At the Edge of Empire: A Personal History of China’s Rise

＂A sprawling, complex morality tale, sweeping us along.＂ --The Wall Street Journal

＂In telling this personal story about family memory, exile and return, the book also takes in the breadth of [China’s] evolution during the 20th century.＂ --The Washington Post

＂This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate.＂ --Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

＂Edward Wong’s exquisite family chronicle achieves a level of humane illumination that only one of America’s finest reporters on China could deliver. In tracing his father’s journey--from Hong Kong to Xinjiang to America--Wong gives us a profound story of modern China itself. Anyone who once was absorbed by the power of Wild Swans will savor this meditation on memory, history, and belonging.＂ --Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award

One of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024

An epic story of modern China that weaves a riveting family memoir with vital reporting by the New York Times diplomatic correspondent

The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he made plans for a desperate escape to Hong Kong.

When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father’s mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation’s astounding economic boom and global expansion--and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father’s footsteps, he witnessed ethnic struggles in Xinjiang and Tibet and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And he had an insider’s view of the world’s two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads.

Wong tells a moving chronicle of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into a new authoritarian age transforming the world. A groundbreaking book, At the Edge of Empire is the essential work for understanding China today.

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times who reports on foreign policy from Washington, DC. In more than twenty-four years at the Times, he has reported from dozens of countries and been based in New York, Baghdad, Beijing, and Washington. As Beijing bureau chief, he ran the Times’s largest overseas operation. He covered the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007 and reported from China from 2008 to 2016. He has taught international reporting as a visiting professor at Princeton University and UC Berkeley. He has received a Livingston Award for international reporting, and he has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation and Kennedy School Belfer Center, and at the Wilson Center in Washington. He has appeared on CBS News, MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and other major media outlets.