Happy FRIDAY!
This is a brief note to say thank you to all who have subscribed. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest and honored that so many people are willing to read my writing and work.
I wanted to do a brief poll to gauge interest in the kind of content and writing you would want to see. After all, there’s a lot of great substack content out there on China, but I aim to bring something a bit different—you mostly won’t find breaking news here, but you will find info on issues not often covered in mainstream media, a focus on particular cities, and hopefully-a better grasp of the diversity and sheer vastness of China by exploring specific places and specific histories.
While most of my posts have been deep dives/longform reads (and a lot on Xiong’an, given I was researching that for my dissertation), I will soon debut a few new formats including features on particular cities, book reviews, and historical dives into small or lesser known places or regions in China, and a few pieces on urban issues and infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
This poll is going to be helpful for me to know what you like to see (just to be sure I’ll keep doing my wonky urban planning stuff too), but I’m interested to see if I can broaden out to reach new audiences or stories that aren’t being told.
Thanks very much for your help and continued interest!
Hi! Thanks for the great articles! I actually wanted to pick 2 or 3 things in the poll but after I chose one I realized I couldn’t then pick any more. So just wanted to say that I’d be interested in history / profiles of individual cities, as well as social and cultural trends more generally.
I really enjoyed your Shenzhen City Report. I would be interested to be see more City Reports and perhaps some deep dives on other aspects of the Pearl River Delta, since it's such a large and consequential place.