“There’s a storm coming,” Police Superintendent Killian Tong is warned in City on Fire, Simon Elegant’s third novel, “and Hong Kong will look very different when it’s over.”

Storm or fire? Whichever apocalypse one prefers, Hong Kong is well into it on the story’s first page.

It’s the summer of 2019. The pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, which got worldwide sympathy a few years earlier with images of middle-aged baldies and students fending off police water cannons with umbrellas from golf courses and 7-11s, has evolved into something more vicious and violent. The state response, especially through the new paramilitary Special Tactical Squad, is even worse. Little tragedies start occurring on a regular basis and it all seems headed to a big one like Tiananmen.

One little tragedy involved Killian, a second-generation British policeman. At a demonstration, a protester took a swing at him with a pole. Killian raised his pistol in the air but another protester pulled it down. The pistol discharged, killing the first protester.

He’s on administrative leave pending an investigation, dealing with guilt and PTSD with his dog in an abandoned police station on Deep Bay, which separates Hong Kong from the mainland city of Shenzhen. In the 1960s, desperate refugees swam across the shark-infested bay to flee to British Hong Kong, and Shenzhen was farmland.

“In the space of a few decades, the obscure Chinese county town had transformed itself into to Hong Kong’s upstart younger sibling,” Elegant writes. “Now it was daaigo, the elder brother. The boss, though most Hong Kongers hadn’t clocked that yet.”

It’s one of the quirks of action stories that when a character is suspended from duties, he reliably manages to get into major trouble, often of a highly significant nature.

A corpse has been found without head, limbs, or genitals in a landfill nearby. The force is stretched thin. “The cockroaches are going crazy tonight,” a colleague explains. “Demos everywhere.” Killian has to lead the murder investigation.

But there are two special circumstances. The murder must be kept secret, ostensibly to avoid inflaming a public that would assume it to be an extrajudicial killing by police. Secondly, it has to be solved before a major announcement about Hong Kong’s National Security Law.

While not exactly a spoiler, a thematic clue to this murder comes from where the body was discovered: on a landfill composed of garbage. “The detritus of urban life: doorless refrigerators; rusting air conditioners; kitchen cabinets covered in a thick layer of nicotine-brown grease from years of stir frying…” A scavenger on the site suffers from a boil on his shoulder and his t-shirt is “soaked with pus.” Killian’s squad car has garbage dumped on it, a sign of contempt for the “garbage police.”

It’s a city of slime. “The reek of decay hung in the air,” Elegant writes. Corruption, both private and public—ultimately at the very highest level—is the solution to the murder mystery.

As he criss-crosses Hong Kong investigating the murder, Killian is also dealing with a family crisis. His younger stepsister Jun has been radicalized and the authorities are watching her—along with everyone else. “There are already five, maybe six hundred thousand cameras,” a colleague explains to him. “In another year there’ll be a million…We have the whole city under surveillance. Every person who is considered a threat is tagged orange or red. A little rectangle appears above their heads when they show up on our screens. Red is for arrest immediately.”

Jun is flashing orange.

The siblings are trapped on ever-receding political positions—peaceful protests for democracy becoming anarchic violence, protecting and serving transforming into political oppression—and much of the tension comes from wondering how their conflict will be resolved.

Though on the opposite pole, Killian grows to appreciate the protesters.

“My generation would have said their only duty was to themselves and their families,” he muses. “It was then I realized how much Hong Kong had changed. It wasn’t the money-grubbing, materialist refugee city that was our default image of ourselves. Somehow, we’d become a people who were ready to fight for their freedoms. Ready to sacrifice.”

Jun does eventually have to make a sacrifice, though not the ultimate one.

Elegant’s first novel, A Chinese Wedding, was an exploration of a claustrophobic cross-cultural marriage in Hong Kong, where he was born and partly raised. His second, A Floating Life, was expansiveness itself. An invented picaresque memoir by Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, it offered the warp and weft of everything Chinese: smells, superstitions, Confucian conformism, mystical Taoism, brigandry, astrology, and how to trap songbirds. Not to mention classical poetic forms and viscous camel urine. Li Po embodies China’s Golden Age, and Elegant dragged him through the low of sloshing through pig feces to a vertiginous flight on the back of an eagle.

City on Fire is being marketed as a “taut thriller,” and Elegant takes to pulp conventions with gusto. Sentences chug along on a series of threes, like the book’s first: “Light flooded into the room and Killian bolted upright, heart hammering, gasping.” Bigwigs with dubious ethics flick specks of dust off bare, polished desktops. Frustration manifests itself familiarly—”Killian reached down and picked up his coffee cup, cradling it, then, without thinking, hurled it against the wall”—as does fear: “Jun felt the icy clutch of doubt on the back of her neck.” A first look at the book’s chief heavy tells all. “Rivulets of sweat ran down the side of his face and into his T-shirt, molding it around his bulging deltoid muscles. His eyes were small in that big, glistening head, flat, black shards.”

But the book’s subtitle is “A novel of Hong Kong,” and it works as a literary novel about a historical turning point told through characters whose futures depend on it. The Hong Kong portrayed in City on Fire is filthy and very dark, but ultimately not without hope. “It was going to be a long, long night,” Elegant writes. “But Hong Kong would survive. And thrive. And be free again. Maybe not this year, or the next. But one day soon.”

The spread of South Asia’s modern artistic talent in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India is being demonstrated in the region’s current art boom that has led to a record activity in London this summer. Events have spread from small venues to Tate Britain, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

This underlines London’s central role that is evident, not just in auctions generating record prices for individual artists, but in the demand for private sales and in not-for-sale exhibitions.

Following the past month’s major £19m Christie’s auction of the Goodricke tea estate’s collection, and the opening of the Hayward gallery’s Anish Kapoor exhibition, Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses both have their first non-auction exhibitions next month.

Shows by many other galleries are under way, almost all leaving aside the famous Progressive group of artists that dominates the top end of auctions.

The latest to open is Sakshi from Mumbai at London’s Mall Galleries, while Delhi-based Vadehra has a show at the Frieze in Mayfair, and Mumbai’s Jhaveri Contemporary opened an exhibition at its small private Kensington gallery last week. London galleries with exhibitions include the Victor Miro in Islington, the Grosvenor in Mayfair, and Tate Britain. Outside London there are exhibitions in Wakefield and Bradford, both adaptations of London shows last year.

Many of these exhibitions are aimed at buyers making a mid-summer visit from India and looking for art deals that they might continue negotiating when they return home. Some of the artists and galleries have also been at this year’s Venice Biennale where India had a substantial presence.

Called Unfolding Narratives, Sakshi’s week-long show celebrates the Mumbai gallery’s 40th anniversary and precedes a bigger institutional exhibition in London next year.

Six contemporary artists – Amit Ambalal, Manjunath Kamath, Ravinder Reddy, Rekha Rodwittiya, Shine Shivan and Surendran Nair – reflect the traditions of tribal art by telling stories in a modern setting. “The narrative becomes fertile ground for playful reflection, speculation, autobiographical impulses, feminist resistance and socio-political critique,” says Geetha Mehra, the gallery’s founder and director.

Reddy is perhaps the most widely known with large scale brightly coloured sculptures of heads and female figures. Sakshi says they span secular and sacred crossroads. Reddy told me when we met at the Jaipur literature festival in January that he started by shunning modern sculpture, which was “alien” to him. Instead he looked at folk, tribal and temple art for inspiration, as well as art from places like Egypt, South America and elsewhere.

Other works include Ambalal’s fun depictions of animals including a happy elephant with a bouquet of flowers. Rekha Rodwittya, whose works have been described as “strong, politically vigilant feminist”, has two large water-colours over digital prints, one titled Home is Wherever You Are. Her partner Surendran Nair has striking human figures with distorted animal heads. All three are from Gujarat that is celebrated for its Baroda school of art.

At Jhaveri, Sabrina Tirvengadum, a deaf British Mauritian artist of Indian origin based in London, has works that stem from her family’s history as indentured labour. Using AI and digital printing with collages, she reimagines old family photographs into works that she produces in runs of five. (She was featured on May 9 in the FT Weekend Magazine).

Titled A singular Modernist, Vadehra is showing large paintings, drawings and sculptures by A. Ramachandran, a prolific artist who died in 2024, and is known for his rural and tribal focus on Rajasthan. Uma Nair, a leading Indian art critic, says that “the colours, the odhinis and turbans, dhotis and lehengas and lush tropicana and insects and lotuses all celebrate fauna and flora”. Also at the Frieze is a group show by the Mumbai gallery Project 88.

Two leading artists, American-Pakistani Shahzia Sikander and N.S.Harsha from Mysore in Karnataka, are on show at the Victoria Miro gallery.

All the works by Harsha, who is represented by Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery, are believed to have been placed with collectors. His intricate, large-scale paintings mix Indian miniature traditions with contemporary imagery including people at work in the fields of Karnataka, along with another popular theme of small lamps.

In an exhibition titled High Seas; Closed Skies the works by Lahore-born Sikandar are dominated by a powerful nine-minute animation called 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. This joins the popular negative theme of empire, trade and migration that was the focus of an animation at the Singh Twins exhibition in Kew Gardens six months ago.

Started in 2015 (before the Singh Twins’ work), it is based on hand-painted images and traces the “entangled histories” of the British East India Company, the Mughal Empire and Qing dynasty along with “colonial extraction, the opium trade and contested sovereignty”. Drawing on miniature painting traditions, Sikander questions “power, identity and historical memory while offering poetic visions of resilience and renewal”.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, a young British-Bengali artist, has a small innovative exhibition at Tate Britain titled Never the Same. It consists of two collections of small paintings, enclosed in open-sided timber framed pavilions, based on two works already in the Tate collection. One pavilion titled The Spaghetti House starts with a story the artist created with his six-year-old niece and continues the spaghetti theme inside. The Lovers starts with six people in a tight embrace and continues with a love and creation theme.

Grosvenor Gallery in Mayfair will be showing paintings by Pakistani artist Jamil Naqsh, who is best known for his figurative oil paintings of women with pigeons, from next week.

In Wakefield, there is a continuing exhibition at the well-known Hepworth Gallery of 150 works by Mrinalini Mukherjee and four other leading women sculptors. This moves on from a Mrinalini retrospective in London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA) at the end of last year.

Titled Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms – Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh, it places Mrinalini, who died in 2015, with two other Indian Bengalis – her mother Leela and Meera Mukherjee (no relation) along with Novera Ahmed from Bangladesh and Pilloo Pochkhanawal from Maharashtra

The focus is on Mrinalini’s massive hanging textile sculptures and other striking bronze works. There are also drawings, etchings and watercolours, plus Ahmed’s sculptures. Here and elsewhere in the exhibition there is a backdrop of a strong green wall reminiscent of Bangladesh’s national colour, though officially it was chosen to set off the bronze sculptures.

The star piece, which was also at the RA, is Pakshi, Mrinalini’s iconic 7ft high suspended sculpture of voluminous golden-brown to pinkish red knotted hemp resembling both a deity and a human figure. Some people find works such as this one disturbing; others see sensuality and eroticism or spirituality. It is dramatically set off by larger bronze sculptures that Mrinalini worked on in her final years.

“They were five pioneers of modern art, working in the same direction in terms of craft traditions, spirituality, eroticism and the natural world,” says Laura Smith, the co-curator and Hepworth’s artistic director. “This constellation of interests and techniques is present across all of the work on show, from Mrinalini’s approach to macrame [knotting], the erotic, mythologies and nature, to Meera’s use of very traditional casting techniques and Pilloo’s incorporation of natural materials.”

In Bradford, 20 miles north of Wakefield the works of young contemporary artists from across South Asia are on show, following on from an exhibition at SOAS in London last year. This has drawn attention from the local Pakistani diaspora that makes up 25% of city’s population.

The co-curator, Manmeet Walia, told the BBC that Bradford’s history as the wool capital of the UK led to the inclusion of textiles that had helped increase the number of South Asians visiting the gallery “to explore their shared history”.

Next month’s exhibitions by Sotheby’s and Christie’s will be the first time that the two top international auctioneers have held coinciding exhibitions in London. They follow a large selling exhibition at Philips auction house last year. Both start within three days of each other in mid-July.

Christie’s announcement came first, a month ago, saying it would be displaying not-for-sale works acquired by Kiran Nadar, India’s foremost collector, for her expanding museum activity in New Delhi.

Sotheby’s followed this week, saying it would have works by six famous artists spanning painting, printmaking, sculpture and ceramics. Most will be for sale: those that are not will include works by F.N. Souza, a leading Progressive, from the Delhi-based Alkazi Collection of Art.

Also underlining the role of London is AstaGuru, a Mumbai based online auctioneer, opening an office and small gallery in South Kensington and showing works by Krishen Khanna, a leading member of the Progressives. It generated auction sales of approximately $14m this month. Market leader Saffronart, which has had a gallery in Mayfair since 2008, had $11m sales, while London-based Bonhams had a live £2.1m auction.

A new book by Japanese physician Dr. Tomoaki Takei, The Life Expectancy Gap Trap, takes up a subject that is becoming increasingly important in aging societies: how ordinary people can avoid bad medical choices and build a more reliable relationship with the right doctor.

Dr. Takei, a physician trained in both pediatrics and internal medi…

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Indian-born, British sculptor Anish Kapoor has hit the headlines with a dramatic exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery that includes three massive red sculptures and over 80 other works, many creating the enigma and uncertainty for which the artist is famous.

This is the second solo exhibition at the Hayward for Sir Anish, 72, who has a rarely-mentioned British knighthood and is one of the world’s most famous and financially successful sculptors.

It opened last week and is a magnificent and rare return to the Hayward by the artist after his first solo show there in 1998, Twenty years earlier, when he was only 24, he had participated just after he left art college in a group show titled New Sculpture with an early version of his 1000 Names piles of coloured pigments

The Hayward is one the most grim examples of Britain’s 1960s grey concrete architecture and Kapoor invades it with his strong red works. You can view them either simply as interesting visual compositions, or delve into the artist’s sometimes troubled thinking, with the aura of enigma constantly present.

The entry to the exhibition, through one of the Hayward’s insignificant small doorways, presents the immediate shock of a bright red inflated bulbous PVC membrane. Called All of Nothing and completed this year, it fills half the huge room (below), reaching up six metres to the ceiling.

There are more massive shocks in red later – a monumental installation sprawling across a room suspended from the ceiling, and another built up like a mountain from the floor, though Kapoor told the Art Newspaper: “Just because a thing is big, it doesn’t mean it’s of any interest or even good”. All three go beyond what is usually thought of as a sculpture, each filling an entire section of the Hayward.

Ralph Rugoff, who curated the exhibition and has just retired after 20 years as the gallery’s director, talked at the media preview about the PVC membrane as “this enormous bulging object….almost kissing the sides of the gallery”. It was “almost in an intimate relationship with this brutalist architecture and a love letter to this brutalist building”.

He added that it was “an enigma that you can’t see the whole thing because it blocks your way, you can’t walk around it .…squeezed by this brutalist corset”. Kapoor has echoed the thought, talking about “the body being pushed into a particular relationship between the architecture and the object that’s very important”.

In the floor above the bulbous All of Nothing, hangs what looks like an upside-down mountain suspended weirdly from the ceiling (below), creating the feeling up close of being smothered in a cave. Completed in 2022 and called Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, it defies gravity as it plunges down to just a few inches above the gallery’s floor tiles.

The title refers to the place where, in the Bible, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Art critics have interpreted the work as a mountain running red with blood as if the sacrifice had happened. “A pendulous mass of engorged scarlet and black paint on silicone, it crashes to a tip from the ceiling. An inverted mountain, the world up ended? Or cascading internal organs and raw flesh, the biblical sacrifice not averted?” suggests the FT.

On one side are three red inflatables, seemingly bulging up from the floor below as huge bags of blood. On the other side are three sacrifice sculptures wrapped in PVC “resembling body bags bursting with butchered human remains”.

Next, on a floor above, is Ha Makom (two images below), which means both Place and God in Hebrew. (Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai to a Jewish mother of Iraqi descent and a Hindu father).

“It’s a very big pigment piece and it is a very emphatic, insistent red made of bits that all sit in relation to each other,” he says. “So, what am I after? I’m after red, of course, in a very particular mood, but also otherness, the sense of this being, if you like, somewhere else, something else,” he adds, more enigmatically.

The Hayward says that the exhibition “highlights the artist’s ongoing exploration of perceptual illusions, including seemingly depthless ‘void’ works and sculptures coated with Vantablack, a light-absorbing nanotechnology so black it makes three-dimensional forms appear entirely flat when seen head-on”. The works “interrogate what Kapoor calls ‘the space of the object’, inviting us to look twice and question how we experience our environment.”

Large-scale mirrored steel sculptures stand on the Hayward’s outdoor terraces, creating reflections that distort the gallery’s rough concrete walls and London’s skyline, along with images of people viewing the works, often upside down.

I first saw Kapoor’s sculptures at London’s Royal Academy in London in 2009 and then again in Delhi and Mumbai in 2010. There was more explicit active violence in those exhibitions.

In an installation called “Shooting Into The Corner“, an iron canon shot sticky chunks of red wax across a room repetitively every 20 minutes. In Mumbai, then marking the second anniversary of devastating terror attacks, this was seen by some as symbolic of repetitive shooting and the horrors of terrorism.

In London, a massive, tracked train-like block of blood-red wax, weighing more than 20 tonnes, squeezed its way through doorways linking galleries in the Royal Academy. Some saw that as a references to the Holocaust trains that carried WW2 Jewish prisoners to death camps.

Now the active violence has been replaced with more thunderous static sculpture, which provoke thought about what has been created, so I asked Kapoor what had changed?

He replied that the violence of the 2009 work was specific to it and its context, which seems to have been to symbolise violence and tension in art-making and explore the paradoxical relationship between destruction and creation. “I carry on making my work in other ways,” Anish added. “What remains constant is a preoccupation with colour, form, and non form”.

Kapoor was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1954. London has been his main home since the 1970s, though he has properties in New York and the Bahamas. He was educated at The Doon School, known as India’s Eton, and then went to London’s Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. Providing aid for displaced and homeless communities is one of his main charitable activities.

He still shows mixed reactions to his Indian origin, as he did 16 years ago. “I have always refused to be referred to as an Indian artist,” he said in the latest issue of the Apollo art magazine. “What’s important to me is to be referred to as an artist. I happen to be of Indian origin but that’s not my purpose”.

He was relaxed and happy doing endless interviews at the media preview. When I asked him if his Indian roots influenced his current work he said, “I am Indian, so I hope so, on much of my work. India is complex and my work is complex”.

John Elliott is Asa Sentinel’s South Asia correspondent. He blogs at Riding the Elephant.

A new compendium edited by respected Tibetan scholar Vijay Kranti and published by VK media group for the Centre for Himalayan Asia Studies and Engagement (CHASE), comprises nearly 60 essays by 39 leading experts on Tibet and China, reiterating the spirit of independence of a subjugated people. Its central thesis is that China, rather t…

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A rare auction with the entire 93 lots coming from a single collection produced record sales totaling £18,91 million (US$25.37 million) at Christie’s in London yesterday. On offer was what is known in the art world as the Goodricke Collection, a name long connected with Calcutta and t…

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In less than a month, an indie film with an unknown cast became China’s second-highest grossing film of 2026. Dear You, with a modest budget of CNY 14 million (US$2.06 million), earned CNY 1.5 billion (USD 221 million) at the box office by June 5 after being released nationwide on May 3.

Its success is surely causing some consternation in Beijing. As Xi Jinping calls on media professionals to share the uplifting messages of China’s modern development through what he dubs “positive energy,” Dear You centers on protagonists eking out a living amid the poverty and disorder of the 1940s. And as the government promotes the nationwide usage of Mandarin, the film is done entirely in Teochew, a regional Guangdong dialect that few elsewhere in the country understand.

What explains its nationwide success? Viewers shed plenty of tears as they follow a series of remittance letters sent between the husband in Thailand and his wife awaiting his return at their home village. Each details the travails Chinese emigrants faced in their host society, and the longing for the family that they cannot return to. The reality of being hurt and dying all alone in a foreign land amidst the increasingly desperate calls to “come home” tug at the heartstrings of an audience aware that they are privileged enough that they need not leave in the first place.

Propaganda tool?

That inconsolable distance, however, produced not heartbreak, but dismay and suspicion among the Teochew-speaking viewers of Southeast Asia. The Singapore newspaper Lianhe Zaobao suggested that Dear You is an emotional device persuading the progeny of those original emigrants to see China as their homeland. Even though the film had no government involvement, its message inadvertently echoed the Chinese government’s message that the overseas Chinese “come home” and contribute to the mainland’s development.

The sentiment cannot simply be dismissed as paranoia, even if most of the region’s ethnic Chinese today, born and bred locally, no longer have any familial ties to China. As someone who left China at age 5, I also watched Dear You with discomfort. The film is fundamentally reductionist, presenting an extremely “clean” story of where the male protagonist’s allegiances lie in ways that I, and many other overseas Chinese I met, will perhaps never be able to have.

It highlights one extreme sentiment often expressed by the newest arrivals in the newest Chinese communities. Think of the smartphone seller in an African market town or the soybean farmer in the Russian Far East. Their personal success is almost completely reliant on China, in the form of suppliers, customers, and go-betweens that ferry goods, capital, and information between China and the host society. Economic dependence breeds emotional ties. These new emigrants want a wealthier, stronger China that can help their businesses and improve their social standing in the host society, in ways that can fend off unscrupulous locals, whether bribe-seeking officials, xenophobic neighbors, or contract-flouting partners. Dear You’s domestic audience can easily understand this perspective: living in China, they too see no reason not to want the best for where they live.

Split identity

But there is also an entirely different way for the overseas Chinese to think about social standing. Some see their acceptance hinged on outright signaling that they suffer no split loyalties and intend to contribute exclusively to the host society. They know that hostility arrives with suspicions of being a fifth column. Imagine the AI expert in Silicon Valley or the Taiwanese with big investments on the mainland. Whatever they originally felt about China, they need to verbalize their economic and emotional distance from it. And the more they publicize that distance to their families, friends, and professional networks, the distance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Personal success that came from defining themselves as “not China,” buttressed with the evidence of ever-weakening familial ties to China, only entrenches the distance over time.

The overseas Chinese’s discomfort from watching Dear You ultimately comes down to the male protagonist being portrayed firmly in the former, without giving him the room and agency to shift, even if slightly, to the latter. By portraying the non-Chinese almost exclusively as antagonists, the film implicitly closes off the audience’s imagination that an overseas Chinese’s time abroad can be anything but a temporary sojourn to escape poverty and disorder back home.

Yet, this “we vs them” portrayal discounts the vibrant ties among different communities within any host society. In my travels, it is not rare to come across Chinese workers who planned for a few years in a foreign land, but ended up building entirely new lives when they married, had children, and became part of the non-Chinese community. This shift happens despite the opportunity cost of lost ties with people “back home” or further success that could be had by moving elsewhere. Could the male protagonist have naturally gone down this path over time? The film conveniently leaves that part unanswered.

The contrast between Dear You’s resonance at home and skepticism in the diaspora comes at a time when Chinese identity has become more fraught. The China of 1940s left elicited more sympathy than hostility. Being a fifth column for a country in civil war meant little to a much wealthier host society. That China gave few usable resources for emigrants seeking more success in business or higher social standings. But as China’s rise today drives up anxieties in host societies, the overseas Chinese pay a price. Many face a new sense of urgency in assuaging their non-Chinese friends, while pondering how China’s increasing economic sophistication can translate into their own. Like me, many are constantly remolding who they are to find balance. Dear You might elicit tears, but its absolutist view of the Chinese identity does little to help with that uncertainty.

Xiaochen Su, Ph.D. is a business risk and education consultant and a regular correspondent to Asia Sentinel. He has worked in several countries throughout Asia.

In his book How to Sell a Genocide (Pluto Press), media analyst Adam H. Johnson, who clearly delivers from the left side of the political spectrum, delivers a scathing critique of how U.S. corporate media not only enabled but at times outright incited one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in recent history—the destruction of Gaza. Johnson’s media and political analysis frequently appear in progressive publications like In These Times, The Nation and The Intercept.

Through rigorous, data-driven research analyzing thousands of news stories, broadcasts, and social media posts, Johnson reveals how major outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC, systematically whitewashed Israel’s war crimes, concealed America’s pivotal role as Israel’s primary military and diplomatic backer, and stripped Palestinian lives of their humanity by portraying them as unworthy of grief or protection.

The author exposes how propaganda machinery operated through selective empathy by centering Israeli suffering while erasing Palestinian deaths, hiding the scale of civilian casualties and destruction and the relentless circulation of state-approved falsehoods. He also documents the vilification of humanitarian aid workers and dishonest coverage of pro-Palestinian campus protests. Johnson argues that the genocide could never have continued for as long as it did without the active, unwavering complicity of the US media establishment, which spun a sanitized narrative of “self-defense” and made political settlement seem impossible.

In this interview with Asia Sentinel, the author talks about how US media actively enabled the killings in Gaza, how emotive, racialized words like “massacre,” “barbaric,” and “savage” were selectively applied to Israeli victims while Palestinian deaths were rendered in sterile, medical terms, despite Gaza’s civilian toll surpassing Israel’s within weeks.

Edited excerpts:

Your book analyzes over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments to document U.S. media complicity in Gaza. Were there some specific patterns in your research, findings that convinced you that establishment media didn’t just report on but actively enabled, facilitated, and cheered on the genocide in Gaza?

The first and most obvious is the asymmetry of language in how they describe deaths. How death is covered is necessarily a proxy for humanity. And in our findings, we found that the killing of Israelis was routinely put in emotive and tabloid language, whereas the killing of Palestinians was put in sterile, almost medical terms.

Our analyses of cable networks and print media found a consistent double standard in the usage of the emotive terms “massacre,” “barbaric,” “savage,” and “slaughter” to describe the killing of civilians. By October 11, 2023, the civilian death toll in Gaza had passed that of the October 7 attack, but the rising death count and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza did not get the sympathetic, emotive treatment afforded to the victims of the October 7 attack. By the end of our 100-day survey sample for print media on January 14, 2024, the official Palestinian death toll was roughly 24,000—with an estimated 70 percent of the victims being women and children. Nevertheless, over that 100-day survey period, the use of emotive words was almost entirely one-sided in favor of Israel.

You describe the pernicious role of Center-Left media as “moats of rationalization” in their coverage of the war in Gaza. Can you elaborate on what this means and how it played out in practice?

The basic concept for this model is the nonstop destruction of Gaza for months on end, the sheer brutality and one-sidedness of which was obvious from the onset, and that was impossible for any otherwise moral person to ignore outright. So an elaborate framework of excuse-making, deflection, faux-savvy realpolitik, orientalist tropes, and glaring double standards emerged to justify the Biden White House’s lockstep support for producing carnage everyone could easily witness across their social media timelines on a daily basis. Living in a world where our government, especially a Democratic president, could not possibly be supportive of such manifest cruelty, Moats of Rationalization emerged to allow the average media consumer—and media worker—to cope with the undeniable and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes.

These Moats of Rationalization ran the spectrum from outright support for mass death to desperate liberal-left argument by Non Sequitur and argument by Trolly Problem The two most popular Moats of Rationalization, and most effective were, “Yes it’s Sad So Many Palestinians Are Dying But It’s Hamas’ Fault Because They Use Human Shields” and “Biden Is Helpless and Can’t Stop Israel Even Though He Wants To,” both which are thoroughly detailed—and debunked—in the book.

You note that loaded terms like “barbaric” and “savage”—which carry racialized connotations—were frequently used by US media when reporting on Hamas attacks. Why do you believe this loaded language was no accident, and how did it contribute to the dehumanization of Palestinians?

As Stafford Beer famously said, the purpose of the system is what it does. If racialized terms like “barbaric” and “savage” are exclusively used for racialized subjects like Palestinians and never for the military that slaughtered—at a minimum—20,000 children, then it’s fair to say the media is racist. What’s in their hearts is unknowable, but the outcome, the actual coverage, is quantifiably racist.

You also analyze some false narratives and fake news, such as the viral claim that Hamas was “beheading 40 Israeli babies,” which entered public consciousness and was repeated by American presidents. How did such false claims function as part of a broader PR campaign to obscure the antecedents of Palestinian violence?

The “beheaded babies” lie served a crucial, high-leverage function in the early weeks of the genocide. The primary goal in Washington and Tel Aviv was the removal of demands for a ceasefire from the realm of political seriousness. To do this, Hamas had to be indexed as a cartoon “terrorist” organization that kills solely for sadistic, antisemitic glee rather than being a militant group with any secular or political demands. Regardless of what one thought of their actual tactics, obviously, beheading dozens of babies would be an act of gratuitous sadism. But this story was, of course, not true, which anyone who knew anything about Hamas, and their own years-long battle against ISIS gangs in Gaza (many of which we now know were armed and backed by Israel), knew at the time. But it appealed to racist tropes about barbaric, asiatic hordes so it spread like wildfire then quietly walked back after it had served its primary, genocidal purpose.

You observe in the book that the consequences of widespread media complicity in the Gaza genocide are still not fully appreciated. Why do you think this is the case?

Because the liberal institutions that either explicitly supported the genocide or looked the other way in the first year—the Democratic Party, most universities, most nonprofits and cultural groups, The New York Times and CNN—are simply too big to fail. The genocide was bipartisan and the worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus in Washington. The only counter force pushing back against the bipartisan Zionist consensus is grassroots activists and, frankly, people’s common moral sense that the slaughter was wrong. But it had little to no institutional support, little to no money and so it could not stop the genocide. It failed, and those who backed and, in the context of the US State Department, expressly covered up the genocide, have since pivoted back into liberal think tanks, academia, and media as if nothing happened.

My conclusion, which predicted this, is proving to be correctly cynical. But large swaths of the West, as it were, see the insanity, the barbarism, the racism and remain very angry and frustrated over this. This frustration will be channeled into some type of political project; it’ll either be Tucker Carlson-type fascism or a coherent, non-sectarian left anti-imperialism. I fear, given the total impotence and nonprofit capture of the so-called “left” leaders in the US, the former is winning the moment and will, unfortunately, shape the outrage over the genocide in the coming years. This, of course, will do nothing to build long-term solidarity for Palestine and combat imperialism or Zionism but it will help sheepdog voters for JD Vance 2028 so there’s that. Basically, it’s playing out just like Jonathan Greenblatt wants it to play out.

How has the response been since the book’s publication, particularly from the mainstream press whose coverage of the Gaza genocide and Israeli actions you critique extensively in the book?

Mainstream press has entirely ignored the book and will likely continue to do so.

Could the current (and worsening) global energy crisis have one small silver lining: halting the advance of the monstrous regiment of sports utility vehicles (SUVs)?

Despite widespread advocacy by media and politicians in most countries—though notably less so in the United States—for energy savings, environmental protection, and public health, the past d…

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Octogenarian Indian tycoons in the pharma and consumer industries are believed to have been not only the buyer but also the seller of an oil on canvas (below) by Raja Ravi Varma, a famous and stylish 19th century artist, that set an unexpectedly high record price of nearly US$18 million for Indian art last week at a Sa…

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Broken incentives are draining talent from Japanese surgery, emergency care, pediatrics, and other essential fields into private aesthetic medicine in a silent but profound restructuring within the healthcare system. Historically, acquiring a medical license was viewed as a commitment to a lifetime of rigorous public service within hospitals. But today, a growing segment of young physicians is treating that same license as a highly specialized business degree.

The catalyst for this shift is a phenomenon known as Chokubi (direct-to-aesthetics)—the practice of junior doctors transitioning straight from their mandatory two-year residency into the lucrative, unregulated private aesthetic clinic sector – specialized, non-surgical, or minimally invasive medical procedures to enhance physical appearance, facial balance, and skin health via Botox or dermal fillers, laser treatments, chemical peels, and body contouring, often designed to reverse aging signs or improve skin texture.

The Japanese are highly receptive to aesthetic medicine, particularly non-surgical, low-downtime procedures, ranking fourth worldwide with a focus on subtle, natural-looking enhancements rather than dramatic transformations, with 70 percent of Japanese women aged 14-23 having had or wanting plastic surgery.

Eyelid surgery (double-lid) and facelifts are the most popular, with clinics emphasizing high-precision techniques, particularly in Tokyo. The market has been growing sharply in injectables and laser treatments, increasing by 174 percent between 2010 and 2019, driven by a focus on “natural” beauty, precision, and an aging population seeking rejuvenation.

While definitive nationwide data is difficult to aggregate given the private nature of these clinics, industry estimates suggest that upwards of 300 junior doctors annually are now bypassing essential clinical specialties in favor of aesthetic medicine. To place this in perspective, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) Physician Statistics indicates an influx of roughly 9,000 new doctors each year.

Losing hundreds of these recruits annually represents a significant, compounding drain on the talent pool. The consequence is a hollowing out of what the Japanese medical community refers to as “gritty” clinical medicine—the high-stress, low-margin, yet socially vital fields like surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency care.

The Economics of Cos-pa and Tai-pa

To understand this migration, one must examine the shifting values of modern Japanese professionals, which are increasingly defined by two concepts: cos-pa (cost-performance, or return on investment) and tai-pa (time-performance, or efficiency of time usage). The traditional path of a hospital surgeon—characterized by grueling on-call shifts, immense legal liability, and rigid hierarchies—offers notoriously poor cos-pa and tai-pa.

The economic reality driving this labor allocation is stark. In Japan, physician salaries within the public and semi-public hospital sectors are effectively capped by the government-controlled National Health Insurance (NHI) reimbursement rates. These rates artificially suppress the market value of complex, life-saving procedures. Conversely, a Chokubi doctor entering the unregulated, cash-pay aesthetic sector can easily command double the starting salary of a university hospital surgeon, while maintaining strictly 9-to-5 hours with zero on-call duties and significantly lower litigation risks. When viewed through a purely economic lens, the decision to pursue aesthetics is not a moral failing of the younger generation, but a highly rational response to a deeply flawed incentive design.

A Comparative Warning: The South Korean Paradigm

This structural vulnerability is not unique to Japan. South Korea provides a harrowing preview of the logical endpoint of these market dynamics. Both nations share a similar fee-for-service model under national health insurance frameworks, juxtaposed against intense societal pressures driving demand for aesthetic perfection.

In South Korea, the flight from essential fields recently culminated in a systemic crisis. As evidenced by OECD health data, while the overall density of doctors may appear adequate, the distribution is becoming perilously skewed. The concentration of specialists in essential medicine—such as pediatrics, obstetrics, and emergency care—is plummeting. The situation escalated dramatically in 2024 with massive medical strikes across South Korea, highlighting a system stretched to its breaking point. Young Korean doctors have been fleeing to what is colloquially known as “GP-Skin” (General Practitioner Skin Care), driven by the realization that the legal risk-to-reward ratio in essential public medicine has become entirely untenable compared to the lucrative, low-risk private aesthetic market.

Market Failure and the Loss of Public ROI

The Chokubi trend represents a classic market failure in the realm of public health. Medical education in Japan is heavily subsidized by the state; it is estimated that educating a single medical student costs the taxpayer tens of millions of yen. When these newly minted doctors immediately pivot to the private aesthetic sector, the public’s return on investment (ROI)—intended to manifest as a robust workforce providing essential healthcare—is fundamentally lost. Publicly subsidized training is effectively functioning as a pipeline for private, cash-pay enterprises.

Furthermore, essential clinical medicine relies heavily on a “master-apprentice” model of skill transference. As hundreds of doctors bypass this rigorous postgraduate training annually, the “middle management” layer of hospitals—the mid-career physicians who perform the bulk of surgeries and shoulder the burden of night shifts—is slowly evaporating. This skill gap threatens the long-term sustainability of acute care capabilities.

Strategic Interventions: Realigning the Incentives

Addressing this brain drain requires acknowledging that appeals to professional nobility are insufficient against overwhelming economic realities. Structural reforms are necessary to reclaim the profession and correct this misallocation of labor.

First, the NHI reimbursement rates require a drastic overhaul. The budget must be reallocated to significantly increase the financial value assigned to high-risk, high-stress procedures. Policymakers must make essential clinical practice competitive from a cos-pa perspective. Simultaneously, implementing robust “no-fault” compensation systems for high-risk specialties could mitigate the crippling fear of litigation that drives young doctors toward low-risk aesthetic fields.

Regulatory measures are also vital. Similar to discussions recently initiated in the MHLW’s Committee on the Appropriate Implementation of Aesthetic Medicine, Japan must consider establishing mandatory minimum requirements for general clinical experience—perhaps five years of service in essential fields—before a physician is permitted to practice independently in the unregulated aesthetic sector.

Finally, exploring mechanisms for economic redistribution is essential. Levying a targeted “social contribution tax” or licensing fee on highly profitable private aesthetic clinics could provide a dedicated funding stream to subsidize the training and salaries of surgeons and ER physicians, thereby internalizing the externalized costs of this medical brain drain.

The Chokubi phenomenon is not an anomaly; it is the predictable outcome of a system that financially penalizes its most essential workers. A society whose incentive structures reward the pursuit of beauty more reliably than the preservation of survival is a society courting a public health disaster. If Japan and nations with similar healthcare frameworks fail to align the economic realities of their physicians with the public good of their citizens, the dedicated, life-saving clinical doctor may soon become a casualty of market forces.

Tomoaki Takei is a physician at Koza Shibuya Tsubasa Clinic, Medical Corporation Tsubasakai.

With the growing popularity of mindfulness and meditation, as well as a steady stream of converts, it may seem on the surface that Buddhism is expanding around the world. But recent research paints a more complicated—and, at first glance, worrying—picture.

According to the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center, covering 201 countries and territories, Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population declined between 2010 and 2020 despite the powerful charisma of the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and global recognition as a figure of peace, and Buddhism’s rational self-help approach emphasizing inner peace, compassion, and mental discipline over dogmatic belief or divine authority.

In 2010, an estimated 343 million people identified as Buddhists globally. By 2020, that number had fallen to 324 million—a decline of roughly 5 percent. Over the same period, the global population grew by 12 percent, and all other major religious groups expanded in size. As a result, the Buddhist share of the world’s population dropped from 4.9 percent to 4.1 percent. Two major factors help explain this decline: demographics and religious switching.

Demographics

Demographic trends are not favorable to Buddhism. Nearly all Buddhists—98 percent—live in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 40 percent concentrated in five East Asian societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. These regions tend to have older populations and lower birth rates. The median age of Buddhists globally is about 40, significantly higher than the global median of 31. Fertility rates among Buddhists are also low, averaging 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population size.

As a result, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Buddhists in these five East Asian societies fell by approximately 32 million, or 22 percent.

The Problem of Definition

Yet the survey raises important questions—beginning with the issue of definition. Many people who engage deeply with Buddhist ideas and practices, especially in the West, do not formally identify as Buddhists. Mindfulness meditation, for instance, has been widely adopted in secular contexts, often stripped of religious labeling but rooted in Buddhist traditions. Similarly, Buddhism has long coexisted with other religious identities. It is not uncommon for individuals who identify as Christian or Jewish to privately draw on Buddhist philosophy. Such fluid and overlapping identities are difficult to capture in surveys that rely on fixed, either-or categories.

The China Question

There is also the question of China. Some estimates suggest that China alone may have hundreds of millions of people who engage with Buddhist beliefs or practices. Estimates of how many there actually range from 4 percent to 33 percent of its population, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, from 42 million to 362 million people. The Chinese Communist Party’s nearly 100 million members are required to be atheist, meaning any survey is likely to run into problems out of apprehension.

Measuring religious affiliation in China thus is notoriously difficult due to political sensitivities and restrictions on religious expression. Many individuals may be reluctant to identify themselves as religious in surveys, even if they participate in spiritual practices. If this undercounting is significant, it could substantially alter the global picture of Buddhism’s decline.

Religious Switching

Another key factor is “religious switching”—the movement of individuals away from the religion in which they were raised. According to the Pew Research Center, for every 100 adults raised as Buddhists, 12 convert to Buddhism later in life. Proportionally, this is a higher conversion rate than that of Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam.

However, Buddhism also experiences higher rates of disaffiliation. For every 100 people raised Buddhist, 22 leave the tradition, resulting in a net loss of 10 adherents. This trend is particularly pronounced in East Asia. In Japan, roughly half of those raised Buddhist no longer identify with the religion, while in South Korea the figure rises to six in ten. Thailand stands as an exception, where Buddhist identity remains largely stable.

The reasons for this shift are complex. In South Korea, the growth of Christianity has been driven in part by strong institutional networks and active evangelism. In Japan, the decline may reflect broader social changes, including weakening religious institutions and a disconnect between younger generations and ritual practice.

Transformation, Not a Decline

Taken together, these trends suggest not simply a decline, but a transformation. As a formal religious identity, Buddhism may indeed be shrinking. But as a system of thought—as mindfulness, ethics, and a way of understanding the mind—it appears to be spreading beyond traditional boundaries. In a world marked by the conflict we face today, with the Middle East plunged into unimaginable violence, Buddhist teachings of kindness and compassion encourage empathy, fostering ethical behavior and social harmony. Buddhism’s Middle Way offers a lifestyle that avoids the extremes of self-indulgence and severe austerity which are badly needed today. Its principle of interdependence reminds us that all life is connected.

What the data may be missing is precisely this shift: from belonging to practicing, from identity to experience. Buddhism, in this sense, is no longer something people simply inherit or declare. It is something they adopt, adapt, and live—often without naming it.

Tsering Namgyal is a Tibetan journalist and is author of three books including the novel “The Tibetan Suitcase,” a biography “His Holiness the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje: A Biography” (reviewed here in Asia Sentinel), and other works.

Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, graduated from Princeton University with a history degree and rose through WSJ’s ranks from Hong Kong intern to leading coverage of the Korean Peninsula. In between, he visited North Korea twice, in 2013 and 2017. His forthcoming book, Korean M…

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There were two stars during Delhi’s India Art Fair week earlier this month. One was Ai Weiwei, the leading Chinese dissident artist who was on his first major visit to the country. The other was Tyeb Mehta, possibly the most distinguished of India’s famous “modern” artists whose 100th birth anniversaries…

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British-Indian novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before turning to writing. His debut collection, Tokyo Cancelled—a set of interconnected stories inspired by modern folktales—was published in 2005. This was followed by his novel Solo (2009), which chronicles a Bulgarian centenarian’s reflections on 20th-century upheavals and futuristic visions. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

His 2014 nonfiction book on the impact of globalization on his adopted home city, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, received the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and nominated for the Ondaatje Prize.

Dasgupta’s most recent book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2025), traces the evolution of the nation-state system—from ancient empires to today’s tech-driven crises. It “critiques failures in addressing migration, ecology, and inequality, urging a post-national reimagining of citizenship, law, and economy.”

In an interview with Majid Maqbool for Asia Sentinel, Dasgupta—whose writings explore themes of migration, inequality, and global systems across genres—discusses growing up between two cultures that have shaped his writing and reading life, and how thinkers and writers like Marx, James C. Scott, and Thomas Piketty have influenced his intellectual and literary outlook while critiquing imperialism, capitalism, and global power structures.

Edited Excerpts:

You grew up between two cultures in England, with Indian roots shaping your sense of the world. What kinds of books did you read as a child and adolescent, and how did those early reading experiences influence the writer—and reader—you later became?

Yes, my two cultures affected my outlook significantly. I was a British kid who didn’t fit entirely into the British story, but who certainly didn’t fit into the Indian story either. So I’ve always had some dissatisfaction with the grand stories nations tell about themselves. As an adolescent, I was particularly drawn to stories of outsiders - including Camus’s The Outsider. I loved Dostoevsky.

What are some works of nonfiction that have profoundly shaped your intellectual and literary outlook, particularly influencing your critiques of imperialism, capitalism, and global power structures?

I reached adulthood in the aftermath of Soviet collapse – during the triumph of Western liberalism and capitalism. But that era was very unconvincing. It was supposed to bring peace and freedom, but the opposite was true. I tried to understand why systems built on apparently peaceful principles could never in fact be peaceful. Marx, of course, was a touchstone. But also more recent thinkers such as James C Scott, who had a clearer understanding of state power, colonialism and ecology, and Thomas Piketty, who documented the decline of Western equality.

Your recent book ‘After Nations’ examines how the empire continues to economically and politically rewire Asia. During the research and writing of this book, which texts were most central in helping you develop and sharpen its arguments?

A major theme is international law: how international law has worked to perpetuate the power relations instituted during the period of European empire, and to stop nations from rising or falling in the economic hierarchy. A few books were essential in this: Antony Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Katerina Pistor’s The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Branko Milanović’s Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2016).

I feel the implications of Chinese power are also poorly understood, partly because our conversations are very short term. With his book, The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz began a very important conversation which has been taken up by such other fascinating writers as Peer Vries and Roy Bin Wong.

For readers engaging with your latest book, ‘After Nations’, are there other books or texts you would recommend as parallel or companion readings that can deepen understanding of the issues you explore in the book?

I feel strongly that we are victims, today, of the fact that our picture of the world is very artificial. We are bewildered by the world because our stories of it are fossilized, and have little to do with the world as it actually is. Some books which can correct this: Ntina Tzouvala’s Capitalism as Civilisation; David Graeber & David Wengrow’s, The Dawn of Everything.

In your nonfiction, especially in Capital, you’ve written powerfully about urban transformation and the lived experience of cities like Delhi. Any books or texts you found especially illuminating on cities, urban change, and modernity you’ve also explored in this book?

Mike Davis’ astonishing book, Victorian Holocausts, offered a perspective I wished I’d known about when I wrote Capital. It would have expanded my sense of the traumatic history of colonial urbanism. But after writing three books about cities, I think After Nations has increased my appreciation of the global countryside. One of the most serious charges against the modern nation-state system is that it has destroyed, not only our natural heritage, but also agrarian systems and cultures. Peasants, the upcoming book by my partner, Maryam Aslany, offers a crucial corrective to the urban bias which shapes almost all consideration of “modernity”.

Is there a lesser-known or under-read book that you feel captures the current moment of xenophobia, fragmentation, and global disorder particularly well?

I see the nation-state system as a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones, and for exporting war, poverty and ecological destruction in the opposite direction. In order really to understand what our world is about, it’s essential to look at Africa, which bears by far the deepest scars of this process. Read the Congolese novelist Jean Bofane, for instance.

Is there a recently published novel or work of nonfiction that you’ve found exceptional—one you would highly recommend for both its literary merit and the clarity of its insights?

Lyn Alden’s Broken Money. In much of the world, the inability of states to supply currencies in which populations may reliably store value and transact is another major problem of our present system. She offers a provocative but fascinating account. The ever-brilliant Lea Ypi has just come out with another book, a family memoir tracing the development of Balkan states out of the Ottoman empire - more wonderful insights into the making of our “world order”.

As a writer who reads across cultures and disciplines, what kind of reading do you find yourself drawn to of late, and how does it influence the direction of your future writing?

Like many people, I’m currently finding the world as it is very wearying. Partly in preparation for my upcoming novel, and partly because it is a relief to retreat to beauty and grandeur. I’m reading a lot of Jewish philosophy at the moment. Writers on Jewish mysticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s a new world to me, and thrilling.

Although a work of fiction, this book addresses two real issues: the historic problem of the Japanese Imperial Army recruiting by deception and trafficking women and girls as young as 11 years old into providing sexual services to Japanese troops in ‘comfort stations’ across the Asia Pacific during World War II, and the ongoing global is…

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In what is regarded as an attempt to suppress press freedom in India’s troubled Kashmir region, several journalists including two reporting for national media have been summoned by authorities over their reporting without being told why, earning international criticism from national and international press organizations.

Over the past w…

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The dominant political ideology in India today is Hindu nationalism, a spectrum of thought that represents a “New India.” In the words of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Indi…

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History tells us that the first emperor of unified China, Qin Chi Huang, sent his court alchemist and sorcerer Xu Fu on two expeditions to find the elixir of immortality. We know he failed, don’t we ever, but we don’t know where Xu ended up. Legend says it was Japan.

Foreign correspondent and author Tim McGirk takes Xu’s tale much further in his novel “The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers.” His protagonist Ned Sheehan, a down-at-the-heels Indiana Jones working without tenure for a third-rate university, stumbles upon Xu’s burial tomb on a Maya archeological dig in Chiapas. Included in the tomb are hundreds of clay tablets inscribed in Chinese, which when translated, provide the back story. In an adjacent tomb, Sheehan finds another corpse buried with more grandeur. It is the mother of the first Chinese emperor, and she brings the romance promised in the book’s title.

McGirk’s Xu is a guileless monk forced into adventure by an immortality-crazed emperor. He had accidentally stumbled upon a legendary chih plant, which has the effects of Viagra. That achievement lands him on a large raft dispatched to find Mt. Penglai, the home of China’s Eight Immortals, and the elixir.

The Emperor also sends his mother as punishment for a wicked past. Empress Dowager is not a title that usually quickens the pulse, but McGirk’s Zhao Ji is hot, with wrists “as delicate as willow boughs” and fetching robes concealing “her two blushing peaches of immortality.” A fearsome storm literally throws them together, and soon the 40-year-old virgin’s Jade Stalk is finding the Empress’s Red Gate in such positions as the Tiger’s Tread and Overlapping Fish Scales, which really rock the raft.

The contemporary romance is a slow-burn between Sheehan and Li Siqin, an academic researcher escaping an arranged marriage in Harbin. She flies into Chiapas to translate the clay tablets and unwittingly becomes the contact point for a group of diabolical Chinese diplomats who get around in a silver Mercedes that “glided past cantinas that exhaled drifts of sad, wounded song.” They and a separate group of Japanese hackers believe the archeological dig promises treasure beyond the material or historical: immortality itself.

McGirk warns us on page 18 that the Chinese will not be given credit for Maya architecture or any other cross-cultural pollination. His real interest is bringing together two civilizations he covered in a long career as a correspondent, and on the most fond and respectful of terms. Along with a couple of cold-blooded murders, sea monsters, and a hero of true innocence. “You are probably the only man I’ve ever lain with who doesn’t have blood on his hands,” Zhao Ji tells Xu, “whose mind isn’t elsewhere—devising plots and schemes—as he seduces me.” I love it when you talk mayhem, Empress!

According to the Records of the Grand Historian, the first great historical work of China, the real Xu Fu brought 3,000 virgin girls and boys on his final trip to hunt for the elixir. You can’t blame McGirk for reducing them to 300 colonists from good backgrounds. If one follows Chekhov’s dictum about the loaded rifle on a stage, there’s only one way to bring 3,000 virgins to a successful dramatic conclusion, and McGirk’s two Chinese lovers could never have competed—although one suspects he would have enjoyed writing it.

Inside a dim recycling unit in Panipat, Haryana, 100-odd km north of New Delhi, 26-year-old Rekha Devi cuts through heaps of discarded clothes from Europe and America. The room vibrates with the sound of rag-pulling machines. Fibers swirl in the air before settling on her skin and hair like fine dust.

Rekha has been worki…

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