Author: denton.2@osu.edu

Taiwan prays for rain

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Source: NYT (5/27/21)
Taiwan Prays for Rain and Scrambles to Save Water
Some of the island’s lakes and reservoirs have nearly run dry. And water restrictions have forced many residents to modify how they shower, wash dishes and flush.
By Amy Chang Chien and Mike Ives; Photographs by Billy H.C. Kwok

Tourists taking pictures at Sun Moon Lake in Nantou, Taiwan.

Tourists taking pictures at Sun Moon Lake in Nantou, Taiwan.

TAICHUNG, Taiwan — Lin Wei-Yi once gave little thought to the water sluicing through her shower nozzle, kitchen faucet and garden hose.

But as Taiwan’s worst drought in more than half a century has deepened in recent weeks, Ms. Lin, 55, has begun keeping buckets by the taps. She adopted a neighbor’s tip to flush the toilet five times with a single bucket of water by opening the tank and directly pouring it in. She stopped washing her car, which became so filthy that her children contort themselves to avoid rubbing against it.

The monthslong drought has nearly drained Taiwan’s major reservoirs, contributed to two severe electricity blackouts and forced officials to restrict the water supply. It has brought dramatic changes to the island’s landscape: The bottoms of several reservoirs and lakes have been warped into cracked, dusty expanses that resemble desert floors. And it has transformed how many of Taiwan’s 23.5 million residents use and think about water.

“We used too much water before,” Ms. Lin said this week in the central city of Taichung. “Now we have to adapt to a new normal.” Continue reading Taiwan prays for rain →

Stories for women, by women

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Source: China Daily (5/17/21)
Stories for women, by women
By Yang Yang | China Daily

Zhang Li (facing, third from left) and other guest speakers discuss Chinese women’s writing in recent years at the book launch ceremony of The Beautiful Changes at a bookstore in Beijing in April.[Photo provided to China Daily]

New literary collections reflect contemporary approaches female writers adopt in their works, Yang Yang reports.

The golden age for women in Chinese literature has arrived. Over the last year, there has been an increase in the publication of women’s literary works. Readers can find anthologies of short stories by Chinese women, special issues of literature magazines devoted to essays by Chinese women, and seasonal reading lists on stories by women both online and in bookstores, along with seminars and dialogues discussing their work.

In celebration of International Women’s Day in March, two anthologies of stories by women were published. Both collections were edited by Zhang Li, a Chinese literature professor with Beijing Normal University.

One is An Anthology of Short Stories by Chinese Women in 2020, and the other one The Beautiful Changes, is a collection of novellas, short stories, nonfiction and poems by women as well as a manuscript of a dialogue between two female literary professors discussing Chinese feminist writings and gender culture of the past 40 years. Continue reading Stories for women, by women →

China’s vaccination campaign roars ahead

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Source: SupChina (5/18/21)
China domestic vaccination campaign roars ahead, now at four times peak U.S. daily rate
True to form for the world’s most populous nation, China is now administering eye-popping numbers of COVID-19 vaccinations. In a span of nine days, 100 million people in China recently received a shot.
By Lucas Niewenhuis

A COVID-19 vaccination site in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, on May 18. Photo via Xinhua.

After a surprisingly slow start earlier this year, China’s domestic COVID-19 vaccination program has finally kicked into high gear. And true to form for the world’s most populous nation and leading industrial powerhouse, the numbers are as eye-popping as you might expect:

  • Almost 14 million people per day are getting a dose, Bloomberg reports, about four times faster than the daily rate of the U.S. at its peak of 3.38 million per day last month.
  • In a span of nine days, 100 million people in China recently received a shot, Xinhua reports.
  • China is on track to widely surpass the goal it set two months ago to vaccinate half a billion people by the end of June. More than half of the almost 400 million shots that China has administered to date were given in the past month, per Bloomberg.

What changed?

Most important, presumably, is supply — but there is limited public information on the exact capacity of China’s vaccine manufacturers. Continue reading China’s vaccination campaign roars ahead →

Zhanqi Village film

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Source: China Daily (5/24/21)
New film reflects epic changes in rural China
By Xu Fan | chinadaily.com.cn

A scene in the new film Zhanqi Village. [Photo provided to China Daily]

As the first of its kind, Zhanqi Village — a cinematic feature to reflect China’s epic changes in the vast countryside thanks to the country’s rural revitalization policies — will open across Chinese mainland on May 25.

Based on real stories taking place in Chengdu, Southwest China’s Sichuan province, the film tells the story of a village Party secretary who leads local young people to seek opportunities and develop distinctive industries.

Recently, more than 50 film critics, researchers and rural revitalization experts gathered at a seminar after a sneak preview of the film in a downtown Beijing cinema.

Veteran scriptwriter Song Fangjin, also deputy head of the China Cinema Literature Association, said the film successfully visualizes China’s great shift from ending extreme poverty to the revitalization of rural areas. Continue reading Zhanqi Village film →

Alone together in Taipei

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Source: NY Review of Books (June 10, 2021)
Alone Together in Taipei
Intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang’s films is an elusive possession, but the desire for it is constant and always particular.
By Max Nelson

Lee Kang-sheng in Tsai Ming-liang’s Days

Grasshopper Film. Lee Kang-sheng in Tsai Ming-liang’s Days, 2020

In 1997 the Taiwanese film and theater director Tsai Ming-liang premiered a movie called The River. It starred Lee Kang-sheng, who has had major parts in all eleven of Tsai’s feature films, as a young man living with his parents who develops agonizing, mysterious neck pains after visiting a film set and agreeing to play a floating corpse. Tsai’s previous two theatrical releases, Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and Vive L’Amour (1994), had been tense, entrancing portraits of young people rattling through Taipei’s streets, parks, arcades, restaurants, and apartment buildings, making brief contact and simmering in isolation. In both of those films, Lee plays a voyeuristic onlooker who follows an outlaw played by Chen Chao-jung and watches him have a fleeting love affair with an equally adrift woman. When we last see Lee in Vive L’Amour, he’s hiding under the bed and masturbating while the couple has sex above him, then slipping out and giving Chen’s sleeping character a kiss on the cheek.

The River carried the tone of those films past where many viewers were willing to follow it. “I was almost boycotted by the entire Taiwanese audience,” Tsai said in a 2003 interview with the critic Chris Fujiwara and the scholar Shujen Wang. At the core of the controversy was a single five-and-a-half-minute-long shot: a scene of inadvertent incest between Lee’s character and his father (Miao Tien) in a dimly lit gay bathhouse.

That scene was a breakthrough for one of Tsai’s career-long projects: emphasizing his characters’ material needs and hungers. The River is about “a family, a wife, husband, son,” he told Wang and Fujiwara. “But in their attitudes I make them go back to the very beginning, to zero. So they are just three bodies.” And yet what made that scene in the bathhouse so startling might have been what the scholar Rey Chow has since called its “reciprocal tenderness.” Continue reading Alone together in Taipei →

Risk of nuclear war over Taiwan in 1958

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Source: NYT (5/22/21)
Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known
The famed source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure — and wants to be prosecuted for it.
By Charlie Savage

Soldiers in 1958 on Kinmen Island, also called Quemoy. According to an apparently still-classified document, American officials doubted they could defend Taiwan with only conventional weapons. Credit…John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.

American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.

The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.

[CRISIS OVER TAIWAN STRAIT: Read the full version of an apparently still-classified document or just its previously censored pages.] Continue reading Risk of nuclear war over Taiwan in 1958 →

Expansive thinking sustains HK’s galleries

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Source: NYT (5/21/21)
Expansive Thinking Sustains Hong Kong’s Independent Galleries
These experimental art spaces are offering mentorship programs, residencies and even health and dental insurance.
By Andrew Russeth

The exhibition space Précédée, on a busy stretch of the Yau Ma Tei neighborhood in Hong Kong .Credit…Précédée

One recent afternoon, the curator Cosmin Costinas was discussing the challenging past year from Para Site, the nonprofit gallery he leads on the 22nd floor of a building in the Quarry Point area of Hong Kong.

“When everything that we took for granted was upended,” he said in a video interview, his team asked: “Why should we survive as an institution? What are art institutions for in the first place?”

They thought about how Para Site could respond directly to the urgent moment. For art organizations “to really justify their presence,” said Mr. Costinas, the gallery’s curator and executive director, “they need to be embedded in the community.” Continue reading Expansive thinking sustains HK’s galleries →

He promised a wedding proposal, fans got a 5-hour sale

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Source: NYT (5/21/21)
He Promised a Dreamy Wedding Proposal. Fans Got a 5-Hour Sale.
A Chinese influencer was barred from a video-sharing app after luring viewers to a livestreamed engagement, where he promoted makeup, perfume and mobile phones.
By Tiffany May

Yin Shihang riding a pony and selling products during his proposal that was livestreamed on Kuaishou.

HONG KONG — A Chinese social media influencer promised something special to his eight million followers on a video-sharing app. He would propose to his girlfriend in a lavish declaration of livestreamed love that would fulfill their every romantic fantasy.

On the appointed day last weekend, the influencer and entertainer, Yin Shihang, 22, dressed in a white suit, rode a pony onto a red carpet lining a room whose walls were festooned with images of pink and white balloons, video from the event showed. Fans held their breath.

What followed was something other than romance: Mr. Yin proceeded to sell them stuff.

In a gravelly half-shout, Mr. Yin began hawking all manner of products — perfume, pajamas, lipstick, necklaces and mobile phones — in a five-hour spectacle on Kuaishou, a video-sharing app that allows livestreams. His pitch raked in $7.2 million through in-app purchases, according to local news media. But along with the sales, thousands of complaints from viewers came flooding in. Continue reading He promised a wedding proposal, fans got a 5-hour sale →

Journal of Chinese Film Studies–cfp

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JOURNAL OF CHINESE FILM STUDIES: CALL FOR PAPERS

AIMS AND SCOPE

Journal of Chinese Film Studies (JCFS) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal which focuses on the history, theory, criticism, practice and industries of Chinese films and provides a platform for cutting-edge academic research and debate. It is committed to advancing interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of Chinese films and cinematic practices across multiple genres and platforms. The journal is open to all areas of scholarship in Chinese film studies.

The journal seeks original research articles that set forth innovative research and methodologies or engage with significant historiographical or interpretive issues of films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora. The journal also welcomes reviews of books and films of significance to the focus of the journal, as well as interviews with filmmakers and film scholars. It will showcase research both from established scholars and emerging new voices of Chinese film studies. Authors who have had their articles accepted are encouraged to submit video abstracts. Continue reading Journal of Chinese Film Studies–cfp →

Taiwan confronts a Covid flare-up

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Source: NYT (5/20/21)
‘This Day Was Bound to Come’: Taiwan Confronts a Covid Flare-Up
The island’s border controls had shielded it from the worst of the pandemic. But new variants and a slow vaccine rollout gave the virus an opening.
By Raymond Zhong and Amy Chang Chien

Amid a sudden rise in Covid-19 cases, the Taiwanese government has ordered residents to stay home whenever possible and to wear masks outdoors, though it has not declared a total lockdown. Credit…Ritchie B Tongo/EPA, via Shutterstock

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Closed schools and restaurants offering takeout only. Lines around the block at testing sites. Politicians on television urging the public to stay calm.

If the scenes around Taiwan this week have a distinctly early pandemic feel, it is because the coronavirus is only now washing up on the island’s shores in force. A crush of new infections has brought a swift end to the Covid-free normality that residents had been enjoying for more than a year.

By shutting its borders early and requiring two-week quarantines of nearly everyone who arrives from overseas, Taiwan had been managing to keep life on the island mostly unfettered. But all that changed after enough infections slipped past those high walls to cause community outbreaks. Continue reading Taiwan confronts a Covid flare-up →

Chinese Film Classics

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Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce the publication of my book Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (Columbia University Press):

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/chinese-film-classics-19221949/9780231188135

For fun, I made two short trailers for the book–something I think more of us should do:

1-min trailer: https://youtu.be/mMwK7_h052s
2-min trailer: https://youtu.be/mMwK7_h052s

People interested in early Chinese cinema might also take a look at the updates to the Chinese Film Classics website: https://chinesefilmclassics.org/

The website features over 20 English-subtitled films from the Republican era, as well as a full online course. I will post about the website on the listserv separately later this month.

For now, please join me tomorrow at my first public talk since the book’s release, hosted by the U.C. Berkeley Department of History: “Chinese Film Classics and Hollywood Resonances”

https://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/history/?event_ID=139398

The event begins at 5pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday, May 20, 2021.

Professor Wen-hsin Yeh will be the chair and Professor Weihong Bao will be the discussant.

Best,

Christopher Rea

What is South China Sea Buddhism

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Lecture: What is South China Sea Buddhism?

Organised by the Department of Chinese Studies in collaboration with the China Studies Centre ‘Language, Literature, Culture and Education’ cluster and The Australian Society for Asian Humanities (formerly OSA).

Chinese Buddhists have never remained stationary. They have always been on the move. Why did Buddhist monks migrate from China to Southeast Asia? How did they participate in transregional Buddhist networks across the South China Sea? In this talk, I will tell the story of “South China Sea Buddhism,” referring to a Buddhism that emerged from a swirl of correspondence networks, forced exiles, voluntary visits, evangelizing missions, institution-building campaigns, and organizational efforts of countless Chinese and Chinese diasporic Buddhist monks. Drawing on multilingual research conducted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, I challenge the conventional categories of “Chinese Buddhism” and “Southeast Asian Buddhism” by focusing on the lesser-known—yet no less significant—Chinese Buddhist communities of maritime Southeast Asia. By crossing the artificial spatial frontier between China and Southeast Asia, this talk brings Southeast Asia into the study of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism into the study of Southeast Asian Buddhism. Continue reading What is South China Sea Buddhism →

China releases first photos from its Mars Lander

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Source: NYT (5/19/21)
China Releases First Photos From Its Mars Lander
The country’s space agency said that the craft’s components, and those of the rover it would soon release, had “deployed in place normally.”
By Steven Lee Meyers

Coverage of the Mars landing on a screen in Beijing on Saturday. The first images from the lander were released on Wednesday. Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Four days after landing a spacecraft on Mars, China’s space agency released its first photographs from the red planet on Wednesday, announcing that the mission was going as planned.

The four-day wait for the images — one in color, one in black and white — had prompted speculation that something might have gone wrong with the landing on Saturday. When China’s space agency issued a statement in response to those concerns on Tuesday, urging patience, the response online was biting.

“Can’t you learn from NASA propaganda?” one user wrote beneath the statement, seeming to chide the agency with a comparison to NASA’s live broadcasts of its latest mission on Mars, which began in February.

The photographs were the first public evidence that China’s lander had successfully reached the surface and was preparing to release a rover, which has been named Zhurong, after a mythical Chinese god of fire. Continue reading China releases first photos from its Mars Lander →

A hard bargain for Apple in China

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Source: NYT (5/17/21)
Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of China. Now it has to answer to the Chinese government.
By Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi

The Apple data center in Guiyang as seen in a satellite image. Apple plans to store the personal data of its Chinese customers there on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.

The Apple data center in Guiyang as seen in a satellite image. Apple plans to store the personal data of its Chinese customers there on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm. Credit…CNES/AIRBUS

GUIYANG, China — On the outskirts of this city in a poor, mountainous province in southwestern China, men in hard hats recently put the finishing touches on a white building a quarter-mile long with few windows and a tall surrounding wall. There was little sign of its purpose, apart from the flags of Apple and China flying out front, side by side.

Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said the data is safe. But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government.

Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure. Continue reading A hard bargain for Apple in China →