This episode is a special one. The podcast has a conversation with Fox Butterfield, the first correspondent for the New York Times after 1949. Mr. Butterfield set up the Beijing Bureau for the New York Times in 1979 and was the bureau chief from 1979 to 1981.

Mr. Butterfield started studying Chinese in 1958, and was a student of John Fairbank.

In this episode, I got the priveldge of interviewing Mr. Butterfield at his home. We talked about his experience with John Fairbank, his friendship with Senators John McCain and Joe Biden, his work on the Pentagon Papers and many other topics.

In today's episode, we look at a work that tackles the controversial topics of aborition and the One-Child Policy. Today's story, by Nobel-Prize Laureate Mo Yan, watches a father/government official after his wife becomes pregnant with a son. Their first child, a daughter, is not good enough for the official's dad, he wants a son. But the official is tasked with enforcing the One-Child Policy, China's draconian rule that each family was only allowed to have one child. We watch as the official forces his wife to get an abortion while explosions happen all around them.

"Folding Beijing" is one of the most talked-about science fiction stories to come out of China since Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang's story is about a Beijing divided into three parts. First Space is for the rich, Second Space is for the middle class and Third Space is for the poor, who clean up after First and Second Space Beijing. The three spaces never exist simultaneously, but rather when First Space is open, Second and Third Space are folded up and put away.

A man, struggling to put his daughter through school, agrees to take up an illegal job to smuggle a message from Second to First Space.

This is a story that is fascinating because it is all about class, even though China has been run by the CCP for almost a century. Join the podcast as we get folded into Third Space and find ourselves in a new world.