Author: denton.2@osu.edu

China’s in-your-face push for more babies

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Source: NYT (10/8/24)
So, Are You Pregnant Yet? China’s In-Your-Face Push for More Babies.
The government is again trying to insert itself into women’s childbearing decisions, knocking on doors and making calls with questions some find downright invasive.
By Vivian Wang (Vivian Wang visited maternity hospitals and government family planning offices in Beijing and Nanjing to see how women were being prodded to have children.)

In a park, a family walks past artwork featuring life-size cutout of a man and woman walking with three children, under a slogan urging couples not to wait too long to have children.

Propaganda artwork in Miyun, a district of Beijing, depicting a couple with three children and including slogans promoting childbearing. Credit…Andrea Verdelli for The New York Times

The first time a government worker encouraged Yumi Yang to have a baby, she thought little of it. She and her husband were registering their marriage at a local office in northeastern China, and the worker gave them free prenatal vitamins, which she chalked up to the government trying to be helpful.

When an official later called to ask if she had taken them, and then called again after she did get pregnant to track her progress, Ms. Yang shrugged those questions off as well intentioned, too. But then officials showed up at her door after she had given birth, asking to take a photograph of her with her baby for their files. That was too much.

“When they came to my home, that was really ridiculous,” said Ms. Yang, 28. “I felt a little disgusted.”

Faced with a declining population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is responding with a time-tested tactic: inserting itself into this most intimate of choices for women, whether or not to have a child.

Officials are not just going door to door to ask women about their plans. They have partnered with universities to develop courses on having a “positive view of marriage and childbearing.” At high-profile political gatherings, officials are spreading the message wherever they can. Continue reading China’s in-your-face push for more babies →

Translation and Chinese/Sinophone/Sinitic Poetry–cfp

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Call for Papers: Translation and Chinese/Sinophone/Sinitic Poetry
2025 ACLA annual meeting (May 29–June 1, 2025, held virtually)
https://www.acla.org/translation-and-chinesesinophonesinitic-poetry
Organized by Simona Gallo (simona.gallo@unimi.it), Lucas Klein (Lucas.Klein@asu.edu), and Chris Song (chriszj.song@utoronto.ca)
Deadline: Oct 14, 2024

China is, they say, a “nation of poetry.” Though poetry has been and remains important to the Chinese cultural identity, the statement can also be interrogated: what is “China”? what is a “nation”? what indeed is “poetry”? And what does translation have to do with Chinese cultural identity as defined through poetry? Translation into Chinese was important for the development of Chinese poetry in many eras, as well as in the crisscross of poetry and identity formation in Sinophone regions outside China. Translation of Chinese poetry has also been important for the development of poetry in other languages, even as translation remains a basic practice for philological studies of Chinese poetry. Then there is the issue of translation and poetry written in classical Chinese/literary Sinitic by speakers of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. What happens to poetry, and what happens to Chinese cultural identity, throughout these transformations? What can these facets of translation, into and out of Chinese, within and without China, say to each other?

This seminar, organized by the editors of the forthcoming journal Yì: Poetry and Translation, invites abstracts concerning the nexus of Chinese/poetry/translation—each understood broadly, inclusive of the Sinophone and Sinitic/Sinographic, from ancient to contemporary, in all forms and genres. Potential topics include but are not limited to: Continue reading Translation and Chinese/Sinophone/Sinitic Poetry–cfp →

Soundless saturation / quietly nourishing

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Source: China Media Project (9/18/24)
Soundless Saturation / Quietly Nourishing 润物无声
By Alex Colville

An idiom inspired by a classic Tang Dynasty poem is now a modifier commonly used in the official political speech of the CCP to refer to the need to innovate the party’s communication of its political and social agendas — ultimately making them more palatable, and more easily accepted.

As major state-run media, online influencers and propaganda pundits gathered in Shanghai in August 2024 for a conference on how to best innovate international communication, the event’s theme drew on a Chinese idiom, or chengyu (成语), with its origins in classical Chinese poetry. “Soundless Saturation” (润物无声), the four characters splashed across the conference’s promotional poster, a map of the globe faintly visible behind.

This evocative phrase, which could also be translated “quietly nourishing,” references an early spring drizzle falling gently over the world. It is a colorful phrase that now describes the drive by the Chinese Communist Party leadership for more innovative and evocative deployment of state propaganda themes both domestically and internationally. The phrase expresses a trend in CCP thinking about the need for more subtle and effective means to disseminate and inculcate the party’s thoughts and agendas. Continue reading Soundless saturation / quietly nourishing →

China from the Margins

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Loredana Cesarino and Emily Williams are pleased to announce the publication of their edited volume:

New Publication: China from the Margins – New Narratives of the Past and Present
Edited by Emily Williams and Loredana Cesarino
Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781032621098

The book explores and brings to light untold stories from the margins of Chinese society. It investigates and reveals grassroots and popular cultural beliefs, amusing anecdotes, items of lore, and accounts of the strange and the unusual. It delves into questions of identity formation, considering gender, sexuality, class, generational divides, subcultures, national minorities and online communities. It examines heritage-making practices and the persistence of marginalized memories. Bringing together views from cultural studies, literature, gender studies, cultural heritage, sociology, history and more, the book argues that neither the margins nor the centre can be understood in isolation, and that by focusing on the margins, a fuller picture of Chinese society overall emerges, including new perspectives on spatial and social marginality, on hierarchies of marginality, and on neglected spaces, voices and identities.

Table of Contents Continue reading China from the Margins →

Song Binbin dies at 77

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Source: NYT (10/1/24)
Song Binbin, Poster Woman for Mao’s Bloody Upheaval, Dies at 77
She was said to have been involved in the first killing of an educator during the Cultural Revolution, drawing official praise. She later apologized for her actions.
By Trip Gabriel

A black and white photo of Mao and a young woman smiling at each other as she places an armband around his sleeve. Behind them a young man films the event with a hand-held camera. Glimpses of a crowd can be seen below.

As a student leader of the militant Red Guards, Song Binbin was selected to pin an armband around the sleeve of Mao Zedong in a ceremony in 1966 in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Credit…Apic/Getty Images

Song Binbin, a student leader of China’s Red Guards who in 1966 was embroiled in the beating death of her high school principal, one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution — and who publicly apologized for her actions almost a half-century later — died on Sept. 16. She was 77.

Her death was reported by a brother, Song Kehuang, on the Chinese app WeChat, saying she had died in the United States. He provided no other details.

News of her death set off renewed debate on Chinese social media about the adequacy of Ms. Song’s tearful apology in 2014, as well as the Communist Party’s failure to acknowledge the true toll of the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long rampage that Mao Zedong unleashed in the 1960s, claiming more than one million lives, and that remains a heavily censored topic in China.

A daughter of a prominent general in the People’s Liberation Army, Ms. Song was enrolled at Beijing Normal University Girls High School when she and classmates responded to Mao’s call for young people to turn against intellectuals, educators and others who supposedly held bourgeois values.

On Aug. 5, 1966, students attacked Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old mother of four who headed the school. She was kicked and beaten with sticks spiked with nails. After passing out, she was thrown onto a garbage cart and left to die. Continue reading Song Binbin dies at 77 →

Geiss-Hsu Travel Grant

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Thanks to the generous support of the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, the Executive Committee of the Ming-Qing Forum of the Modern Languages Association is pleased to announce the Geiss-Hsu Travel Grant to support participation in the 2025 MLA annual convention by scholars of the Ming and adjacent periods. Convention participants (panel presenters, discussants, or organizers) may apply for grants of up to a maximum of $2000 to reimburse the costs of conference travel, registration, and lodging. Selection will be based on need, with preference given to graduate students, junior faculty, and faculty at institutions that provide limited funding for research travel. Awards will be announced in early December, with funds provided after the conference. For full consideration, please apply here by October 15, 2024.

For questions, please contact Rania Huntington, huntington@wisc.edu  or Patricia Sieber, sieber.6@osu.edu.

Affective Betrayal

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Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China
By Jean Tsui
SUNY Press; Hardcover : 9781438498782, 342 pages, September 2024

Description

Affective Betrayal uses “affect” as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.

At the turn of the twentieth century, China’s leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers’ bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from “reading” to “listening” and “visualizing experiences,” Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China’s modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China’s incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China’s burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China’s continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.

Jean Tsui is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. Continue reading Affective Betrayal →

HKUST positions

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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technnology has announced the following new positions:

(1) Faculty Positions at All Ranks in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

The Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology envisions being a leading cross-disciplinary center where technology, art, and humanities converge to foster innovative and impactful environments, talents, and works that shape the future world.  We especially encourage applicants for faculty positions at all ranks (Professor/Associate Professor/Assistant Professor) who have proven experience in research and teaching of the following focus areas:

  • Machine-assisted Art Practice (visual, sound, performing, installation, cinematic arts, etc.);
  • Critical Studies on Arts and Machine Creativity (art history, media theory, philosophy of technology, etc.); and/or
  • Art Management (managerial, legal, and business topics related to AI arts, NFT, etc.).

Preferences will be given to candidates with research experience in fusing new technologies (e.g., generative AI) with arts.

Appointees are expected to (i) teach art-related courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, (ii) develop a vigorous research program in their areas of interest, and (iii) provide service to the Division/Academy/University governance and professional communities.

Applicants should have a PhD degree in art, design, or other related fields by the time of employment.  The candidates should have a strong research record of publications and/or creative works (e.g., performances, exhibitions, productions, etc.) in one of the Division’s focus areas of research and teaching and a demonstrated ability to work in interdisciplinary teams.  Candidates to be considered for the rank of Associate Professor and above should have proven teaching and advising experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and evidence of securing research funding. Continue reading HKUST positions →

Goodness Me

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Source: China Media Project (9/19/24)
Goodness Me
Good Me, one of China’s largest tea store chains, had a hard lesson in public relations this week after internet users decided its punchline video about workplace discipline was not funny, not at all.
By David Bandurski

On Wednesday, one of China’s largest tea chains found itself at the center of an online storm after a video emerged of employees for the company apparently wearing cardboard signs and makeshift cardboard handcuffs to enforce workplace discipline — public displays of shame that had disturbing echoes of the country’s political past.

The offending post, made on September 17 to the official Douyin and Xiaohongshu accounts of the Guangdong operations of Good Me (古茗茶饮) — a tea chain with more than 5,000 locations across the country — showed several employees on site at a Good Me shop standing with their heads cast down, their hands bound in front with what appeared to be cardboard cup holders. Handwritten signs around their necks read: “The crime of forgetting to include a straw”; and “The crime of knocking over the teapot.”

The meme the Good Me account seemed to be riffing on was not a contemporary, social media derived one, but rather an extremely painful episode from China’s past. In the midst of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, millions of Chinese branded as “class enemies” were persecuted in brutal public spectacles known as “struggle sessions” (批斗大会).  In many cases, they had their heads shaved, and were forced to wear dunce caps and signs identifying their supposed crimes as they were subjected to physical and verbal attacks by crazed mobs. Continue reading Goodness Me →

The Typesetter

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ping Zhu’s translation “The Typesetter,” by Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writer Shen Yuzhong. The translation appears below and at its online home (which also includes the Chinese original): https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-typesetter/. My thanks to Ping Zhu for sharing her work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Typesetter 排字人

By Shen Yuzhong 沈禹鐘 (1889–1971)[1]

Translated by Ping Zhu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2024)

The first page of the Chinese original in Red Magazine.

This story is a satire of the concept of “literature of blood and tears” (血和泪的文学) proposed by Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎 in 1921. Instead of representing the blood and tears of the proletariat, Shen Yuzhong, a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies author, wrote the story from the perspective of a worker who observes the literal “literature of blood and tears” produced by a writer. The Chinese original follows the translation.–Ping Zhu

The clanging of the bell in the printing factory wakes Wang Qin from his morning slumber. Rubbing his tired eyes, he knows it’s time to go to work at the factory again. He gets up grudgingly, puts on his clothes, grabs a basin, goes downstairs to fetch some water, and returns to his room to wash his face and neck. He lives in a small back room on the second floor, rented from a sub-landlord for five silver dollars a month. If you compare them to those of others in society, his living expenses are at the lowest level. However, Wang Qin’s earning capacity is quite weak; he only earns fifteen silver dollars a month at the factory. One-third of that goes to rent, the rest goes to food and clothing, leaving him perpetually worried about his hard life. Sometimes he thinks about changing his life, but that seems impossible. People’s lives are all assigned by capital, deeply oppressed by its forces. No matter what abilities you have, it’s difficult to struggle against capital.

The factory work starts every morning at seven, not long after the bell rings to wake the workers living nearby. Hearing the bell, everyone hurriedly bids farewell to their morning dreams and goes to obey its call. After washing up, Wang Qin also quickly goes out. He takes two copper coins from his pocket and buys some street food to eat along the way. This is his daily routine, not a one-off. When he arrives at the factory gate, he sees many of his coworkers streaming in. They’ve known each other for so long that they no longer bother with greetings or small talk. Once inside the factory, the workers take off their coats and start working amid the clatter of the machines. Continue reading The Typesetter →

Sedition in Hong Kong

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Source: NYT (9/27/24)
This Is What Can Land You in Jail for Sedition in Hong Kong
Three men were the first to be convicted under the city’s recently expanded national security law, which has greatly curtailed political speech.
By David Pierson and Tiffany May

Visitors in a museum look at a screen where Xi Jinping is speaking in front of microphones.

Visitors watching a video of Xi Jinping at the National Security Exhibition in Hong Kong Museum of History in August. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

Wearing a T-shirt with a protest slogan.

Scrawling pro-democracy graffiti on public bus seats.

Criticizing Xi Jinping on social media.

Three men in Hong Kong were sentenced to prison last week for these acts of protest, which in another era probably would have drawn little notice — showing the power of a newly expanded national security law aimed at muzzling dissent.

The rulings, rendered over two days by a judge whom Hong Kong’s leader handpicked, highlight the political transformation that has taken place here.

A financial center and a city accustomed to freedom of political expression, Hong Kong now more closely resembles mainland China, where criticism of the ruling Communist Party is rarely, if ever, tolerated. Continue reading Sedition in Hong Kong →

Renditions valedictory issue 100

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It is with great pride that we write to announce the publication of Renditions no. 100, a landmark that follows fifty full years of publishing our journal. That we have continued to play an important role in literary communication between the Chinese-speaking realm and the world of letters in English is testified to by the extensive collection of pieces we have assembled for this 300-page valedictory issue, which includes masterly translations of a playful anthropomorphic biography by Su Shi, a celebrated classical poem by Lu Xun, and contemporary song lyrics about a post-industrialist China by the rock band Omnipotent Youth Society. A full table of content can be found here.

Orders of the issue can be placed at our e-bookstore, where readers can also purchase past editions or access out-of-print issues for free. We thank you humbly for your support over the years, and we hope that you will continue to support the Renditions Books and Renditions Paperbacks series, with Robert E. Hegel’s superb translation of the late-Ming epic novel Forgotten Tales of the Sui to appear soon.

Sincerely,

Renditions editorial team

Mother Tongues and Other Tongues

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With great pleasure and excitement, Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi announce the publication of their edited volume Mother Tongues and Other Tongues. Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry https://brill.com/display/title/69613

How do self-translation and other translingual practices mold the Sinophone poetic field? How and why do contemporary Sinophone writers produce (new) lyrical identities in and through translation? How do we translate contemporary Sinophone poetry? By addressing such questions, and by bringing together scholars, writers, and translators of poetry, this volume offers unique insights into Sinophone Studies, while sparking a transdisciplinary dialogue with Poetry Studies, Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Conventions
List of Figures
About the Contributors

Introduction: Sinophone Poetry as an Interlingual Space
Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi Continue reading Mother Tongues and Other Tongues →

East Asian ‘Amateur’ Media Practices–cfp

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Call for Papers: The East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices Conference
May 10/11, 2025
Harvard University
Keynote Sessions Featuring: Susan Aasman (University of Groningen) and Jamie Zhao (City University of Hong Kong)

We invite proposals to the East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices conference at Harvard University. The conference aims to provide a venue for presenting research on historical and contemporary amateur media practices in East Asia and for discussing the current state and possible futures of this rapidly expanding field of inquiry.

Broadly, we hope to collectively address questions such as the following:

  • How do differing media situations require different theorization of “amateur” practices – or make other terms and frameworks more productive?
  • As “amateur” media practices take place across media forms / genres / channels, which methodologies are useful to map them and their significance – and which specific questions are they geared to address?
  • Do amateur media practices – past and present – present useful different models of economy, sociality, politics, or topography (i.e. planetary, global, transnational etc.) that can be made productive today?
  • What kind of larger historical trajectories come into view once one takes more than one amateur media form into account? Does the significance of amateur media practice change with their relationship to specific media forms and expressions?
  • Not only recent amateur practices are networked well beyond national contexts; how do amateur media practices and their networks help us track an interaction with imaginaries of nation, or of geopolitics?
  • How do we think beyond what is the focus of much work on amateur media practices: production? How would that history look different if we additionally focused on distribution?

Continue reading East Asian ‘Amateur’ Media Practices–cfp →