Anne F. Thurston is a longtime China specialist and senior research professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. She has written widely about China and has spent some ten years there since her first visit in 1978. Since 2003 she has been working in Tibetan areas of China and currently directs a cooperative program with Tibetan NGOs in Qinghai, the home province of Gyalo Thondup and the Dalai Lama. She served as the ghostwriter for the worldwide bestselling 1994 book The Private Life of Chairman Mao, the story by Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, of life inside the communist party chairman’s imperial court. Her other books include Enemies of the People, based on interviews with people who were victims of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and A Chinese Odyssey, about a Chinese dissident in the late 1970s. An article she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly about orphanages in China has contributed to far-reaching changes in China’s treatment of abandoned children. |
