Month: January 2016

Micro films

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Source: Shanghai Daily (1/29/16)
Short and sweet: an engaging film trend
By Xu Wei

Xu Jing’s “Taxi Stop” , an 8-minute film about love and how it affects people’s lives, won an award for best public-interest film at China International Micro Film Festival.

THE Chinese film market, second-largest in the world, is perhaps best known for fantasy and adventure blockbusters, but short films are also attracting attention on both sides of the camera.

Many young people, like Kiko Li, a 20-year old Donghua University student, are finding enchantment in smaller, more intimate cinema. Some are motivated to try their hand at filmmaking.

“I happened to see the South Korean short “You Are More Than Beautiful” when I was browsing Weibo,” said Li. “Out of curiosity, I clicked into it. It’s a romantic story and I enjoyed watching it.” Continue reading →

Discord at Voice of China

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Source: China Real Time (1/29/16)
Please Don’t Stop the Music: Discord at ‘Voice of China’ over ‘Sky High’ Fees
By Lillian Lin

Actors perform during the final round of “The Voice of China” in Shanghai September 30, 2012. Reuters

The Chinese production house behind the hit TV show “The Voice of China” raised the curtain on a dramatic reality show off the screen this week by accusing its Dutch partner – world-renowned Talpa Media – of trying to extract hundreds of millions of yuan in licensing fees.

Shanghai Canxing Culture & Broadcast Co., a leading Chinese TV producer, said in a statement posted on social media that the Netherlands-based Talpa, which owns the rights to “The Voice,” had terminated contract unilaterally after demanding that the company pay a “sky-high” fee. Continue reading →

Garbage and Landfill in Asian Docs workshop

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The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies invites graduate students to participate in the workshop “Garbage and Landfill in Asian Documentary Films.”

The workshop will be led by USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies Kiriyama Professor, Chia-ju Chang (Brooklyn College-City University of New York). Her first book in Chinese, The Global Imagination of the Ecological Communities: Western and Chinese Ecocritical Praxis (Jiangsu University Press, 2013), won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication Book Award (Social Science division).

This workshop will look at the issue of waste and excess in our contemporary societies, and filmic representations of unwanted matter, landfills and deserted places. Focusing on China and India, we will use documentary as a genre to engage discourses of toxicity, political apathy, and environmental injustice. It urges us to visualize and conceptualize an interwoven geopolitics brought together by the imbalance of hemisphere/continent, nation, race/ethnicity, class/caste, and gender, etc.

This is the first workshop in a two part series aimed at intersecting Asian Studies with the emerging field of environmental humanities. The overarching theme of this workshop is on waste in Asian Anthropocene societies as well as its cultural articulations and cinematic representations. The workshop will employ a critical eco-materialist approach to conceptualize waste matter as a unit of of material assemblage, or a thing to examine out day-to-day life’s production, biologically, materially, culturally, aesthetically, and ethically. Students will come up with their own critical perspective and at the same time gain a deeper understanding of environmental issues and cultural production in Asia. Continue reading →

Everyday Life in Mao’s China

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Source: LA Review of Books, China Blog (1/27/16)
EVERYDAY LIFE IN MAO’S CHINA: A Q&A WITH HISTORIAN COVELL MEYSKENS
By Tong Lam

新华社照片，北京，2014年3月6日 老百姓是怎样关注两会的 全国两会的召开既是国家政治生活中的大事，也与百姓生活息息相关。这组照片呈现了不同年代的群众对两会关注的场景，从中我们既可看到生活环境和社会环境的变迁，也能看到传媒技术的进步使得两会离人们越来越近。 1954年9月15日至28日，第一届全国人民代表大会第一次会议在北京召开。图为北京郊区农民收听会议实况转播的情形。　　 新华社记者 张瑞华 摄

In addition to teaching at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, historian Covell Meyskens also curates Everyday Life in Mao’s China, a website filled with photographs and other images from 20th-century China. In this interview, Meyskens discusses the project with historian, photographer, and regular China Blog contributor Tong Lam.

TONG LAM: I noticed that you have been posting a lot of old PRC photographs on your blog. Could you tell us more about this project? What are your goals?

COVELL MEYSKENS: In the early 20th century, Paul Valery predicted that one day in the not too distant future, it would be possible for someone to access information from all over the world without having to travel anywhere. With the arrival of the digital age, this prediction has become our reality. The possibilities that this condition has opened up for contemporary scholarship are truly exciting. A few months ago, I began my first venture into this realm, when I created the website Everyday Life in Mao’s China.The website came about largely by accident. Over the past few years, I had collected a number of digital photos of the Maoist period, but I had not made much of them, except as illustrations in my dissertation. Then, last fall, I began to show some in my courses to spur discussions. A few lively class sessions later, I realized how useful it would be to have a website where people could access all sorts of images of China under Mao.So, as a public service, I founded a website on life in Mao’s China and started posting photos and paintings from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s. I have chosen this broader timeframe in order to encompass China’s transition both into and out of socialism. So that people can more readily locate images about certain topics, I am careful to appropriately categorize all postings. I also try as much as possible to include their date and location. Continue reading →

Xi book and talk of plots

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Source: NYT (1/27/16)
In Book, Xi Jinping Taints Ousted Rivals With Talk of Plots
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

Chinese state television broadcasting a speech by President Xi Jinping in March. A speech Mr. Xi made earlier in 2015 appears to show his confidence in getting rid of his rivals, analysts say. Credit Andy Wong Associated Press

BEIJING — The strip lighting and plastic chairs of the Xinhua bookstore on Dongdaqiao Road don’t invite people to linger, and the government-owned store, in the basement of a mall, was deserted on Monday afternoon.

Yet something momentous was on the “new arrivals” shelf by the entrance: a book containing the first public and official declaration by President Xi Jinping of “political plot activities” by senior Communist Party officials “to wreck and split the party” — code words for a coup attempt, several Chinese analysts said. Its release was a signal, they said, that the challenge was over, that the party had agreed on what happened and that Mr. Xi wanted people to know that he had overcome his adversaries. Continue reading →

Asian urbanization course suggestions (9)

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Dr. Christopher Lupke (Washington State University) is coming out with a book, The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion. Hou was first known for his visual interpretation of rural and working class Taiwanese during its dramatic and traumatic transformation from an agricultural postcolonial to a semi-industrial economic power in the late twentieth century in the wake of the Japanese surrender. His distinctive use of editing to decelerate the pace of film narrative received the immediate acclaim of discerning film viewers. Turning to political issues in the late 1980s, he infused themes of social engagement into his highly aesthetic style of screen presentation. His later films have transported his lens to such far-flung places as Shanghai, Hokkaido, Tokyo, and Paris, as well as the ancient Tang Dynasty city of Chang’an. Lupke’s book is the most comprehensive and current treatment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work covers his entire oeuvre to date—including The Assassin––and also includes a comparison of Hou’s work and Ozu Yasujiro’s work.

Another related forthcoming book is Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (Rhodes College), which, by focusing on the narratives of the strange (zhiguai), connects the trope of ghost haunting with Taiwan’s complex ethnoscapes and historical, colonial trauma. Both books are in the Cambria Sinophone World Series headed by Dr. Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania) and would definitely be helpful material for designing Asian urbanization courses.

Brendan Moore <bmoore@cambriapress.com>

The Cowshed review

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Source: NY Review of Books (1/26/16)
China: Surviving the Camps
By Zha Jianying

Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, one of Heilongjiang's most powerful leaders, is criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard around his neck with the accusation "counterrevolutionary revisionist element," Harbin, northern China, August 23,1966

Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, being criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard with the accusation “counterrevolutionary revisionist element,” Harbin, China, August 23, 1966. Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images

By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.

At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.” Continue reading →

25 years of jazz in China

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Source: The Anthill (nd)
Twenty five years in Chinese jazz
By David Moser

Ed: This story is from the Anthill anthology book While We’re Here, published today by Earnshaw Books. Buy the book on Amazon

“What do you miss most about the US?” asked my friend Chen Xin, pouring me another beer.

“Nothing,” I said. It was 1993, and I was living in Beijing, yet even when drunk I was never homesick for America.

“There must be something,” she said, licking the excess foam off my glass.

“Jazz.”

The next day I called up her friend Liang Heping, a pianist. He told me that yes, there was a jiemu saishen(“jam session”) that weekend, and I was welcome to sit in. I was a failed jazz musician who had studied music at Indiana University, struggled to survive playing gigs in Boston for years, then finally given up to go into a field I was sure would bring in the big bucks: Chinese linguistics. I had assumed I would never have a chance to play jazz again, yet here I was in 1990s Beijing, where every week something that couldn’t possibly happen happened. A friend loaned me a battered Chinese trumpet, and I set out from Peking University, where I was studying, taking one of the infamous yellow death-trap “breadbox taxis” to Maxim’s. Continue reading →

LA exhibition on Nanjing Massacre

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This story has gotten lots of press in China. And the few US reports there are cite Xinhua. Does anyone know anything more about this museum and who’s behind it?–Kirk

Source: CCTV (1/4/16)
LA exhibition brings to light Nanjing Massacre through American eyes

A Nanjing Massacre-themed museum, the L.A. Memorial Hall of American Heroes during Nanjing Massacre, opened in the city of Los Angeles on the last day of 2015.

The opening exhibition at the museum honors 22 Americans who risked their lives to stay in Nanjing and help the locals during the 40 days of carnage – from December 1937 to January 1938 – that saw over 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers being slaughtered by Imperial Japanese soldiers.

Among the 22 individuals, 14 experienced the entire massacre after the city fell into the hands of the Japanese army; four witnessed the brutality of the Japanese invaders during the first few days of the massacre; and four entered Nanjing city at the end of massacre and witnessed some of the crimes committed by Japanese troops. Continue reading →

The awful Chinese writing system (2)

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I agree that Prof. Pullum errs, but I do not think his error is rooted — as Prof. Hayot suggests — in silly chauvinism.  Pullum’s mistake is to evaluate an organic social institution according to a rational purpose (which he feels to be self-evident) to which it is not very well suited.  He is right that the Chinese writing system is difficult to learn and imposes an apparently unnecessary labor cost on the student who wishes simply to communicate.  And there is nothing implausible about his assertion that this difficulty impedes the adoption of Chinese as an international language.

What he overlooks, as he marvels that the writing system wasn’t “ditched” long ago, is that it may serve multiple purposes, not all of them overt or even conscious.  It connects communities whose speech is mutually unintelligible; for the mandarin class, it created a barrier to entry that kept their skills rare and therefore more valuable; and it has made possible a concision with both practical and artistic benefits. It may also have fostered an education ethic that cultivates sustained attention and accurate memory.

It is possible that changes in technology (keyboard entry to digital devices) and society (the dominance, whether evolved or imposed, of putonghua) will lead to a revolution in the writing system, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

A. E. Clark <aec@raggedbanner.com>

Asian urbanization course suggestions (8)

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Some films to consider:

24 City (2008) – Plenty of Jia Jiangke films could work, but this one may fit best.

The Ball Shot by a Midget (1981)

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) – Lots on industrialization, but also urbanization, if I remember correctly.

Up the Yangtze (2007)

Yeongja’s Heydays (1975) – One of the best known examples of “hostess films” of 1970s Korea, in which women struggle any way they can to get by in the big city.

My Land (2015) – Sorry, I haven’t seen this yet so can’t attest to it’s quality. Looks good though: http://letterboxd.com/film/my-land-2015/

The Chinese Mayor (2014) – Also one I have yet to see but looks fascinating: http://www.sundance.org/projects/the-chinese-mayor Continue reading →

Uncovering Beijing’s DIY Hideaway

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Source: Pitchfork (1/13/16)
Living Rooms: Uncovering Bejing’s DIY Hideaway
BY Jamie Fullerton

The Diders perform at School Live Bar on Christmas day, in Beijing, China. December 25th, 2015.

The Diders perform at School Live Bar on Christmas day, in Beijing, China. December 25th, 2015.

In the first installment of Living Rooms: Global Punk & DIY Venues, a series that looks at DIY clubs around the world, writer Jamie Fullerton and photographer Giulia Marchi visit School Live Bar, a venue in Beijing’s Gulou area.
Gentrification has taken over on Wudaoying Hutong, once a quiet traditional residential lane in Beijing’s Gulou area. Pizza restaurants pile up next to trinket stores selling tin Camden Town signs and postcards featuring pictures of flat-faced cats. At its eastern edge an ornate single-story building houses a branch of Costa Coffee. Continue reading →

Interview with HK publisher Bao Pu

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Source: NY Review of Books (1/22/16)
‘My Personal Vendetta’: An Interview with Hong Kong Publisher Bao Pu
By Ian Johnson

Bao Pu, 2015

Bao Pu, 2015

The presumed kidnapping of the Hong Kong bookseller and British citizen Lee Bo late last year has brought international attention to the challenges faced by the Hong Kong publishing business. During a break from The New York Review’s conference on the “Governance of China,” which took place in Hong Kong earlier this month, just weeks after Lee’s disappearance, I spoke to Bao Pu, one of the Chinese-language world’s best-known publishers of books about the Chinese government.

Along with his wife, Renee Chiang, the forty-nine-year-old Bao runs New Century Press, a small but highly influential house that specializes in works about Chinese politics that would be banned on the mainland. The son of Bao Tong, the well-known policy secretary to deposed Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, the younger Mr. Bao participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and then moved to the United States where he became a citizen and worked as a consultant. In 2001, he moved to Hong Kong, working first at a high-tech start-up. In 2005, he and his wife founded New Century.

The books Bao publishes tap into a vein of political writing that challenges orthodox interpretations of Chinese Communist history; they include the secret journal of Zhao Ziyang (translated as Prisoner of the State), and Xu Yong’s photos of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Its most recent book draws on close readings of Zhou’s diaries and papers to argue that Communist China’s most famous premier, Zhou Enlai, was gay.

Ian Johnson: The books you publish are often critical of the government, or highlight forgotten parts of history that the government wants covered up. Why do you bother if you’re so pessimistic?

Bao Pu: I just do what I can. That’s the current value that I hold. I have no ambition to save China. Continue reading →

Asian urbanization course suggestions (5,6,7)

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This documentary about the former mayor of Datong is very interesting:

https://vimeo.com/121809443

Laura <leela.lettere@gmail.com>

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An American city of interest could be Los Angeles, described in the classic ‘The Image of the City’ by Kevin Lynch: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-city

Relevant European cities such as Berlin and Paris, which so inspired Asian exchange students in the early 20th century, are investigated in depth by Walter Benjamin in ‘Berlin childhood around 1900’ http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674022225 and ‘The Arcades Project’ (das Passagen-werk) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674008021 respectively. The last title is quite demanding, but reading just a few passages (ha!) would give an insight into the essence and atmosphere of European urbanism at a crucial point in its development.

Astrid Møller-Olsen <astrid.moller-olsen@ostas.lu.se>

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Perhaps BBC’s program “How China Fooled the World” will be of interest to you. This documentary takes Wuhan as an example and discusses problems of urbanization in China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwiEKVrZFWc

Best,

Haomin Gong <haomin.gong@case.edu>

The awful Chinese writing system (1)

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Pullum makes some good points! That’s why the Chinese have never managed to do anything of any historical consequence (run an empire, build a culture, write literature, discover scientific inventions, lift several hundred million people out of poverty, build the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, and so on).

Wait, what, they did these things? Well… that must have just been because they copied them from someone else. You know, those Chinese, they’re great imitators. Not like the English, who invented their own alphabet (that’s why it’s called the English alphabet!), their own numbers (that’s why they’re known as English numerals!), even their own word for the place you go to eat a nice dinner out (in French they call it a “restaurant,” those idiots).

… It’s good to see that Donald Trump now writes for the Chronicle language blog, and that he has such a distinguished pen name!

— Eric Hayot <ehayot@psu.edu>