Author: denton.2@osu.edu

New Feng Zhi study

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I would like to announce publication of my book Every Man is an Island: A Transtextual Study on the Chinese Sonnets of Feng Zhi. Malta: Malta University Press, 2020.

Every Man is an Island offers a translation and a transtextual study on the poem collection The Sonnets of Chinese lyricist Feng Zhi (1905-1993) as well as notes on the life and poetic style and ideology of the same author. Feng Zhi was a distinguished translator and professor of German literature with a deep knowledge of the poetry of Goethe, Novalis and Rilke. Regarded as one of the most refined lyricists and sonnet writers in early modern Chinese literature, Feng Zhi’s mystical poetry manifest a gradual shift from Romanticism to Modernism and addresses some of the most relevant themes that interested Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century: individualism, love, poetic transcendence, loneliness and interpersonal relationships. The twenty-seven sonnets analysed in this work encapsulate the mature thought and poetry of Feng Zhi and portray a poetic journey of the individual in modern China. The monograph also contains unpublished photos of the Chinese poet.

The book will be on sale at a prepublication discount. You can order your copy from the email address: mup@um.edu.mt

https://www.facebook.com/463010527164595/posts/2265534033578893/?sfnsn=scwspwa

Salvatore Giuffré

Musha Incident publications

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Dear MCLC Colleagues,

October 27, 2020 is the 90th anniversary of the last major violent resistance to Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, the Musha Incident (霧社事件). Since 1930, the story of the incident has been retold numerous times in popular histories, comic books, novels, songs, and films, including Wei Te-sheng’s epic film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, which was released in 2011.

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce two new books about (the representation of) the incident.

First, Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale written by yours truly – Darryl Sterk – and published by Routledge. My book is about the process of cultural (and interlingual) translation that made it possible for Wei Te-sheng to film Seediq Bale in Seediq, a vulnerable indigenous language. Wei had his screenplay translated from Mandarin to Seediq in 2009, but given that the screenplay included Mandarin translations of Seediq songs and stories recorded during the Japanese era (1895-1930), the Mandarin-Seediq translation was partly a backtranslation. In some cases the backtranslation was filtered through Japanese and different dialects of Seediq. Not surprisingly, the songs and stories ended up very different in backtranslation.

Second, 《霧社事件：台灣歷史和文化讀本》 (The Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture) edited by Michael Berry and published by Rye Field (麥田). In addition to an introduction by Professor Berry, who wrote an influential chapter on representations of the Musha Incident in postwar Taiwan in his A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese History and Film, there are two dozen essays and interviews. The contributors include scholars like Leo Ching, Ping-hui Liao, and Chiu Kuei-fen, writers like Wu He, filmmakers like Wan Jen and Wei Te-sheng, and translators like Dakis Pawan. Including Dakis, five of the contributors are themselves indigenous. The others are Takun Walis, Bakan Pawan, Nakao Eki Pacidal, and Liu Chun-hsiung (劉俊雄).

Lest we forget.

Yours,

Darryl Sterk

The erasure of Mesut Özil

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Source: NYT (10/26/20)
The Erasure of Mesut Özil
A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.
By Rory Smith and Tariq Panja

Cinemagraph

Mesut Özil

LONDON — Everything started with a tweet. Mesut Özil knew the risks, in December last year, when he decided to offer a startling, public denunciation both of China’s treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority in the region of Xinjiang, and the complicit silence of the international community.

Friends and advisers had warned Özil, the Arsenal midfielder, that there would be consequences. He would have to write off China as a market. His six million followers on Weibo, the country’s largest social network, would disappear. His fan club there — with as many as 50,000 signed-up members — would go, too. He would never play in China. He might become too toxic even for any club with Chinese owners, or sponsors eager to do business there.

Özil knew this was not fearmongering. He was aware of China’s furious response — both institutionally and organically — to a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the N.B.A.’s Houston Rockets, only a few weeks earlier. Yet Özil was adamant. He had been growing increasingly outraged by the situation in Xinjiang for months, watching documentaries, consuming news reports. He believed it was his duty, he told his advisers, not so much to highlight the issue but to pressure Muslim-majority nations — including Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had served as best man at Özil’s wedding — to intercede.

And so he pressed send. Continue reading →

Remapping the Contested Sinopshere

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Dear colleagues,

I would like to announce that my second book, Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan, has been published by Cambria Press.

Link: http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=776

Brief description

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania).

In the past four hundred years, the cultural position of Taiwan has been undergoing a series of drastic changes due to constant political turmoil. From the early seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, the ruling power of Taiwan shifted from Spaniard and Dutch to the Late-Ming Zheng regime, then to the Qing court and imperial Japan, and finally to the Kuomintang (KMT) government from China. In this regard, Taiwan has long been regarded as a supplementary addition to its cultural Other: China, Japan, or imperial western powers, despite its rich Aboriginal cultures. To create a self-claimed subjectivity, the localist camp of the island has been promoting the Taiwanese consciousness via political movements and literary writings in a century-long campaign. Its focus on the native soil and experience is well connected with the Sinophone studies, which has been a prominent field across geographical and disciplinary barriers. Continue reading →

Epoch Times influence machine (1)

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The Epoch Times has responded to the NYT article–Leila M. <elenamierce@gmail.com>

Source: The Epoch Times (10/25/20)
New York Times’ 8-Month-Long ‘Investigation’ of The Epoch Times: Light on Facts, Heavy on Bias

The New York Times on Oct. 24 published an article by tech columnist Kevin Roose about The Epoch Times. The article was published on the front page of the NY Times’ Sunday edition on Oct. 25.

Roose worked on this article about The Epoch Times for at least eight months. The result, however, is disappointing. Instead of attempting to give a fair portrayal of The Epoch Times as an up-and-coming media outlet, Roose resorts to factual errors, innuendo, and misrepresentations in an attempt to smear a competing media outlet.

Furthermore, previous social media comments made by Roose and NY Times media columnist Ben Smith (who contributed to Roose’s article) about The Epoch Times, in which they appear to discuss a collective effort against The Epoch Times, raise questions about the intent behind this article (see the section “Personal Bias” below). Continue reading →

Anti-China Politics in the US Election

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Critical China Scholars Presents:
Anti-China Politics in the US Election
Cosponsored by: Justice is Global, Made in China Journal, positions politics
Organizer: Jake Werner, Boston University

Though US elections generally turn on domestic issues, the relationship with China this year has become a potent campaign issue. Years of rising tension between elites in the two countries coincided with the mass trauma of the coronavirus pandemic and the Republicans’ attempt to racialize it. In the process, American military, economic, and racial anxieties are finding new expression, posing a complex challenge to progressive movements. This webinar will discuss the impact of anti-China politics in the US election domestically and internationally and explore how anti-racist and global solidarity activists are responding.

Panelists:
Christian Sorace, Colorado College
Shen Lu, Chinese Storytellers
Khury Petersen-Smith, Institute for Policy Studies
Tobita Chow, Justice Is Global

Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM EST

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Practices of Reading in the PRC virtual lecture series

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Dear Colleagues,

The READCHINA project at the University of Freiburg is hosting a virtual lecture series “Practices of Reading in the People’s Republic of China” to which you are cordially invited.

The lectures will take place at varying times on Tuesdays, running from Nov. 10, 2020 to Jan. 26, 2021 (with a 3 week break during the Christmas season).

All sessions will start with two talks held back to back, followed by a brief statement from the discussant. The floor will then open to all listeners for Q&A via voice and text chat.

Details on presenters, presentation titles, discussants and access information can be found on the poster attached to my message. For updates and presentation abstracts, please also consult the lecture series homepage:

https://readchina.github.io/conferences.html

Looking forward to welcoming you there,

Lena Henningsen
On behalf of the READCHINA team

China aims to end poverty, but Covid exposes gaps

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Source: NYT (10/26/20)
China Aims to End Extreme Poverty, but Covid-19 Exposes Gaps
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
The pandemic has worsened longstanding conditions that have widened inequality, hindering Xi Jinping’s vow to “leave no one behind.”
By Javier C. Hernández

Farmers at night school in Xiaoshan, a village in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, one of the country’s poorest regions, during a government-led media tour. Credit…Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock

Xu Rudong, a farmer in eastern China, thought he had left poverty behind long ago. He turned a small plot of land into a flourishing field of leeks, selling enough to pay for luxuries like fish and meat for his wife and four children. He even had money left over to buy an electric scooter.

Now Mr. Xu is once again struggling to pay for basic necessities like food and medicine. The economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has hurt his income, and severe flooding has devastated his crops.

“We are poor, poor people,” Mr. Xu, 48, said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Wangjiaba, a village of 36,000 in Anhui Province. “We don’t eat meat anymore.”

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to declare victory in the next two months in a campaign to eliminate extreme poverty in the country. The Chinese economy is once again gaining strength, and the Communist Party’s achievements in reducing poverty are expected to feature prominently this week at a conclave of party leaders in Beijing. Continue reading →

Epoch Times influence machine

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Source: NYT (10/24/20)
How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine
Since 2016, the Falun Gong-backed newspaper has used aggressive Facebook tactics and right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.
By Kevin Roose

Cinemagraph

Credit…Adam Ferriss

For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents. Continue reading →

NTU position

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The Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation (GPTI) at National Taiwan University (NTU) announces one full-time faculty position.

Initial appointment will begin on August 1, 2021.  For more information, please refer to the attachment or the following website: http://gpti.ntu.edu.tw/.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could share the news with your members.

Sincerely,

Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation
National Taiwan University
No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 106, Taiwan
Tel: +886-2-33661582
Fax: +886-2-33661708
E-mail: ntutiprogram@ntu.edu.tw
FB: https://www.facebook.com/ntugpti/

Five years after Gui Minhai was kidnapped

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My article in the Toronto Star today summing up what we’ve learned five years after the kidnapping of Gui Minhai, 17 oct 2015.–Magnus Fiskesjö

Source: The Toronto Star (10/19/20)
Five years after Sweden’s Gui Minhai was kidnapped we must keep fighting for his release
By Magnus Fiskesjö, Contributor

October 17 marked five years since my fellow Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, an old friend of mine, was kidnapped from Thailand by Chinese agents, who forcibly took him to China. He had not visited for years — a precaution, since he co-owned the Causeway Bay Bookstore in Hong Kong, which specialized in books critical of the Chinese regime.

Gui’s case is highly relevant not just for Sweden and for Hong Kong, but also for Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Kazakhstan and other countries that have also seen their citizens seized by the Chinese regime. What are the lessons we have learned?

In early 2016, Gui was forced to appear on Chinese state TV in an obviously staged confession, pretending he had returned on his own volition to help resurrect an old traffic accident. Continue reading →

Prosecutor turns rights defender

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Source: NYT (10/20/20)
In China, the Formidable Prosecutor Turned Lonely Rights Defender
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
After sheltering a prominent dissident, Yang Bin, a former prosecutor, is now under the scrutiny of the police. But she has no regrets.
By Amy Qin

Yang Bin, a former prosecutor in China, is now a defense lawyer. “When many people look at the system, they see its strength. When I look at it, I see only its fragility,” she says. Credit…via Yang Bin

Yang Bin was at home when two dozen Chinese police surrounded her house and entered, searching for the man she had recently taken in as a houseguest. Filing in quickly, the officers found their suspect upstairs and arrested him, ending a weekslong manhunt.

The police also detained Ms. Yang for questioning. They wanted to know how Xu Zhiyong, one of China’s most outspoken government critics, had come to find refuge with her, a Communist Party member and former government prosecutor.

For Ms. Yang, the turn of events came with no small irony. In her old job, she had escorted death row prisoners to a police station near the one in which she was being interrogated, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. This time she was regarded as a suspect, and the police had also taken her husband and 20-year-old son.

“Even though I was being questioned like a criminal, I knew in my heart I hadn’t done anything wrong,” Ms. Yang, 50, who was later released with her family, said in a recent telephone interview from her home on Seagull Island, a rural area on the outskirts of Guangzhou. “When many people look at the system, they see its strength. When I look at it, I see only its fragility.” Continue reading →

Made in China 5.2: Spectral Revolutions

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Dear Colleagues,

I am glad to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Made in China Journal. You can download it for free at this link: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/19/spectral-revolutions.

Below you can find the editorial:

Spectral Revolutions: Occult Economies in Asia

The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide for us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009) Continue reading →

Open letter to Monthly Review

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This is a letter the Critical China Scholars organization put together in response to a report about Xinjiang promoted on the Monthly Review website. It is posted here for the information of those on the MCLC mailing list. The letter was sent to MR on Oct 19, 2020, and is also posted to the CCS website [https://criticalchinascholars.org/] and to our FB page, as well.

Rebecca E. Karl

OPEN LETTER TO MONTHLY REVIEW
19 October 2020

Dear friends at Monthly Review,

As scholars and activists committed to charting a course for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left in the midst of rising US-China tensions, we write in response to your recent republication of a “report and resource compilation” by the Qiao Collective on Xinjiang.

We fully acknowledge the need for a critique of America’s cynical and self-interested attacks on China’s domestic policies. We are committed to that task. But the left must draw a line at apologia for the campaign of harsh Islamophobic repression now taking place in Xinjiang.

Qiao’s “report” is written in a style that is sadly all too common in leftist discussions of China today. While the report “recognize[s] that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique,” it finds no room for any such critique in its 15,000 words. Eschewing serious analysis, it compiles select political and biographical facts to suggestively point at, but not articulate, the intended conclusion – that claims of serious repression in Xinjiang can be dismissed. Continue reading →

Online exhibit captures pandemic in HK

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Source: SCMP (10/15/20)
Online art exhibition captures pandemic scenes in Hong Kong – of loneliness, fear, but also the triumph of the human spirit
Louise Soloway Chan’s virtual exhibition ‘Contactless’ is a showcase of 22 ink paintings on rice paper hosted by the Boundless Artists Collective. She hopes that when the crisis finally passes, the sketches will be a reminder not just of the horrors but of how the human spirit navigates adversity
By Kylie Knott

“Too Cool for School II” by Louise Soloway Chan. The work is one of 22 of Chan’s sketches of Hong Kong during the pandemic that form “Contactless”, a solo online exhibition that runs until December 15.

“Too Cool for School II” by Louise Soloway Chan. The work is one of 22 of Chan’s sketches of Hong Kong during the pandemic that form “Contactless”, a solo online exhibition that runs until December 15.

Today is the opening of Louise Soloway Chan’s virtual exhibition “Contactless”, a showcase of 22 ink paintings on rice paper that capture Hong Kong scenes amid the pandemic.

“I’m an obsessive sketcher and always draw from life, from what’s in front of me,” says Soloway Chan via Zoom from Britain.

The artist was born in the UK and spent time in India before moving to her adopted home of Hong Kong in 1994. She’s back in Britain temporarily to spend time with her family.

Many people in Hong Kong will have seen her work. In 2011, the MTR Corporation commissioned her to paint 12 huge bas-reliefs of Hong Kong street scenes, many depicting traditional dai pai dongs (open-air food stalls) as well as lantern and tea shops that have since fallen victim to gentrification. The works took six years to complete and are permanently installed at the Sai Ying Pun MTR station. Continue reading →