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Articles by Perry Link
Tiny model. Big decisions. — How I built a 144M-parameter typed decision model that routes 54% of agent decisions off LLMs
Or: why your agent's "should I run this command?" does not need a 70B chat model. Every agentic workflow I build hits the same wall: the interesting logic is 10 lines, and the other 90% is a language model deciding "allow or deny?", "which tool?", "pass or escalate?" — thousands of times a day, at chat-model prices and chat-model latency. So I built the opposite of a chatbot: Phocinae-Largha-150M-v1, a 144.3M-parameter typed decision model. It cannot generate text.
China’s ‘Low-Human-Rights’ Advantage
People in the West say they must avoid a new Cold War without realizing that they are already in one – and China is winning.
China’s ‘Low-Human-Rights’ Advantage
People in the West say they must avoid a new Cold War without realizing that they are already in one – and China is winning.
647. China Is Run by Engineers. America Is Run by Lawyers.
In his new book "Breakneck," Dan Wang argues that the U.S. has a lot to learn from China. He also says that "no two peoples are more alike." We have questions. SOURCES: Dan Wang, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. RESOURCES: Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang (2025). The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link (2025).
China Is Run by Engineers. America Is Run by Lawyers.
Episode Transcript Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Before we get started on today’s episode, I’d love your help on a future episode we’re producing — especially if you happen to be a physician. We’re looking into the doctor shortage in the U.S., so if you happen to be a doctor, we want to hear from you. I’d like to know how your workload has changed over time, maybe how your workplace has changed, or if you have anything else on the topic to say you think we might find interesting.
Life On a Blacklist
One of the questions I am asked most often is what it feels like, as a China scholar, not to be able to go to China. I have been denied visas since 1996. I do not know the reason (the authorities won’t specify), although I can see that the number of possibilities is large. On the evening of July 8, 1996, I arrived at the Beijing Capital Airport after a long, two-stage flight from Newark, New Jersey.
China’s Counter-Histories | Perry Link
The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on. In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else.
Beating a Dead Anaconda
February 4th, 2025 BOOK REVIEW: THE ANACONDA IN THE CHANDELIER: WRITINGS ON CHINA By Perry Link/Paul Dry Books Reviewed by: Martin Petersen The Reviewer — Martin Petersen is a CIA veteran, Asia expert, and a Cipher Brief Expert. He is the author of City of Lost Souls, A Jack Ford Shanghai Mystery, which was recently named Earnshaw Books Best Seller of 2024 REVIEW — Perry Link is a distinguished American China Scholar and Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.
‘Their Control Cannot Be Flawless’
What are the true lessons from Tiananmen Square? Why does nonviolent resistance offer the best chance of challenging the CCP? Hu Ping, a leading Chinese dissident, reflects on the mistakes that were made and what it will take to succeed next time. Reflections from a Chinese Dissident July 2024 Thirty-five years ago, the best chance at democratization in China in decades faded quickly when the powerful Tiananmen Square prodemocracy movement was brutally suppressed.
林培瑞：我們為什麼記得六四？
Smart Board and interactive whiteboard systems, designed for schools and office use. The perfect multi-media system for collaboration...
La cultura del miedo del Partido Comunista Chino
IdiomacatalàDeutschEnglishespañoleuskarafrançaisgalegoitalianoportuguêsromână
A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years.
A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China | Perry Link
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years.
Book Review: "I Have No Enemies" by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi
In This Review In This Review I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo There are very few icons in the chronicles of the Chinese struggle against state repression. This meticulously researched and wonderfully crafted biography will help change that. Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize winner who died while incarcerated, lived a life of extraordinary courage, sacrifice, and achievement.
Mao to Now - The Wire China
This article was originally published on China Books Review, a new sister publication of the Wire China in partnership with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations. China Books Review is a space for China bookworms, publishing commentary on China writings new and old as well as excerpts, profiles, a books podcast, and a variety of book lists, both curated and comprehensive, that keep you up to date.
China Books Review
We tend to forget that during the 1960s the U.S. officially sent more people to the moon than it did to China. In that era, the “People’s Republic” under Mao Zedong seemed not only other-worldly but quasi-metaphysical, something constructed in the mind based only on whiskers of evidence. China seemed like Shangri-la.
How Cruel Is Nature?: An Exchange | Perry Link
In response to: A Peopled Wilderness from the December 8, 2022 issue To the Editors: In “A Peopled Wilderness,” Martha Nussbaum notes that humans can “support the lives of animals,” and one tool she mentions is “spraying for tsetse flies” [NYR, December 8, 2022]. The spraying does not support the lives of the flies, of course, and for me this raises a question on which I would like to hear her always-astute analysis.
Opinion | The Korean Model for Taiwan
In the 1990s, even Beijing abandoned its rejection of the ‘one country, two governments’ formulation. By Hu Ping and Perry Link March 29, 2023 4:16 pm ET Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen is visiting the U.S., but under the odd diplomatic protocol that governs U.S.-Taiwan relations, she isn’t on a state visit or even a visit.
Does the History of Diplomacy Show the Way forward on Taiwan for US?
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal 3/29/2023 Roundup tags: China, Korean War, international relations, Taiwan, Peoples Republic of China by Hu Ping and Perry Link Mr. Hu is a Chinese dissident in exile and editor of Beijing Spring. Mr. Link is professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen is visiting the U.S., but under the odd diplomatic protocol that governs U.S.-Taiwan relations, she isn’t on a state visit or even a visit.
4/2/23 National Security News and Commentary
Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners Quotes of the Day: 1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 1, 2023 2. Top Republican calls out "geopolitical malpractice" on Russia and China threats 3. ‘When China Attacks’ – and the US goes down to defeat 4. Where Putin and Xi don’t see eye to eye 5. The Korean Model for Taiwan 6. Opinion | Centcom gets a tech disruptor 7. When Weapons Fall Silent: Lessons for NATO from the First Year of the Ukraine War 8.
How the Olympics Hurts China | National Review
Fans watch as Chinese athletes are awarded the gold medal in short track speed skating mixed relay at Beijing Medals Plaza in Beijing, China, February 6, 2022, at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters) The financial costs of the games are staggering enough, but the spiritual toll shouldn’t be ignored.
The CCP’s Culture of Fear
Roughly two thousand years ago, the arrival in China of Buddhism from India brought major changes not only to China’s belief systems but to many aspects of its daily life. Buddhism’s approach on the whole was gentle, and indigenous Chinese versions of it eventually flourished. Zen was a Chinese invention. Then, beginning about two hundred years ago, the only comparably large foreign cultural influence on China began with the arrival of British gunboats on the Chinese coast. This was more disturbing.
Opinion | Beijing Protests a Lab Leak Too Much
I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a longtime student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source.
China’s Moral Disfigurement
A soldier of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army stands in front of a portrait of the late Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, China, March 3, 2019. (Aly Song/Reuters) The Communist Party has attacked, but not destroyed, the nation’s traditional ethics In 2001 Gordon G.
China's Moral Disfigurement
Perry Link National Review April 20, 2021 n 2001 Gordon G. Chang, an American lawyer who worked many years in China, published a book called “The Coming Collapse of China.” The corruption and hypocrisy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be its undoing, Chang argued. A spirited controversy among China-watchers ensued. Nonsense — Chang is dreaming, said CCP defenders. No, it’s you apologists who are dreaming, replied CCP critics.
Stacey Abrams, Fount of Disinformation
Skip to content IN THE May 3, 2021, ISSUE Stacey Abrams, Fount of Disinformation She says there’s a new Jim Crow. Here’s the truth. Stone Age Anti-capitalism Our hunter-gatherer past helps explain opposition to free markets. America’s Microchip Slip By Oren Cass & Richard Oyeniran How to retake the lead in the great semiconductor race. China’s Moral Disfigurement The Communist Party has attacked, but not destroyed, the nation’s traditional ethics.
Seeing the CCP Clearly
Perry Link New York Review of Books January 16, 2021 For Chinese dissidents, the end of Washington’s deference to Beijing has been a long time coming. Read Full Article »
Seeing the CCP Clearly
Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images Chen Guangcheng speaking at the Republican National Convention, Baltimore, Maryland, August 26, 2020 In a speech at the Republican National Convention last August, Chen Guangcheng, a blind, iron-willed human rights lawyer and dissident from China whom the Obama administration brought to the United States in 2012, said: Standing up to tyranny is not easy. I know.
Subverting Mao: The Roots of Minjian Activism in China
SEPTEMBER 18, 2020 WHEN CITIZENS OF HONG KONG demonstrated last summer to protest the encroachment of Beijing’s rule in their city, they used some distinctive tactics. Although as many as two million people were in the streets at one point and protest activity lasted for many months, the participants did not claim an organization and their leaders kept low profiles.
China: From Famine to Oslo
1. Each year around the “sensitive” anniversary of the Beijing massacre of June 4, 1989, Ding Zilin, a seventy-four-year-old retired professor of philosophy, is accompanied by a group of plainclothes police whenever she leaves her apartment to go buy vegetables, or to do anything else.
‘What I’m Always Doing Is Escaping, Escaping, Escaping’
Liu Xia, widow of Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and died while in Chinese custody in 2017, has opened up to the public for the first time since she began a life of exile in Germany nearly a year ago. On May 4, in a dialogue with the well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, she spoke candidly of exile, memory, history, and art.
Tiananmen Square 30 years on: 30 essential stories about June 4, 1989 – SupChina
Photo by Jeff Widener, June 5, 1989 On the night of June 3, 1989, China invaded its own capital with tanks and soldiers, and by the following morning had successfully crushed a monthlong protest that top leaders believed threatened the survival of the Communist Party. The decision to use deadly force revealed a deep insecurity within the Party, one that has arguably intensified as the years have rolled on, even as the country has inarguably grown stronger in other measurable categories.
Tiananmen Square 30 years on: 30 essential stories about June 4, 1989 – The China Project
On the night of June 3, 1989, China invaded its own capital with tanks and soldiers, and by the following morning had successfully crushed a monthlong protest that top leaders believed threatened the survival of the Communist Party. The decision to use deadly force revealed a deep insecurity within the Party, one that has arguably intensified as the years have rolled on, even as the country has inarguably grown stronger in other measurable categories.
林培瑞：我们为什么记得六四？ - DW - 2024年6月4日
（德国之声中文网）我们记住六四，是因为那时候蒋捷连才17岁。今天，他仍然是17岁。他永远是17岁。死去的人不长岁数。 我们记住六四，是因为那些逝去的亡灵，始终困扰着刘晓波，直到晓波去世；亡灵们也将困扰我们，直到我们也去世。 我们记住六四，是因为刺刀上闪烁的篝火，令人难忘；即使没有亲眼看见过的人，也不会忘记。 我们记住六四，是因为它让我们看清了中国共产党的本质。在那时，这个党所有的外衣脱落在地，毫无隐藏。没有任何书籍、电影或者博物馆，能够让人看得如此清晰。 我们记住六四，是因为普通的工人倒了下去。我们不可能记住大多数他们的名字，因为我们不知道他们的名字，从来也不知道。但我们记住了他们作为人的举动，我们也记住了自己始终不知道他们的名字。 我们记住六四，是因为这是最坏的中国，但也是最好的中国。 我们记住六四，是因为它是一场大屠杀--不仅是一场镇压；不是一个事故、事件或风波；不是一次反革命暴乱，不是一个模糊的记忆；不是如同今天中国孩子所能够想起的一片空白。不是别的，是一场大屠杀。 我们记住六四，是因为，正如方励之以他的特有的幽默所说的：世界历史上很少有大国侵略他自己。...
Why We Remember June Fourth
Some people recently asked, “Why must you remember June Fourth? Thirty years have gone by. It is history. Get over it. Move on.” A simple question, but there are many answers. No single answer is adequate, and all of the answers together still leave the question hanging in mid-air, asking for more. We remember June Fourth because Jiang Jielan was 17 at the time. He is still 17. He will always be 17. People who die do not age.
‘The Events Were Regrettable’
Politicians, more than most people, need to worry about public image. It’s their job. In a democratic system, few voters know a candidate personally. The public image is what attracts or repels them. In his dealings with China, George H.W. Bush did what he could to protect his image—but paid a very high price for it ethically. In late February 1989, a month after becoming president, Bush visited Beijing and invited roughly 500 people to a “Texas barbecue” at a posh Beijing hotel.
The Secret Politburo Meeting Behind China's New Democracy Crackdown
In an NYRblog post on February 17 (“Middle East Revolutions: The View from China”), I discussed Chinese government efforts to block news of the democracy uprisings spreading across the Middle East and speculated how China’s rulers might view those uprisings.
Before the Revolution
In 2012, as he ascended to the top of the Chinese Communist Party and its government, Xi Jinping began giving speeches about a “Chinese Dream”: China was to become wealthy, powerful, beautiful, and unified. Of these four goals, wealth and power were especially important because, in an official narrative that had been repeated for decades in schools and the media, China for too long had been bullied by Western powers.
The Heritage of a Great Man
Why did communism grow deep roots and survive in China, while it withered and died in Russia? This is one of the central questions of modern history. A plausible answer to the question is that communism in China resonated with the two-thousand-year-old Confucian tradition of the wise ruler governing a harmonious society of peaceful citizens, while communism in Russia was undermined by the Russian tradition of ruthless tsars like Ivan the Terrible ruling a lawless society of oligarchs and serfs.
‘China Strikes Back’: An Exchange | by Perry Link
In “China Strikes Back” [NYR, October 23], Orville Schell sounds a much-needed wake-up call about China’s recent attitude toward the world. He notes the “China dream”—a vision of modern life that sidesteps human rights and democracy—and that the government is pushing with increasing “truculence.” He might have added that the truculence has been even stronger inside China than outside.
China: Detained to Death | by Renee Xia
On May 3, fifteen Beijing citizens—scholars, journalists, and rights lawyers—gathered informally at the home of Professor Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy to reflect on the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the 1989 June Fourth massacre in Beijing. Two days later, five of the participants were arrested and charged with “creating a disturbance in a public place, causing serious disorder.” All five remain in detention.
Beijing's Bold New Censorship | Perry Link
Authoritarians, in China and elsewhere, normally have preferred to dress their authoritarianism up in pretty clothes. Lenin called the version of dictatorship he invented in 1921 “democratic centralism,” but it became clear, especially after Stalin and Mao inherited the system, that centralism, not democracy, was the point. More recent examples of prettifying include “The Republic of Zimbabwe,” “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” and several others. What would be wrong with plainer labels?
The Specter of June Fourth
If yesterday was typical, about 1,400 children in Africa died of malaria. It is a preventable, treatable disease, and the young victims lost their lives through no faults of their own. Why it is that human beings accept a fact like this as an unremarkable daily event, whereas one murder can grab a headline, is an awkward question.
At the Nobel Ceremony: Liu Xiaobo's Empty Chair | by Perry Link
On December 10, I attended the award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the government of China had a few days earlier declared to be a “farce.” The recipient was a friend of mine, the Chinese scholar and essayist Liu Xiaobo, whom Oslo was now referring to as a Laureate and Beijing as a “criminal” serving an eleven-year sentence for “incitement to subvert state power.” Countries that have embassies in Oslo were invited to send representatives to the ceremony, but the...
Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed
In 1898, some of China’s most brilliant minds allied themselves with the Emperor Guangxu, a young ruler who was trying to assert himself by forcing through reforms to open up China’s political, economic, and educational systems. But opponents quickly struck back, deposing the emperor and causing his advisors to flee for their lives. One, however, stayed put. He was Tan Sitong, a young scholar from a far-off corner of the empire.
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xia Liu Xiaobo, mid-2000s In the late 1960s Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman, encouraged children and adolescents to confront their teachers and parents, root out “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and otherwise “make revolution.” In practice, this meant closing China’s schools. In the decades since, many have decried a generation’s loss of education.
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo | Perry Link
In the late 1960s Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman, encouraged children and adolescents to confront their teachers and parents, root out “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and otherwise “make revolution.” In practice, this meant closing China’s schools. In the decades since, many have decried a generation’s loss of education.
China’s Charter 08
The document below, signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak intellectuals formed a The Chinese document calls not for ameliorative reform of the current political system but for an end to some of its essential features, including one-party rule, and their replacement with a system based on human rights and democracy.
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