Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake

Hi all,

Want to share my NYR Daily piece on Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake with you: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/14/into-the-uncharted-zone-diao-yinans-the-wild-goose-lake/. You can find out if it is still shown in theaters near you: https://www.filmmovement.com/the-wild-goose-lake.

Source: New York Review Daily (3/14/20)
Into the Uncharted Zone: Diao Yinan’s ‘The Wild Goose Lake’
By Jiwei Xiao

Film Movement. Hu Ge as Zenong Zhou, back left, in Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake, 2019

The story of Diao Yinan’s new film, The Wild Goose Lake, is simple, almost allegorical: a man of the underworld is thrust onto a perilous journey to death to redeem himself. Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) leads a gang that specializes in stealing motorbikes in the streets of Wuhan. After mistakenly killing a cop on the road, Zhou knows he is doomed. So he hatches a scheme to turn the hefty bounty on his head into a final gift for his family. After a botched attempt to get his wife (Wan Qian) to report him to the police, another woman Liu Ai’ai (Gwei Lun-mei), a “bathing beauty,” steps into the accomplice role and helps him finally accomplish the mission against tremendous odds. The film ends with Ai’ai and Zhou’s wife walking together side by side, carrying a bag of cash.

Zhou Zenong is resigned to his imminent death not because the crime squad is particularly capable. In one scene in which Captain Liu (Liao Fan) gathers his team to set up the operation, the officers are so unconfident about using firearms that they ask for retraining. What really makes Zhou sure about his sealed fate is his realization that he has committed an unforgivable crime and that he cannot escape an all-out man hunt in a surveillance society. Continue reading

Coronavirus source found in pangolins

The wildlife trail re-emerges: The pangolin, known as the target of massive over-harvesting for Chinese markets, an over-exploitation which is driving the animal to extinction across the world. In the wake of the Corona epidemic some writers have tried to paint criticism of Chinese over-harvesting as anti-Chinese racism, but if you just look at the pangolin, you realize this is at best gross ignorance and at worst, papering over the speed-rushed extinction of wildlife. Criticism of unsustainable foods and fake “medical” use, like with rhino horns etc. is not racism at all. It is necessary.–Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu.

Source: Daily Maverick (2/7/20)
Coronavirus source found in pangolin meat
By Don Pinnock and Tiara Walters

A picture made available on 30 June of Hook the pangolin resting on a tree stump while zoo keeper Suman looks on in the Singapore Zoo, 29 June 2008. EPA/HOW HWEE YOUNG

As the death toll climbs in the China pandemic, researchers reveal new origins for the coronavirus in Earth’s most threatened mammal.

The deadly novel coronavirus pandemic has been traced to pangolins, the world’s most trafficked and endangered mammal, according to researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. This had been confirmed by researchers at the South China Agricultural University.

Today Our Burning Planet can reveal that DNA analysed by the Baylor researchers appears to offer a near-perfect match for the current outbreak of novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019), an acute respiratory disease that has killed hundreds. Continue reading

Perverse Taiwan

Source: China Channel, LARB (1/13/20)
Review: Perverse Pasts and Queer Futures in Taiwan
Brandon Kemp reviews the academic essay collection Perverse Taiwan

Taiwanese LGBT rights activist Chi Chia-wei (Chris Horton on Twitter).

When Taiwan’s government became the first in Asia to legalize gay marriage last May, the de facto island-nation received a flurry of positive press from international media. For a brief moment, coverage of Taiwan was not dominated by its relationship with neighboring China. Yet the open question remained of what exactly it means to be Taiwanese. The island, once home to an indigenous majority, was colonized variously by the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Chinese and still calls itself the Republic of China decades after the end of the exiled Chinese Nationalists’ one-party rule. This is despite the fact that its population increasingly identifies not as Chinese but Taiwanese.

Taiwan, in short, is a queer subject. By this, I don’t mean to repeat the cliché that it’s a gay Mecca, though it’s certainly true that Taiwan boasts a rich tradition of cultural and artistic LGBT expression. Rather, I mean that Taiwan today, with its political ambiguity, cultural syncretism, and peripheral status, seems almost impossible, or impermissible. Even as an object of scholarly inquiry, Taiwan is frequently ignored. As Sinophone scholar Shih Shu-mei writes, “Taiwan is too small, too marginal, too ambiguous, and thus too insignificant. Taiwan does not enjoy the historical accident of having been colonized by a Western power in the nineteenth or twentieth century; instead it was colonized by other Asian powers.”1 The result, she concludes, is that Taiwan has been effectively “ghettoized” within China-centric Asian studies or Sinology. Continue reading

Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance

Source: Long March Space (1/15/20)
Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance
The Drawing Center, New York
February 20, 2020–May 10, 2020

Guo Fengyi, Diagram of Primordial Positioning of the 64 Hexagrams, 1989. Colored ink on glazed printing paper, 39 x 54 cm

Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance, will be the first major institutional exhibition of the work of Guo Fengyi (1942–2010, Xi’an, China) in the United States. The exhibition will feature works from all periods of her compact yet fruitful career, including drawings executed on the backs of book and calendar pages and on cloth, as well as small- and large-scale drawings on rice paper scrolls. The exhibition will also feature sketchbooks, notebooks, and archival materials that provide context for a drawing vocabulary that osscilates between the whimsical, the systematic, and the wildly imaginative. Occupying two floors of The Drawing Center—the Drawing Room and The Lab—the exhibition will present the expanse of a career that was highly focused but at the same time inclusive of a variety of interests and obsessions, including Chinese medicine, ancient Chinese history, and a deeply personal spirituality. Continue reading

KFLC 2020 reminder

Dear Friends,

A gentle reminder on the November 11th deadline for submitting your abstract for the 2020 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, to be held in our beautiful campus from April 16-18, 2020 in Lexington Kentucky.

Please submit your abstract in the field of East Asian Studies by November 11th, 2019 @ 11:59 pm EST here: https://kflc.as.uky.edu/submit-abstract.

Warm thanks,

Liang

羅靚 Luo, Liang Ph.D.
Faculty Director, International Village Living and Learning Program
Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Kentucky, USA

Chinese orienteering team disqualified

Source: The Guardian (10/24/19)
Chinese orienteering team disqualified for cheating at Military World Games
Athletes lose moral compass after using secret paths and markings to win contest
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

Screengrab of the Chinese orienteering team disqualified from the Military World Games for cheating

The Chinese orienteering team disqualified from the Military World Games for cheating. Photograph: Tomonews.com

A Chinese orienteering team has been disqualified for cheating at the Military World Games in China.

Chinese runners in the middle-distance competition on Sunday initially came first, second, and fourth among the women and second among the men.

However, it was soon discovered that the runners had received illegal assistance from spectators and used markings and small paths prepared in the terrain that only their team was aware of, the International Orienteering Federation (IOF), whose rules govern the competition, said. Continue reading

One country, no arguments

Source: NYT (10/11/19)
China’s Political Correctness: One Country, No Arguments
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
The Communist Party has spent decades preparing the people to defend a united homeland. Hong Kong’s protests show it has paid off.
By Li Yuan

A military parade honoring the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was held in Beijing in October.CreditCreditWu Hong/EPA, via Shutterstock

Hong Kong’s protests have disrupted Yang Yang’s family life. Though the 29-year-old lives in mainland China, he was inspired by the demonstrations to write a song about freedom and upload it to the internet. When censors deleted it, he complained to his family.

They weren’t sympathetic. “How can you support Hong Kong separatists?” they asked. “How can you be anti-China?” His mother threatened to disown him. Before Mr. Yang left on a trip to Japan in August, his father said he hoped his son would die there.

Hong Kong’s protests have inflamed tensions in the semiautonomous Chinese city, but passions in the mainland have been just as heated — and, seemingly, almost exclusively against the demonstrators. Continue reading

WICL-5–cfp

Call for Papers: 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5)
http://u.osu.edu/wicl/wicl-5/

The 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5) will take place on Sunday, 19 April 2020, at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. The WICL conference — an event hosted every two years by different institutions in North America — focuses on new advances in Cantonese Linguistics, including innovations in methodologies, tools, and/or computing software. New approaches and research on language variation within the Cantonese (or “Yue”) subgroup of the Chinese language family, language contact phenomena, and new subfields and their interfaces are especially welcome.

Keynote speakers are: Professor Roxana Suk-Yee Fung (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Professor Genevieve Leung (University of San Francisco) Continue reading

China from the Margins–cfp

CHINA FROM THE MARGINS: NEW NARRATIVES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Dates: 10-11 April, 2020
Venue: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Department of China Studies, Suzhou (PRC)
Conference language: English
Deadline for abstract submission: October 31, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Late December 2019
The Department of China Studies of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University is pleased to announce a Call for Abstracts for the forthcoming conference “China from the margins: New narratives of the past and present”. The conference aims at unearthing, exploring and bringing light to stories usually left untold by historians, narratives from the margins of society, explorations of grassroots and popular culture beliefs, amusing anecdotes, items of lore, accounts of the strange and the unusual, etc. It is planned as a dialogue among scholars working in different disciplines whose research offers new approaches to China’s history and culture. The conference is designed to be an inclusive event, open to scholars working on any period of Chinese history and in all research fields, including but not limited to cultural history, oral history, art history and visual arts, literature, philosophy, culture and social sciences.

Continue reading

Looking for a room in Shanghai

Hi, please allow me to seek your attention to my fieldwork housing, if you don’t mind.

I’m looking for a room to rent for about a year in Shanghai, beginning in mid June 2019. This is for my dissertation fieldwork in cultural anthropology. My dissertation project is about environmental NGOs of today’s Shanghai. My budget is around RMB 3,000 per month. I’d like to be within an hour-long distance from North Sichuan Road (四川北路) by subway or bus. If you are looking for a roommate in Shanghai or know someone who is, kindly consider letting me know. I don’t smoke, I have no pets. My email address is goeun.lee@uky.edu and my WeChat ID is huahai14. Thank you.

All the best,

Goeun

李高恩 Lee, Goeun, MSc Social Anthropology
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
211 Lafferty Hall, University of Kentucky, USA

Contending for the ‘Chinese Modern’

Dear Colleagues,

When the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement approaches, I’m pleased to announce that my book Contending for the Chinese Modern: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China 1937-1949 (604 pp.), published by Brill, has gone to the printer and will be available soon. This book studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social subtexts, it explores how social modernity and literary modernity intertwined with and interacted upon each other in the development of modern Chinese literature. It not only makes critical reappraisement of some renowned modern Chinese writers, but also sheds fresh lights on a series of theoretical problems pertaining to the issue of plural modernities, in which the problematic of subjectivity, class consciousness and identity politics are the key words as well as the concrete procedures that it undertakes the ideological analysis. –Xiaoping Wang <wxping75@163.com> Continue reading

Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History no. 102

The latest issue of Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Vol. 102 is now available online at: http://www.mh.sinica.edu.tw/bulletins.aspx

Contents

[Articles]

Juntian Tunyong on the Nineteenth-Century Hunan Miao Frontier
By Lee Wen-liang

The Predicament of Public Administration Education at the Central Politics School and Its Solution
By Wang Chen-cheng

The Formation and Evolution of the Re-education through Labor, 1955-1961
By Xu Hetao

[Book Reviews]

William T. Rowe, Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China, Reviewed by Wang Xueshen

Posted by: Jhih-hong JHENG <bimhas60@gmail.com>

Lu Guang shows China’s dark side

Source: NYT (12/8/18)
A Photographer Goes Missing in China
Lu Guang’s images have shown the world China’s dark side.
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
By Robert Y. Pledge (Robert Pledge is an editor, curator and co-founder of Contact Press Images, a photojournalism agency.)

A factory worker in Wuhai City, Inner Mongolia, in 2005. Due to a lack of environmental safety standards they would get ill after one or two years on the job.CreditCreditPhotographs by Lu Guang/Contact Press Images

For five weeks, the world has had no idea where Lu Guang is.

Lu Guang is an internationally acclaimed photographer from China, and he has been my friend for more than 15 years. I’m proud that the agency I co-founded represents and distributes his work. We first met in Beijing in 2002. He was already a well-known and widely awarded documentary photographer in his country, and he would soon win a slew of international awards, including some of the world’s most prestigious. Continue reading