Do you enjoy reading Peking Hotel?

Could you invite your friends to read with us?

Dear reader,

As we enter the festive season, I can’t help but feel incredibly lucky.

I first thought of collecting oral history from foreign China specialists as a Schwarzman Scholar in 2020, when I encountered many brilliant foreign professors from all over the world working on China. I studied with them and heard their stories - some combatted the AIDS crisis in China in the 90s, others met with Zhou Enlai back in the days, yet others observed rural elections at a close range. Everyone dedicated their whole lives to reading and writing about my home, China. I was inspired by the insights and experiences of my professors and recognised the great value it might bring to the world by preserving and sharing their stories. I let the idea sit for a few years, and after the pandemic, when I moved to the States, it felt like the right time to pursue the project finally.

We launched Peking Hotel back in May, not quite knowing what to expect. Seven months on, I have many reasons and little milestones to celebrate:

• We published ten Substack posts and eight podcast episodes.

• I interviewed 12 prominent China specialists with ~100 hours of recording yet to process (lots of new gems to come, I promise).

• 1,959 followers (!).

• Our subscribers live in 64 countries and 42 US states! Yes, I expected readers from the US, UK, and China. But look at the global outreach - 11 from Brazil, 5 in Nigeria, 11 in Morocco, 5 in Turkey, 2 in Kenya, 7 in the Czech Republic, 22 in Japan, and many others. Wow, this is amazing. To connect with so many people around the world is a dream come true (thank you World Wide Web). One day we have to get people together in a big party and all be friends.

  

• Our audience is 藏龙卧虎 (yes, where dragons and tigers hide and rest). I won’t name names but I see Pulitzer winners, ex-senior officials, professors, veteran journalists, ex-presidents of business associations, and CEOs of big companies. I have now developed a habit of looking up new subscribers on LinkedIn and Google, and I get humbled all the time. I know many of you have great stories to share, so please don’t be surprised if I come knocking some day.

• We are now recommended by some great names in the Substack China space:

  Sinocism
  ,
  ChinaTalk
  ,
  《人文中国》Humanities China
  ,
  Goldkorn
  , and
  PC
  . I can’t appreciate enough their generosity and support in connecting us with a broad audience of common interest. I know making Substack posts can feel lonely, so it really helps knowing there is a colleague network on Substack supporting each other’s work!

  

• Our posts attracted ~19,000 views in total and 1.9k per post on average.

• Our podcast gained ~10,800 downloads across all platforms.

Not too bad for our seven-month-old new media baby, Peking Hotel.

All of this is to say - THANK YOU. You have been an amazing audience. I have many reasons to do this project, but it is the greatest fortune of any writer to write, share and be read. And the dopamine I get each time I see a new subscriber email and check our stats certainly helps keep me going. I read all your comments, emails, notes, reports, tweets, Blueskies. You are my teachers, and as much as you read my stuff, I have learned so much from you too. Peking Hotel is a project of love. I don’t do this for money or attention, but it is really nice connecting with the global China watcher community and sharing interesting stories.

Since it’s the Santa season, let me promise you more, better content for the coming year. I am now in the middle of editing the second episode of Prof. Susan Shirk’s tenure as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. We have lots of fun goodies planned for next year, just you wait.

And I would like to make an ask. It would mean the world to us if you invited friends, colleagues, social media followers, and whoever you like to subscribe and read with us. We are not looking to go viral, but we do want to find like-minded individuals, and your referral is the best way to do so. I hope your friends will enjoy our posts and be happy that you recommended us to them! We are creating a Shoutout Section in our Substack posts and a Leaderbaord on our webpage to say thank-you to our referers.

Thank you for spreading the word out about Peking Hotel!

With love and Christmas greetings,

Leo

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!