Julian Gewirtz is the author of two new books: Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, October 2022) and Your Face My Flag: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, October 2022). He has been Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program, an Academy Scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, a lecturer in history at Columbia University, and a lecturer in history at Harvard University.
Never Turn Back
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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022
A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year
• “A delectable rehabilitation of a momentous decade... Connecting world history, development economics, and political theory with a lyrical style, Gewirtz has written an exceptionally wide-ranging book for a new generation.”—Chang Che, The New Republic
• “Vivid and readable… Exceptionally well-researched.”―Andrew Nathan, Foreign Affairs
• “Excellent… A fascinating, authoritative account of the paths for China’s future explored during a decade long buried by official, state-sponsored history.”―Julia Lovell, Foreign Policy
• “Richly researched… enhanced by access to internal Chinese documents and interviews with former officials and intellectuals active at the time.”―The Economist
• “Gewirtz looks at the road not taken―and a tantalizing glimpse, perhaps, at the political possibilities that remain still.”―Emily Feng, NPR
Your Face My Flag: Poems
• “Julian Gewirtz’s exquisite debut collection [renders] desire and self-determination…imagining the inner lives of people that the authorities would erase. His poems on western culture make an aesthetic of indirection—a Vermeer’s interiority (‘that world outside where she isn’t’), a bog body’s ‘mute deserted face’—integral to his style of erudite disquiet. The effect is austere but beautifully illuminating.”—David Woo, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
• “These poems revitalize an aspect of lyric poetry easily lost sight of—not that a poem must include history, but that a poem occurs within history and against it, too... The hope here isn’t to resolve or absolve us of our human complexity, but the ethic is better: to keep it open.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, Colorado Review
• “In a collection that’s vividly detailed and layered, Gewirtz proves to be a wonderful storyteller.”—Library Journal
Julian Gewirtz’s first book was Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2017), which The Economist called "a gripping read, highlighting what was little short of a revolution in China’s economic thought." He received his doctorate in history in 2018 from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his undergraduate degree in 2013 from Harvard College, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. From 2015 to 2016, he was on leave from Oxford and served in the Obama Administration, most recently as special advisor for international affairs to the Deputy Secretary of Energy. His research is published in Past & Present, China Leadership Monitor, and the Journal of Asian Studies. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he has also written on Asia for publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, Foreign Affairs, and Harper’s.
His poems have been published by AGNI, Boston Review, Lambda Literary, The Nation, The New Republic, PEN America, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, as well as Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. Samples of his work are here: “To X (Written on This Device You Made),” “Yde Girl,” and “Spend.” His poetry criticism and nonfiction essays have been published by The Economist, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Prac. Crit, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and the Poetry Foundation.