Month: July 2016

Yanhuang chunqiu files lawsuit

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Source: Sinosphere, NYT (7/15/16)
Liberal Chinese Journal, Claiming Interference by Overseers, Files Lawsuit
点击查看本文中文版 Read in Chinese
By KIKI ZHAO

Du Daozheng, who has been removed as publisher of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, in his office in Beijing in 2009. CreditShiho Fukada for The New York Times

BEIJING — A liberal Chinese journal whose publisher and top editors were dismissed or demoted this week says it is fighting back with a lawsuit.

On Tuesday, the Chinese National Academy of Arts, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and oversees the monthly journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu, announced on the publication’s website that it was removing Du Daozheng, its founding publisher, because Mr. Du, 93, is “in his advanced years.” He will be replaced by Jia Leilei, a deputy director of the academy. Continue reading Yanhuang chunqiu files lawsuit →

Epic Guan Yu statue

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Source: Popular Mechanics (7/15/16)
Incredibly Epic Statue of Ancient Chinese Warrior God Unveiled
​Guan Yu​ stands over 150 feet tall, Green Dragon Crescent Blade​ in hand. 
By Jay Bennett

CCTV News China

China just unveiled what might be the most epic statue of all time. The 157-foot sculpture of the ancient Chinese warrior-god Guan Yu stands on a 33-foot pedestal designed to look like a warship, holding a long halberd weapon known as the “Green Dragon Crescent Blade,”according to CCTV News China. Continue reading Epic Guan Yu statue →

Sixiang shi no. 6

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9789570847468With apologies for the partial self-promotion but I think it’s worth drawing attention to this timely bilingual publication from Academia Sinica, which has not been widely circulated so far.

Best,

Sebastian Veg <veg@ehess.fr>

https://www.linkingbooks.com.tw/LNB/book/Book.aspx?ID=16119706#ExtendBook

內容簡介

五四運動97週年，《思想史6：五四新文化運動》規畫「五四新文化運動」專號，收入5篇論著，1篇研究討論，以及1篇書評。

這5篇論著涵蓋了促成五四新文化運動的上層及下層結構，主題包括胡適、章太炎、魯迅等大知識分子的作用，以及江南地方士人階層呈現出的「下行」現象；另有1篇以色列青年學者Shakhar Rahav觀察五四運動相關視覺素材（海報、繪畫、郵票、漫畫）演變，討論從97年前的舊中國到全球化浪潮下的當代中國，對五四運動的詮釋有什麼樣的變遷。 Continue reading Sixiang shi no. 6 →

The American Chinese movie star

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Source: NYT (7/14/16)
The American Who Accidentally Became a Chinese Movie Star
The journey of Jonathan Kos-Read, better known as Cao Cao, is a good guide for anyone seeking to make it in China’s budding, chaotic film industry.
By MITCH MOXLEY
Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版

caocao1-facebookJumbo-v2

Every foreigner living in China has his share of China Stories. Jonathan Kos-Read has more than his share. Here’s one: Not long ago, the 43-year-old American actor received a call with an offer to appear in “Ip Man 3,” the third in a series of biopics about Bruce Lee’s martial-arts master. The role was small, but his agent negotiated what Kos-Read considered an “outrageous” amount of money for it, and the producers agreed. Kos-Read was thrilled until he read the script and noticed another part for a foreign actor — a bigger and better role as a mobster named Frank.

This was troubling. Kos-Read, who is known in China only as Cao Cao, is by far the leading foreign actor working in the country today, having appeared in about 100 movies and television programs since his career began in 1999. He is famous throughout the mainland, and his career has been on a steady upward trajectory. Last December he appeared in the action film “Mojin — The Lost Legend,” currently the fifth-highest-grossing movie in Chinese history. Who, Kos-Read wondered, would the producers have cast instead of him? Continue reading The American Chinese movie star →

Forgotten life of H. T. Tsiang

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Source: The New Yorker (7/14/16)
THE REMARKABLE FORGOTTEN LIFE OF H. T. TSIANG
By Hua Hsu

Hsu-Tsiang-921

H. T. Tsiang on the set of “Kraft Mystery Theatre.” COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS LICENSING LLC

In the nineteen-thirties, “The Good Earth,” by Pearl S. Buck, was inescapable. The tale of a noble Chinese farmer and his struggles against famine, political upheaval, and personal temptation, the book was an immediate success upon publication, in 1931. Buck was born in West Virginia, but she was raised in rural China, the daughter of American missionaries, and she resisted the sense of Christian superiority many within her circle felt toward the “heathen” Chinese. “When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings,” she later recalled. Her sympathetic backstory gave “The Good Earth” a rare kind of authority: it was billed as an authentic tale of a distant, windswept China, but its author was a white American, and it told the kind of story that Americans grappling with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl wanted to hear—of hard work, perseverance, and triumph in the face of natural disaster and corruption. Continue reading Forgotten life of H. T. Tsiang →

HK student faces criticism over photo

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Source: Ejinsight (7/14/16)
HK student faces criticism in China over award-winning photo

Jimmi Ho's award-winning picture of a university dormitory building has sparked intense discussion in online forums on the mainland. Photo: travel.nationalgeographic.com

Jimmi Ho’s award-winning picture of a university dormitory building has sparked intense discussion in online forums on the mainland. Photo: travel.nationalgeographic.com

A Hong Kong student’s award-winning snapshot of a university dormitory building in Guangzhou has sparked heated discussions in online forums, with mainland citizens taking offense at the picture’s original caption.

Jimmi Ho Wing-ka’s photo, titled Silenced, was captured last year at South China Normal University, showing a highly dense dormitory with clothes hanging outside the rooms.

The picture won the second place in the city categories in the 2016 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest. Continue reading HK student faces criticism over photo →

Why translations of premodern poetry are having their moment

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Source: LA Review of Books (7/14/16)
Tribunals of Erudition and Taste: or, Why Translations of Premodern Chinese Poetry Are Having a Moment Right Now
By Lucas Klein

POETRY TRANSLATION, though Americans generally pay little attention to it, is a contentious domain. Consider Matthew Arnold and Francis W. Newman’s argument about the essence of a translated literary work, and whether taste or scholarship should determine poetry translations. In “The Translator’s Tribunal” (1861), right after the Second Opium War (1856–’60) and the British army’s burning of the Summer Palaces in Beijing, Arnold wrote against popular and popularizing poetry translations such as Alexander Pope’s of Homer (1715–1720, 1726), claiming that the translator “is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him.” Newman responded nearly a decade later, in 1870, that scholars may constitute “the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge.” Though they were not writing in direct reference to Chinese literature, or even imperialism and trade, their debate nevertheless has shaped much current thinking not only about translation, but also about China. Continue reading Why translations of premodern poetry are having their moment →

Chinoperl 35.1

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The latest issue of CHINOPERL: Journal of Oral and Performing Literature (July 2016) is now available online at

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ychi20/35/1.

Information on the journal, membership and individual subscriptions is available at https://chinoperl.osu.edu/journal.

In this issue:

untitledARTICLES

Maids, Fishermen, and Storytellers: Rewriting Marginal Characters in Early Qing Drama and Fiction
MARIA FRANCA SIBAU

Liu Qingti’s Canine Rebirth and Her Ritual Career as the Heavenly Dog: Recasting Mulian’s Mother in Baojuan (Precious Scrolls) Recitation
XIAOSU SUN

BOOK REVIEWS

La réforme de l’opéra de Pékin [Peking opera reform]. By Maël Renouard
JOSH STENBERG

Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History. By James A. Benn.
PETER MICIC               

Urban Politics and Cultural Capital: The Case of Chinese Opera. By Ma Haili.
EMILY E. WILCOX Continue reading Chinoperl 35.1 →

China Paw-litics, anyone? (1)

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What You Don’t See Doesn’t Exist

I was happy to read recently on the MCLC LIST a text on animals and China. Haiyan Lee’s text “China Paw-litics, anyone?” — first published in the China Policy Institute blog, University of Nottingham (7/7/16) — emboldened me to write this response. As I’m presently doing research on dogs and China, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the dog eating business in China today. While critical attention, in and outside China, is turning a horrified gaze on the annual Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival, I would like to gain some perspective by looking back to the Han dynasty, a time when human-dog relations were viewed as complex, and the status of the dog was high. Inhumane slaughtering techniques and dog flesh recipes have existed throughout China’s long history. The difference is that, toward the end of the Han dynasty, dog ceased to be a prized meat, and the business itself — the butchering and selling — was relegated to the wretched of the earth. Blame the poor. Or blame Buddhism, which prohibited the consumption of the flesh of animals working with humans. By the Eastern Han dynasty, dog meat was three times cheaper than a pig’s and barely more expensive than chicken or rabbit. (Roel Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China, p. 26.) By the Tang dynasty, dog meat was consumed in fixed seasons for its purported health giving qualities (Edward H. Schafer, Food in Chinese Culture, p. 99). Here of course we are speaking of the habits of full-fledged citizens. The peasants, the poor, the outcasts eat dogs; but not those with the means to assume moral superiority. Continue reading China Paw-litics, anyone? (1) →

Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China

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Source: China Daily (7/13/16)
History matters
By Andrew Moody (China Daily)
Scholar’s compilation of the story of modern China is an Oxford first, Andrew Moody reports.

History matters

[Photo provided to China Daily]

Jeffrey Wasserstrom says it is a challenge to be a historian of China because it is a country where history always matters.

“I think history has always been seen as significant on multiple different levels and is significant in different ways,” the 55-year-old says.

The leading American China expert was speaking in the Bedford Hotel in London, where he was appearing at a series of events to launch The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, of which he is the editor.

“One of the first tasks of each new dynasty has been to write a history of the previous one and use the story to explain or justify the new arrangements. The historian therefore has a special role,” he adds.

The book, which has taken four years to produce, is the first significant Oxford history of China. Cambridge University, seen as the birthplace of Sinology and where Wade and Giles invented the first Romanization system for Chinese, has its own famous history of the former Middle Kingdom. Continue reading Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China →

How a Taipei Girl Sees the Mainland

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Source: Global Times (7/10/16)
Taiwan author tries to build bridges with new book
By Huang Tingting

The cover of How a Taipei Girl Sees the Chinese Mainland Photo: Courtesy of Guo Xueyun

“The Chinese mainland is more open than we thought and is by no means ‘as closed a country as North Korea’ like people in Taiwan think it is!”

“I am sick of hearing clichés about how dirty and disorderly the mainland still is… According to an old Taiwanese granny who traveled with us to Guizhou Province in 2009, Taiwan was just as terrible as we think the mainland is now back in the day… Progress takes time. I learned to cast aside unnecessary prejudice to enjoy the beauty of this land.”

The quotes above are from How a Taipei Girl Sees the Chinese Mainland, a small book that has sparked heated debates on both sides of the Straits.

Taiwan’s official Central News Agency covered the book in late May, when Tsai Ing-wen, head of the Democratic Progressive Party, was sworn in to become the province’s first female leader. Continue reading How a Taipei Girl Sees the Mainland →

Sound and the Public–cfp

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Sound and the Public: A Special Issue of Communication and the Public
Call for papers
Jing Wang (Zhejiang University) and Marina Peterson (Ohio University), Guest Editors

Sound as a constitutive element in the formation of public life is exemplified by urban public concerts, the everyday sound of a church bell in a small European village, or the Chinese national anthem played every Monday in Tiananmen Square. In virtual space, the sharing of music files and all sorts of sound files organize public life underlined by shared tastes and ideologies. Sound in public is also a domain of policing relative inclusion and exclusion, of constituting citizenship along axes of race, class, gender, and nationality. And environmental noise that makes the atmospheric perceptible is subject to legal and techno-rational regimes of control. We envision this special issue as joining the already rich literature on sound and the public, while amplifying less well addressed areas of affect, sense, and materiality. Our understanding of the public is expansive, encompassing public feelings, public rituals, public space, public sphere, public speech, the networked public, the transient public, and the mediated public. We seek articles on sound’s capacity and role in creating, enhancing, complicating, or disintegrating the public. Here we ask, how does sound helps us understand current situations of the public as lived, imagined, and sensed? How does a public organize itself acoustically – through listening, feeling, or orienting toward one another? How does sound serve as force, object, or “actant” in composing publics? Continue reading Sound and the Public–cfp →

Technologies, TAP–cfp

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Call for Papers – Technologies

For the spring 2017 issue of the Trans Asia Photography Review, we are seeking projects which explore the technologies of photographic image making and distribution in all regions of Asia. Our interests include early and more recent printing processes, cameras and camera-less images, contemporary social media (including the use of “selfies”), as well as earlier methods of image circulation; in short, the materials, instruments, forms, methods, media, and networks that make possible the production and reception of photographic work. We seek work on technologies utilized in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, and Central Asia. In all cases we are especially interested in the cultural, social and political implications of the technologies under consideration.

Proposal deadline: October 1, 2016. Notification of proposal acceptance by October 15, 2016. Accepted proposals must then be completed by December 15, 2016; full peer review and final decisions regarding publication will follow.

In addition to seeking work specifically related to the Technologies theme, the TAP Review maintains an ongoing “open call” for submissions on all other topics relating to photography in Asia.
Proposals may be for articles (length open), curatorial projects (10-15 images with brief text), translations (from Asian languages into English), interviews, or book/exhibition reviews (exhibitions must have a catalog). Please send proposal with accompanying CV to editor@tapreview.org.

Questions? Contact editor@tapreview.org.

The Trans Asia Photography Review is an open-access peer-reviewed online journal published by Hampshire College in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library with funding from the Five College Consortium.

Sandra Matthews
Editor, Trans-Asia Photography Review
tapreview.org