Hillenbrand interview

Source: China Digital Times (2/14/24)
Interview: Margaret Hillenbrand on Her Books “On the Edge” (2023) and “Negative Exposures” (2020).
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Margaret Hillenbrand, professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, joined CDT to discuss her two latest books: “On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China” (2023) and “Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China” (2020).

On the Edge” examines antagonistic cultural forms generated in response to the expulsion of hundreds of millions of China’s precariat from mainstream society, effectively condemning them to “zombie citizenship,” which Hillenbrand describes as “a state of exile from the shelter of the law.” The book covers a kaleidoscopic range of art: assembly line poetry, shit-eating livestreams (literally) on short video apps, and documentaries on trash, to offer but a sampling. Our conversation focuses on two forms: delegated performances, in which charismatic artists recruit vulnerable workers to participate in staged site-specific installations that often include degrading, even sadistic, elements; and “suicide shows,” in which workers stage dramatic protests on high-rise edifices and tower cranes to demand their unpaid wages. The first half of the interview is a wide-ranging discussion on the dark feelings generated by the “cliff-edge” of precarity and expulsion, and the potentially socially transformative powers of abrasive behavior, despite its obvious destructive potential.

The second half of the conversation focuses on “Negative Exposures,” a study of the relationship between “photo-forms”—photographs and their remediated renderings in other media—and “public secrecy” in China. The book makes a dramatic challenge to popular narratives of an “amnesiac China” forgetful of its traumatic past, proposing instead that the silences of the past are, at least in part, conspiratorial. (For more on “amnesia,” see CDT’s recent discussion with Perry Link on Liu Xiabo.) While readily acknowledging the state-engineered project to silence the past, Hillenbrand argues that photo-forms capture “the paradox of things that are fully known but are totally unacknowledgeable.” Silence about China’s past, in Hillenbrand’s telling, is part therapeutic, exculpatory, and self-interested—not so much a product of forgetting but rather, at least in part, of active choice. Our discussion of “Negative Exposures” focuses on photo-forms related to Bian Zhongyun, former vice-principal at an elite girls’ school in Beijing and the victim of the capital’s first recorded murder by Red Guards on August 5, 1966. In 2014, Song Binbin, daughter of a founding father of the Chinese Communist Party and former lead Red Guard at Bian’s school, stood before a bronze bust of Bian erected on the campus they once shared and tearfully apologized for her role in the vice-principal’s death. We discuss whether Song’s controversial apology “created ripples of sound” that have punctured public secrecy in China, or whether the silence of the past continues to hold. Continue reading

Youth in Chinese History project

Youth in Chinese History: bibliography and video-papers

The research project ‘Youth in Chinese History: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources between Tradition and Modernity,’ coordinated by Giulia Falato (University of Parma, former Oxford University) and Renata Vinci (University of Palermo), included the organization of the Youth in Chinese History Workshop at the China Centre, University of Oxford, in September 2023. From this rich moment of exchange and dialogue, the idea arose to create digital resources to make the research of project participants available to the academic community and a broader audience.

On the project’s website, you can consult a thematic bibliography and a video-papers series produced by project participants on topics related to education and the representation of young people in imperial times. Both resources are constantly updated, so we invite you to visit the website and subscribe to the Youtube channel. You will already find the first four video-papers, and by subscribing to the channel, you will receive a notification whenever a new video is uploaded.

Project website: www.youthinchinesehistory.com

Direct link to the thematic bibliography: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/bibliography/

Direct link to the video-papers series: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/ych-video-series/

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@YouthinChineseHistory

For further information, you can contact the coordinators at info@youthinchinesehistory.com

THIS RESEARCH PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY THE BRITISH ACADEMY AND LEVERHULME TRUST SMALL RESEARCH GRANT.

Posted by: Renata Vinci renata.vinci@unipa.it

Dalifornia

Source: NYT (2/4/24)
Welcome to ‘Dalifornia,’ an Oasis for China’s Drifters and Dreamers
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Young Chinese are flocking to the picturesque mountain town of Dali to escape the cutthroat competition and suffocating political environment of the country’s megacities.
Photographs by Gilles Sabrié. Written by Vivian Wang

People hold hands and dance in a courtyard. Mountains and storm clouds loom in the background.

Embracing one’s inner child, in Dali. Li Xiaoxue, center, moved there in August, after returning to China from Los Angeles. Ms. Li said Dali’s diversity and open-minded culture reminded her of California.

To find the dance circle in the bed-and-breakfast’s courtyard, drive north from the bedsheet factory converted into a crafts market, toward the vegan canteen urging diners to “walk barefoot in the soil and bathe in the sunshine.” If you see the unmanned craft beer bar where customers pay on the honor system, you’ve gone too far.

Welcome to the Chinese mountain city of Dali, also sometimes known as Dalifornia, an oasis for China’s disaffected, drifting or just plain curious.

The city’s nickname is a homage to California, and the easy-living, tree-hugging, sun-soaked stereotypes it evokes. It is also a nod to the influx of tech employees who have flocked there since the rise of remote work during the pandemic, to code amid the picturesque surroundings, nestled between snow-capped, 10,000-foot peaks in southwest China, on the shores of glistening Erhai Lake.

The area has long been a hub for backpackers and artists, who were lured by its cheap rents and idyllic old town, where ancient city gates and white-walled courtyard homes point to the history of the Bai ethnic minority, who have lived there for thousands of years. Continue reading

Getting jobs in China

Source: NYT (1/28/24)
What It Took Young People in China to Get Their Jobs
Not long ago, China’s economy was the envy of the world. Now a new generation of aspiring professionals is facing the toughest job market in years.
By Vivian WangAgnes Chang and 

THEY KNEW the job market would be tough. None were prepared for just how tough it proved to be.

China’s economy is struggling through a sustained slowdown, with real estate developers mired in debt, families fearful of spending and entrepreneurs hesitating to take risks. Joblessness levels among young people have hit record highs.

We spoke to five young Chinese about what it took to find their jobs amid such uncertainty. They described moving home with their parents, exhausting their savings, taking on unpaid internships or working two jobs.

They also spoke of a generational disillusionment. Born in the headiest years of China’s economic boom, they grew up with more opportunities and more comforts than their parents — and also higher expectations. They were told that, with hard work and the right education, their futures were all but guaranteed.

Now, those boom years are fading, as are many young people’s hopes — with unpredictable consequences for China and the world. Continue reading

U-lock

Source: China Digital Times (1/18/24)
Word of the Week: “U-LOCK” (U型锁, U-XÍNGSUǑ)
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This month, there have been a number of incidents—some major and some minor—that illustrate the “U-lock” mentality, a phrase that is sometimes used as shorthand to describe vitriolic xenophobic (particularly anti-Japanese) sentiment. “U-lock” refers to a U-shaped metal bicycle lock used to attack the Chinese owner of a Japanese-made car during the 2012 anti-Japanese protests in Xi’an. Ever since, Chinese internet users have used the term “U-lock” to refer to knee-jerk, xenophobic sentiment with the potential to incite real-world violence.

The “U-lock” mentality was on display in some of the rejoicing and Schadenfreude on Chinese social media after a destructive magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck western Japan on New Year’s Day of this year. Some nationalist commenters even claimed that the earthquake was “retribution” for past Japanese transgressions, from the conquest of Asia during WWII, up to and including last September’s initial release of treated nuclear wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Just a week after the earthquake came the Nanning Metro “rising sun/folding fan” flap, set in motion by a nationalistic Douyin vlogger who complained that a colorful new advertisement on the Nanning metro system resembled the controversial former “rising sun” flag of the Imperial Japanese Army. Nanning Metro quickly backed down, deleting the offending imagery and promising to improve its oversight of future advertising, but a look at the entirety of the advertisement revealed that the image was not a Japanese rising sun at all, but a traditional Chinese folding fan. Some online observers chalked the incident up to nationalist trolls attempting to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment through deliberate misrepresentation or intentional misdirection (指鹿为马, zhǐlùwéimǎ, literally “pointing at a deer and calling it a horse.”) Others characterized it as an example of “porcelain bumping” (碰瓷, pèngcí)—in other words, creating a sham scenario to fool the unwary and advance one’s own agenda. (The term was coined, noted David Bandurski, “to describe a technique used by fraudsters who would wait with delicate porcelain vessels outside busy markets and demand payment when these shattered, ostensibly due to the carelessness of others.”) Continue reading

China’s population shrinks again

Source: NYT (1/16/24)
China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again
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Faced with falling births, China’s efforts to stabilize a shrinking population and maintain economic growth are failing.
By Alexandra Stevenson and Reporting from Hong Kong

On a frozen river crowded with people, an adult wearing a heavy red coat pulls a child in a pink sled across the ice.

The frozen Liangma River in Beijing. The number of babies born in China declined for the seventh straight year in 2023. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.

It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”

The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.

China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of 2 million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The shrinking and aging population worries Beijing because it is draining China of the working-age people it needs to power the economy. The demographic crisis, which arrived sooner than nearly anyone expected, is already straining weak and underfunded health care and pension systems. Continue reading

Island in Between

Island in Between, directed by S. Leo Chiang, has been shortlisted for an Oscar in the “documentary short film” category. The film can be viewed on the New York Times Youtube site:

Here’s a synopsis:

The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. It also marks the frontline for Taiwan in its escalating tension with China. Filmmaker S. Leo Chiang weaves lyrical vignettes of tourist visits and local life with his own narrative as someone negotiating ambivalent personal bonds to Taiwan, China, and the US, ISLAND IN BETWEEN explores the uneasy peace in these islands, and contemplates Taiwan’s uncertain future.

How Taiwanese identity has evolved

Source: NPR (1/8/24)
How Taiwanese identity has evolved on the island in recent generations
By , , , , Hugo Peng

What it means to be “Taiwanese” varies from one generation to the next, influenced by the island’s complicated history with China. NPR talks with members of one family across generations.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

And I’m Ailsa Chang in Taipei, Taiwan, where I often visited as a kid because this is where my family is from, going back centuries. But, you know, all through my life, I never really thought of myself as Taiwanese, even though I grew up speaking Taiwanese. My parents always just said, you are Chinese, just like, well, someone such as Emily Feng is.

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.

CHANG: NPR’s Emily Feng covers China and Taiwan from her base here in Taipei.

FENG: But to be clear, my parents emigrated to the U.S. from China.

CHANG: That’s right. And yet, Emily, a lot of people would clump you and me together as Chinese.

FENG: Yes. And identity is a hugely sensitive issue for this island of 23 million people. Because even though more than 90% of people living in Taiwan can trace their roots to mainland China, the majority of them now identify in polls as Taiwanese only. And that’s a huge shift from just 30 years ago.

CHANG: Exactly. And part of the reason that we’re here is because there’s a really consequential presidential election this week. And for many voters, at the heart of this election is the question, what does it mean to be Taiwanese? Continue reading

Unfit for Chinese eyes, part two

Source: China Digital Times (1/2/24)
The Top ███ Chinese ██████s of 2023 (Part Two: Comedy to Tragedy)
By 

In part two of our retrospective on the most sensitive topics of 2023, as selected by our Chinese team, we focus on dissent and disasters. In part one we covered long-standing taboos on discussions about Xi Jiping and the Tiananmen Massacre, as well as the increasingly explosive problem of youth discontent. The following six themes are not the “most censored” words of 2023 but rather some of the more important censored themes. Each section will lead with censored terms and then follow with a brief explanation of their provenance and context. For more on many of these themes, see CDT’s newly launched ebook, “China Digital Times Lexicon: 20th Anniversary Edition.”

Dissident Leanings

Censored termsChizi, Wang Yuechi, Slap, Lew Mon-hung

Comedy proved a notable avenue for dissent in 2023. Chinese comedians performing abroad broke new ground with politically minded stand up routines. Many of them have paid a price for their humor. Wang Yuechi, known by his stage name Chizi, had all his Chinese social media accounts deleted after performing a North American stand-up tour during which he touched on human rights, Xinjiang, and the changes to China’s constitution that have allowed Xi to indefinitely extend his tenure as state president. One stand up comedian in China was issued a lifetime ban for an innocuous joke about the People’s Liberation Army and his dogs. Revitalized corps of “culture cops” stirred further anxieties that the space for humor is now even more tightly closed. Continue reading

China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price

Source: NYT (12/12/23)
‘I Have No Future’: China’s Rebel Influencer Is Still Paying a Price
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Li Ying used social media to help tell the world about last year’s protests. Now in exile, he has been threatened and lost his livelihood for his defiance.
By Li Yuan

An illustration of a set of stone feet on a stone platform facing a chaotic scene that includes flames, candles and flying papers.

Credit…Xinmei Liu

In November 2022, Li Ying was a painter and art school graduate in Milan, living in a state of sadness, fear and despair. China’s strict pandemic policies had kept him from seeing his parents for three years, and he was unsure where his country was heading.

In China, after enduring endless Covid tests, quarantines and lockdowns, people staged the most widespread protests the country had seen in decades, many holding roughly letter-size paper to demonstrate defiance against censorship and tyranny, in what has been called the White Paper movement.

Then Mr. Li did something that he never anticipated would become so significant: He turned his Twitter account into an information clearinghouse. People inside China sent him photos, videos and other witness accounts, at times more than a dozen per second, that would otherwise be censored on the Chinese internet. He used Twitter, which is banned in China, to broadcast them to the world. The avatar on Mr. Li’s account, his drawing of a cat that is both cute and menacing, became famous.

His following on the platform swelled by 500,000 in a matter of weeks. To the Chinese state, he was a troublemaker. To some Chinese, he was a superhero who stood up to their authoritarian government and their iron-fisted leader, Xi Jinping.

When the government abruptly ended the Covid policy last December, Mr. Li and other young activists faced a question: Was their protest a moment in history, or a footnote? Continue reading

Worldconned

Source: Uyghur Times (12/3/23)
Worldconned: How China Co-Opted Sci-Fi’s Crown Jewel Amidst the Uyghur Genocide
By Danielle Ranucci

Illustaration: IMAGE – AI image creator

Last month, Chengdu, China hosted the 81st World Science Fiction Convention. Known as Worldcon, this annual convention is the site of the prestigious Hugo Awards—sci-fi’s equivalent to the Oscars. Past Hugo winners include household names like George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. Yet as over 20,000 people flocked to Chengdu’s futuristic-looking Worldcon site, China was committing one of the largest genocides since the Holocaust.

China is detaining 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic populations in concentration camps in the East Turkestan region. Meanwhile, the regime seeks to avoid accountability and improve its image through reputation laundering, such as taking advantage of voting irregularities to become the host of the prestigious Winter 2022 Olympics. Or to buy Worldcon.

Worldcon happens in a different country each year. Countries submit “site bids” to host it—there’s no overarching organization regulating the process, and each host is independently in charge of overseeing its own year’s Worldcon.

Site bids are voted on two years in advance by members of that year’s Worldcon. Anyone can pay a fee to become a member. Members can attend Worldcon and vote on site bids. Meanwhile, people who pay to become “Supporting Members” don’t attend Worldcon, but can still submit mail-in votes for site bids.

In 2018, China submitted a bid to host the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu. Its main competitor was Winnipeg, Canada. Yet Chengdu won by a landslide: 2,006 votes to Winnipeg’s 807. More than 1,900 of the Chengdu votes were mail-in ballots, mostly from China. Of those ballots, 1,586 had no street address for the voter. Continue reading

China’s Age of Malaise

Source: The New Yorker (10/23/23
China’s Age of Malaise
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
By Evan Osnos

Twenty-five years ago, China’s writer of the moment was a man named Wang Xiaobo. Wang had endured the Cultural Revolution, but unlike most of his peers, who turned the experience into earnest tales of trauma, he was an ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life. In his novella “Golden Age,” two young lovers confess to the bourgeois crime of extramarital sex—“We committed epic friendship in the mountain, breathing wet steamy breath.” They are summoned to account for their failure of revolutionary propriety, but the local apparatchiks prove to be less interested in Marx than in the prurient details of their “epic friendship.”

Wang’s fiction and essays celebrated personal dignity over conformity, and embraced foreign ideas—from Twain, Calvino, Russell—as a complement to the Chinese perspective. In “The Pleasure of Thinking,” the title essay in a collection newly released in English, he recalls his time on a commune where the only sanctioned reading was Mao’s Little Red Book. To him, that stricture implied an unbearable lie: “if the ultimate truth has already been discovered, then the only thing left for humanity to do would be to judge everything based on this truth.” Long after his death, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-four, Wang’s views still circulate among fans like a secret handshake. His widow, the sociologist Li Yinhe, once told me, “I know a lesbian couple who met for the first time when they went to pay their respects at his grave site.” She added, “There are plenty of people with minds like this.”

How did Wang become a literary icon in a country famed for its constraint? It helped that he was adroit at crafting narratives just oblique enough to elude the censors. But the political context was also crucial. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had risked falling into oblivion, behind its comrades in Moscow. It survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era; he called for “courageous experiments” to insure that China would not be like “a woman with bound feet.” Soon, new N.G.O.s were lobbying for the rights of women and ethnic minorities, and foreign investors were funding startups, including Alibaba and Tencent, that grew into some of the wealthiest companies on earth. Young people were trying on new identities; I met a Chinese band that played only American rock, though their repertoire was so limited that they sang “Hotel California” twice a night. Above all, the Party sought to project confidence: Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, visited the New York Stock Exchange, in 1997, rang the opening bell, and boomed, in English, “I wish you good trading!” [READ THE FULL ESSAY HERE]

Shanghai’s Halloween Party

Source: NYT (11/1/23)
Shanghai’s Halloween Party, a Rare Chance for Chinese to Vent in Style
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Thousands paraded the streets in creative, joyful and provocative costumes in a four-day celebration of a city returning to life.
By Isabelle Qian and Agnes Chang

Photos by Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock and Lucas Fu

There were evil wizards, TV celebrities and undead beings, yes.

But there were also walking memes, rare public expressions of queer life, wry commentary on the state of China and at least one bipedal cucumber — a colorful burst of pent-up energy and emotion in Shanghai’s first big Halloween celebration in years.

In Shanghai, revelers have embraced Halloween, turning what started as a Western tradition into something distinctly Chinese. Over four days, they celebrated many of the things that Chinese censors normally suppress: elements of L.G.B.T. life, political and social criticism, or simply appearances that mainstream Chinese society might consider too flamboyant or strange.

This year’s celebration was also the first since China lifted its sweeping pandemic restrictions, adding to the exuberant tone of the thousands present, who laughed, mingled and delighted in each others’ costumes. Attendees said it was the largest gathering they had seen in years.

“It was a sea of joy from Huaihai Road all the way to Nanjing Road,” said Eric Ding, a 23-year-old tech worker. “Voices from all corners of the world came together here.” Continue reading

Women’s place is in the home

Source: NYT (11/2/23)
China’s Male Leaders Signal to Women That Their Place Is in the Home
The Communist Party’s solution to the country’s demographic crisis and a slowing economy is to push women back into traditional roles.
By Alexandra Stevenson

People in suits sit in rows beside and behind Xi Jinping in a room framed by red drapes.

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the state, including Xi Jinping, attending the 13th National Women’s Congress in Beijing last month. Credit…Yao Dawei/Xinhua, via Getty Images

At China’s top political gathering for women, it was mostly a man who was seen and heard.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, sat center stage at the opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the Congress was splashed on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi lectured female delegates at the closing meeting on Monday.

“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” he said in a speech, adding that it was the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

The Women’s Congress, held every five years, has long been a forum for the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate its commitment to women. The gesture, while mostly symbolic, has taken on more significance than ever this year, the first time in two decades that there are no women in the party’s executive policymaking body.

What was notable was how officials downplayed gender equality. They focused instead on using the gathering to press Mr. Xi’s goal for Chinese women: get married and have babies. In the past, officials had touched on the role women play at home as well as in the work force. But in this year’s address, Mr. Xi made no mention of women at work.

The party desperately needs women to have more babies. China has been thrust into a demographic crisis as its birthrate has plummeted, causing its population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. The authorities are scrambling to undo what experts have said is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another, such as cash handouts and tax benefits to encourage more births. Continue reading