and China did not have formal diplomatic ties until 1972.  

What we heard at the time sounded like thousands, perhaps millions, of young people had turned universities upside down, denounced professors and other members of the Chinese elite, and upended society almost to the point of breakdown. The death toll may have been in the millions; no one knows for sure, because no one kept records (and it was probably dangerous even to consider keeping records). The death toll has been estimated anywhere between hundreds of thousands to 20 million.

 

What would be apparent only much later was the extent Mao Zedong himself was involved in it. Much attention and speculation focused on the so-called “Gang of Four,” close confidants of Mao, including his fourth wife. But when people in China said anything about the group, they always held up five fingers.

The Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong are concise studies published and paired together by Captivating History. And what they make clear is Mao’s central role in starting the revolution, how he did, and, most intriguingly, why he did. The impetus for turning young people loose on their elites (and often their own parents) had much to do with Mao’s concern about his legacy, preserving Chinese communism, and retaining his own position of power.

 

His grip on the country had been slipping since the disastrous failures of his Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward. Mao was also well aware of what happened in Russia to the legacy of Joseph Stalin, dismantled and upended after the dictator’s death. And he was well aware of the propensity of the political class to turn the country into some form of state-controlled capitalistic society. The Cultural Revolution was aimed at the very people most likely to challenge Mao’s grip on the country, and millions of people paid the price for the power struggle.

 

The Cultural Revolution provides the historical background to the event, the roles of key figures involved, Mao’s motivations, the context of a deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union, the mass killings and devastation that occurred (especially in north China), how it finally ended, and what were the long-term effects.

 

Mao Zedong explains the dictator’s early life (he did not come from the peasant or working class), how he came to embrace communism, the off-and-on battles with the Kuomintang of the Nationalist Party, the mythic Long March, the battles with Japan, the victory of the communists in 1949, and then the major events of Mao’s later life, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. 

 

What is clear is that there would have been no cultural revolution without Mao Zedong.

 

Captivating History, a kind of everyman’s history series, has published about 40 of these kinds of concise history books. In addition to these two on Chinese history, other publications have tackled a wide array of people and subjects, including Harriett Tubman, War of the Roses, Aaron Burr, Aztec history, ancient Israel, Egyptian mythology, and many others. The books provide a general overview for the general reader.

 

An interesting question is why there has been a renewed interest in the Cultural Revolution, especially in the United States and Western Europe. While so-called “cancel culture” exhibits only rudimentary similarities to what happened in China, concerns about American culture and society have been rising. The verbal attacks and campaigns against university professors, the often wholesale assaults on American history, schools being renamed, statues removed (and not only those of Confederates), and the often ruthless attacks on people on social media platforms all point to some kind of American “cultural revolution” being underway. 

 

“The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai” by Ha Jin

In college, I was part of the first two classes in Chinese history, courtesy of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and their recognition of the People’s Republic. Interest in all things Chinese had surged, and my university offered the history classes. As a senior, I had rank to get into the classes. 

What surprised me was how much we learned, not only about history, but about Chinese literature. The reason was that to know the country’s history, you had to know the country’s literature. And my history class was the first place I learned about the poet considered the greatest in Chinese history, Li Po, or, as he came to be known after the Anglicized Chinese was changed, Li Bai. 

Li Bai lived from 701 to 762 A.D. during the Tang dynasty, when China was already an ancient society. An indication of his longstanding popularity, which survived dynastic change, wars, and revolutions, is that Mao Zedong loved his poetry and Li Bai’s poems are still recited by Chinese schoolchildren today. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Saturday Good Reads

One of the routine, and often daily, events in American corporate life is yet another hack or attempted hack of a company’s computer systems. A significant source of the hacks is the People’s Republic of China. The targets tend to be companies involved with cutting-edge technology. This is news to no one; it’s occasionally reported. But the Chinese government has another focus of activity – neutralizing perceived internal threats. More than a million members of ethnic minorities, most of them Muslim, are in internment camps, required to do forced labor. Some of that labor has been found to make sports clothes for the U.S. market. 

And it isn’t only Muslims who are being arrested and imprisoned. Christians are being rounded up as well. A minister who disappeared last week had given a statement to friends to publish in the event he suddenly was gone, and he explains why he had to engage in faithful disobedience. I read that story about forced labor, and the statement by the pastor, and I have to think what it means every time I buy something “made in China.” And how difficult it becomes to buy something not “made in China.”

Christmas Roundup: It’s that time of the year, and I’ve found a veritable explosion of articles, posts, and poems about Christmas. Here are a few of best:  

“Silent Night” turns 200 this year; Edward Schmidt at America Magazine asks if it’s the great Christmas song ever. Lynn Mosher asks where’s the joy of Christmas, and then poses a test to see how well you think you know the Christmas story. Eleanor Parker looks at an Anglo-Saxon poem inspired by the texts sung at Vespers at Advent. Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer has two Christmas poems: December Crawl and Singing Silently. Kingdom Poets posted a beautiful poem by Rochard Wilbur, A Christmas Hymn. And Joseph Mussomeli at The Imaginative Conservative has a great take on a popular song, The Twelve Ways to Christmas.

Everything is politicized these days, and if something’s politicized, it means there must always be a political solution (it’s a power thing). Take friendship. Lester Berg (a pseudonym) is a literary writer living in Brooklyn; he’s got all the appropriate bonafides, except he voted for you know whom. You can guess what happened. And Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition is spitting into the media narrative wind by factually assessing the claim that “81 percent of evangelicals” voted for you know whom.

More Good Reads

Faith

How Caring for the Poor Led to the Beginnings of Capitalism – Dr. Glenn Sunshine at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

The Number 1 Reason for the Decline in Church Attendance,,,and Five Ways to Address It – Thom Rainer at Lifeway Facts & Trends.

Rest for the Weary – Eileen Knowles at The Scenic Route.

Writing and Literature

A Literary Pursuit of Beauty, Grace, and Truth – Michele Morin at Living Our Days.

Why do you do this? – Janet Reid, Literary Agent.

Reign of Love: The Fiction of Wendell Berry – Eric Miller at Commonweal.

Time to Schedule Your Writing Life Tune-up – Ann Kroeker. 

American Stuff

Fredericksburg: The Way They Saw It – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

Life and Culture

Humiliation Over Honor: The Long Term Impact Of Our Cultural Losses – Scott Savage at Thin Difference.

What Happens When an Evangelical Pundit, Armed Only with 58K Twitter Followers and a Reference to the Bebbington Quadrilateral, Takes on a Historian – John Fea at The Way to Improvement Leads Home.

How to Change the World in 2019: Reduce Anger – Zak Schmoll at Entering the Public Square.

Poetry

Somewhere Else Entirely – Ruth Fainlight at The Hudson Review.

Leeks – Richard Spilman at Image Journal.

Art and Photography

Elise Ritter - Maureen Doallas at Escape into Life.

Building an Image: The first glazing layers of “Thomas Touching the Side of Christ” – Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

Water World – Tim Good at Pixels.

Hanukah 2017 – Tom Darin via Facebook.

Where Are You Christmas? – The Piano Guys with Sarah Schmidt

Painting: Wife Helen Reading, oil on canvas by Frederick Serger (1889-1965). 

Ai Weiwei: Personal Art as Public Art

Last September in London, two days after we arrived for vacation, Ai Weiwei and fellow artist Anish Kapoor (known in America for his Cloud Gate sculpture, or “The Bean,” in Chicago) led an eight-mile walk from the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly to Kapoor’s artwork “Orbit” in Olympic Park at Stratford. The refugee problem seemed to have suddenly exploded upon Europe, and the two artists believed they had to make a statement in support of the refugees. They were joined by about 100 fellow marchers and, according to The Guardian, about as many journalists.

Fragments (2005)

“Everything is art. Everything is politics,” Ai Weiwei once said. He knows of what he speaks. His life and his art have often been ensnared in Chinese government politics. The march across London was two days before the Ai Weiwei exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. Only a few weeks before had the Chinese government granted him the right to travel to London for the exhibition.

Janet standing in front of Tree (2009-2010)

My introduction to Ai Weiwei and his art occurred in the bookshop of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Only vaguely aware of the China/Ai Weiwei controversy, I happened upon his Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants 2006-2009 during a visit in 2011. In 2006, the Chinese government had encouraged him to start a blog, and he did. What no one expected was how popular it would become, both in China and around the world. And the government certainly didn’t expect the artist to be as candid (and opinionated) as he was.

In 2009, Chinese authorities shut down his blog. Since then, he’s endured arrest, surveillance, and harassment, none of which has stopped him from speaking out. Ai Weiwei is not the only artist or citizen who’s been persecuted by the Chinese government (consider the current crackdown on Christian churches in the country), but he is likely the best known globally.

Cao, or Grass (2014)

My first direct exposure to Ai Weiwei’s art was at Blenheim Palace in 2014. The palace of the Duke of Marlborough is one of those architectural treasures that are simply awe-inspiring – the house itself is seven acres under roof. It’s also the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and he’s buried nearby at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon.

In 2014, Ai Weiwei had an exhibition at Blenheim, but it was not in special show galleries. A friend met us at the Oxford train station and together we drove to Blenheim. Instead, it was spread throughout the property, from a huge chandelier in the entrance foyer to ceramic crabs in one of the ornate 18^th century furnished rooms to a ceramic video camera in the library. It was jarring to see the juxtaposition of Ai Weiwei’s art with the architecture and furnishings of the palace, but that was likely the point.

His art is simultaneously personal and public, and “public” is often synonymous with “political.” It’s meant to call attention, not only to the artist but what the artist is saying. It’s often jarring and provocative but is always thought-provoking.

Bicycle Chandelier (2015)

The 2015 Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London included some of the artworks from Blenheim but added a considerable number of others. The show as classic Ai Weiwei: the ceramic crabs from Blenheim were clustered in a corner; one room contained hundreds of pieces of rebar assembled in a wave; a poster of names and ages recorded the lives of the children who died when a school collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. (I took the four photos included here during my visit to the exhibition.)

He often uses discarded and waste materials, a kind of artistic recycling project. Several of the pieces at the Royal Academy were representative of that, using castoff metal, wood and other materials.

The Royal Academy exhibition catalog

The exhibition catalog, simply entitled Ai Weiwei, is an excellent introduction to both the artist and the exhibition. In addition to the book collecting his blog posts, two other helpful resources are Ai Weiwei Speaks, an extensive interview with curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Weiwei-isms edited by Larry Warsh, a collection of his statements on art, freedom, government, the digital world, history, and other topics.

Ai Weiwei’s statements for the refugees continue. Recently, he wrapped the columns of the Berlin Concert Hall with the discarded life preservers used by hundreds of Syrian refugees fleeing on boats.

“My activism is part of me,” he says. “ If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.” For Ai Weiwei, the personal is the public is the political, because that is where he comes from.

Top photograph: Ai Weiwei demonstrating what the artist does bet – looking and seeing.