Author: denton.2@osu.edu

Taiwan Lit–cfp

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Dear Friends,

Greetings from Taiwan Lit!

We are excited to circulate Calls for Submissions for two new series in our journal’s Special Topic section. These series are guest-edited by Laura Jo-Han Wen and Mao-shan Huang, respectively, on the following themes: “Taiwan in Visual Culture and Transmedia Representations” and 「《侯孝賢的凝視：抒情傳統、文本互涉與文化政治》書評論壇」.

As we continue developing and improving, we have recently added two new pages to the Taiwan Lit website, “Contributors” and “Archive.” You may now access a contributor’s bio either through the navigation panel or by clicking on the author’s name at the top of the posts. The “Archive” stores our past newsletters, in which you can view the tables of contents from all the back issues.

Yours truly,

Taiwan Lit Editorial Team

各位朋友：

Taiwan Lit 向讀者問候！

我們很高興在此為Taiwan Lit 的兩個新專輯發佈徵稿啟事。這兩個專輯分別由客座主編溫若含及黃茂善所籌備，主題為：“Taiwan in Visual Culture and Transmedia Representations” 和 「《侯孝賢的凝視：抒情傳統、文本互涉與文化政治》書評論壇」。 Continue reading Taiwan Lit–cfp →

Interview with Liu Cixin

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Source: Chinese Literature Today (3/5/21)
Humanity, Crisis, and Changes: An Interview with Liu Cixin
[Originally published in Chinese at Kyodo News Beijing, March 1, 2021. click here for link to article]
By: Okuma Yuichiro
Translated by: John Broach

Liu Cixin, photo by Li Yibo

Okuma Yuichiro (hereafter referred to as OY): The Three-Body Problem tells a story about a female scientist who, having lost hope for humanity after her father’s death during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), initiates communications with aliens. Why did you choose the Cultural Revolution as the background of the story?

Liu Cixin (hereafter referred to as LCX): When conceiving this novel, I dove into modern Chinese history and looked for what can cause complete disillusionment with humanity. I found the Cultural Revolution. Even though the later Reform and Opening up have brought many challenges for Chinese people as well, none of those problems were enough to make someone lose hope in humanity and human civilization.  Things like the COVID-19 pandemic unsettle us, but they are insignificant when compared to the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. I came of age during the Cultural Revolution, which has made me more sensitive than younger generations to possible future crises or disasters. The future catastrophes depicted in my novel are not entirely fantasies, but exist in my subconscious. Of course, I only searched in Chinese history, if I looked for the context of the novel in world history, I might have found other historical periods of similar gravity. Continue reading Interview with Liu Cixin →

XJTLU China Studies MA info session

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Dear Colleagues,

Below find information on the session we are organizing to introduce MA China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China. The online information will take place on March 10, Wednesday 10 am (CET). The Zoom link is as follows: https://zoom.us/j/91399242861?pwd=VGVaMXYvdjBKaVRQUjFtbzRhR3FBQT09

XJTLU is a joint-venture university that grants the University of Liverpool (UK) diploma. The MA China Studies graduate program is an interdisciplinary program with academic and professional components. The degree can be completed online during the pandemic era and scholarships are available.

Ceren Ergenc Continue reading XJTLU China Studies MA info session →

Newman Prize award ceremony

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Dear MCLC colleagues and friends,

I would like to invite you and your students to attend this year’s Newman Prize for Chinese Literature Award Ceremony and celebrate this year’s winner Yan Lianke with us.  The event starts at 7Pm on Friday, March 19th but pre-registration is required. See image below for information. The registration link is: https://BIT.LY/2NK0QUe.

Onward!

Jonathan Stalling

A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Brian Skerratt’s review of A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune: Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers, by Haosheng Yang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/skerratt/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, editor

A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune:
Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers

By Haosheng Yang

Reviewed by Brian Skerratt

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2021)

 

Haosheng Yang, A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune: Classical-Style Poetry of Modern Chinese Writers Leiden: Brill, 2016. ix + 255 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-31079-7

Classical-style poetry is an unlucky genre. If one has not experienced suffering and struggled in society, one can hardly write any satisfying poems. . . . The feeling of suffering is not necessarily described in poems immediately. Poems do not necessarily describe suffering directly either. But because of the suffering, one’s emotion can be stimulated more deeply; one will think about writing poems, will be more sympathetic when reading other’s [sic] poems, and will express one’s own feelings more easily, even though those feelings might be far apart from suffering (Yang, 221).

So wrote Nie Gannu 聶紺弩 (1903-1986) in a letter to a friend. Nie, like many Chinese intellectuals of his generation, had enthusiastically embraced new ideas and social progress—including the New Culture Movement, New Literature, and leftist revolution—only to become a victim of the new China he had helped create. After training at the prestigious Huangpu Military Academy, Nie began a career as a journalist and intellectual; he was critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and later joined the League of Left-Wing Writers. However, only a matter of years after the Communists came to power in 1949, Nie was labeled a rightist and sent to the “Great Northern Wilderness” (北大荒) in Heilongjiang for four years of labor reform. After he returned from hard labor, he was arrested again as a counterrevolutionary and only released following another ten years of confinement. What makes Nie’s case interesting is that his time spent doing hard labor inspired him to produce poetry—and not just any poetry, but dense, highly allusive, classical poetry, exactly the form and style attacked so vehemently by the New Literature movement decades earlier. When the supervisor at the labor site instructed the prisoners to compose poetry, as part of a nationwide campaign to create “new folk songs,” Nie recalls, “I do not know why, but suddenly I thought about composing poems in the old style. Maybe the farther I was from the literary circle, the more I believed that only old poetry was poetry. . . . As a result, that might be the first time I wrote about labor, and also the first time I officially composed classical-style poetry” (qtd. 183). The extreme physical and psychological toll of labor reform led this writer in his late fifties to find solace in poetry, and that solace he found most naturally in traditional, classical verse, rather than the modern, vernacular poetry demanded by fashionable literary circles, which he himself had once advocated. Continue reading A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune review →

Postdoc in East Asian/Slavic Studies, OSU

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Postdoctoral Fellowship In East Asian Studies, Slavic Studies And The Problem Of Crisis

The East Asian Studies Center, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and the Center for Historical Research at The Ohio State University invite applications for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship. We seek an emerging scholar with proven interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary interests in East Asian and Slavic/East European Studies whose work connects to the Center for Historical Research’s theme of “Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change.” Applicants should have earned a PhD within the last three years (2018 or later) in any field related to Slavic, East Asian or Comparative Studies, broadly defined. While the specific topical focus and geographic areas are open, the successful candidate must be able to work in both geographic regions and connect to the larger theme of “Crisis, Uncertainty, and History.”

The fellowship carries a one course per semester teaching load (two courses over one year). The teaching duties are expected to include one graduate course and one undergraduate course that can employ various disciplinary and methodological approaches. The fellow is expected to present a lecture or seminar in the CHR Crisis series in the spring of 2022. This is a one-year appointment and includes an annual stipend of $55,000, benefits, up to $2,000 in relocation costs and a research fund of $1,000. Continue reading Postdoc in East Asian/Slavic Studies, OSU →

China’s scheme to transfer Uighurs into work

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Source: BBC News (3/2/21)
‘If the others go I’ll go’: Inside China’s scheme to transfer Uighurs into work
By John Sudworth, BBC News, Beijing

A still from the state media report, showing Buzaynap

Buzaynap, 19, appeared in a 2017 state media report on labour transfer

China’s policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang to new jobs often far from home is leading to a thinning out of their populations, according to a high-level Chinese study seen by the BBC.

The government denies that it is attempting to alter the demographics of its far-western region and says the job transfers are designed to raise incomes and alleviate chronic rural unemployment and poverty.

But our evidence suggests that – alongside the re-education camps built across Xinjiang in recent years – the policy involves a high risk of coercion and is similarly designed to assimilate minorities by changing their lifestyles and thinking.

The study, which was meant for the eyes of senior officials but accidentally placed online, forms part of a BBC investigation based on propaganda reports, interviews, and visits to factories across China.

And we ask questions about the possible connections between transferred Uighur labour and two major western brands, as international concern mounts over the extent to which it is already ingrained in global supply chains. Continue reading China’s scheme to transfer Uighurs into work →

Virginia Tech position

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The Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech invites applications for an adjunct Chinese language instructor for 2021/2022. Renewal of the contract is possible based on the instructor’s performance. The position requires the ability to conduct classroom instruction.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Teach up to three sections of Chinese language classes.
• Balance office hours between language instruction, tutoring, and development of Chinese instructional materials, exercises, and class modules.

Instruction periods are 23 Aug 2021 till 15 Dec 2021 for the Fall semester and 18 Jan 2022 till 11 May 2022 for the Spring semester.

The suitable candidate should have a masters in Chinese language or a related field, or at least 18 credit hours at the graduate level. If interested, please send your CV to Dr. Sophia Tingting Zhao (tzhao@vt.edu) and Dr. Ming Chew Teo (mcteo@vt.edu). Online applications accepted until the position is filled.

Online database of speech crimes and punishments

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Source: NYT (3/1/21)
当代中国文字狱事件：从上访者到“侮辱英烈”
China Persecutes Those Who Question ‘Heroes.’ A Sleuth Keeps Track.
By 袁莉

中国中央电视台2月19日播放的画面：仪仗队抬着一名去年6月在中印边界冲突中死亡的中国士兵的棺材。

中国中央电视台2月19日播放的画面：仪仗队抬着一名去年6月在中印边界冲突中死亡的中国士兵的棺材。 CHINA CENTRAL TELEVISION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

At least seven people over the past week have been threatened, detained or arrested after casting doubt over the government’s account of the deaths of Chinese soldiers during a clash last year with Indian troops. Three of them are being detained for between seven and 15 days. The other four face criminal charges, including one man who lives outside China.
过去一周里，至少已有七人因怀疑政府对中国军人在去年与印度军队的冲突中死亡的描述而受到威胁、遭拘留或被逮捕。其中三人分别被拘留七至15天。其他四人面临刑事指控，包括一名居住在中国境外的男子。

“The internet is not a lawless place,” said the police notices issued in their cases. “Blasphemies of heroes and martyrs will not be tolerated.”
“网络空间不是法外之地，”警方发布这些案件的通告中写道。“英雄烈士不容亵渎。”

Their punishment might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for an online database of speech crimes in China. A simple Google spreadsheet open for all to see, it lists nearly 2,000 times when the government punished people for what they said online and offline.
要不是因为有人建了一个中国文字狱的在线数据库，这些人受到的惩罚也许不会引起人们的注意。这是一个简单的谷歌表格，面向所有人开放，它列出了政府对近2000人因为他们的线上或线下言论所做的惩罚。 Continue reading Online database of speech crimes and punishments →

HK charges 47 with violating security law

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Source: NYT (2/28/21)
Hong Kong Charges 47 Democracy Supporters With Violating Security Law
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
Before Sunday, only a handful of people had been formally charged with breaking the law that China imposed last year, which carries a potential sentence of life in prison.
By Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May

Benny Tai outside a Hong Kong police station on Sunday. He was among 47 pro-democracy figures charged with violating the city’s national security law. Credit…Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong authorities charged dozens of pro-democracy figures on Sunday with violating the Chinese territory’s harsh new national security law, the latest blow to the dwindling hopes for democracy in the former British colony.

It was the most forceful use yet of the wide-ranging security law, which has cemented Communist Party control over a territory long known for its individual freedoms, independent court system and rule of law.

Before Sunday, only a handful of people had been formally charged with violating the security law, though about 100 have been arrested on suspicion of doing so. Those convicted of violating the law can be sentenced to life in prison.

The police said that each of the 47 people had been charged with a single count of “conspiracy to commit subversion.” They include Benny Tai, a former University of Hong Kong law professor and leading strategist for the pro-democracy camp. Continue reading HK charges 47 with violating security law →

Has China lifted 100 million people out of poverty

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Source: BBC News (2/28/21)
Has China lifted 100 million people out of poverty?
By Jack Goodman
BBC Reality Check

Chinese farmer carrying basket of vegetables on back. GETTY IMAGES

Chinese President Xi Jinping says his country has reached the ambitious goal set when he assumed office in 2012 of lifting 100 million people out of poverty.But what has China actually achieved?

We’ve compared the Chinese data with global poverty figures compiled by the World Bank.

China’s poverty figures

Poverty is defined by China as anyone in rural areas earning less than about $2.30 a day (adjusted for inflation). It was fixed in 2010 and looks at income but also living conditions, healthcare and education.

Provinces have been racing to reach the goal. Jiangsu, for example, announced in January last year that only 17 of its 80 million residents still lived in poverty.

The national benchmark used by the Chinese government is slightly higher than the $1.90 a day poverty line used by the World Bank to look at poverty globally.

World Bank data

How extreme poverty fell in China. Living on less than $1.90 a day. .

Continue reading Has China lifted 100 million people out of poverty →

Couples rush to divorce

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Source: NYT (2/26/21)
China Tried to Slow Divorces by Making Couples Wait. Instead, They Rushed.
A new rule requiring a cooling-off period before a divorce could be granted led to an outcry, as well as a surge of applications to beat the deadline.
Bu Elsie Chen and Sui-Lee Wee

Posing for a wedding photographer in Wuhan, China, last year. There were more than a million filings for divorce in China in the last three months of 2020, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Credit…Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Last December, Emma Shi desperately needed an appointment at the civil affairs bureau in Shanghai, but could not get one. She scoured the internet to find someone who could help, quickly.

Her request: Help me obtain a divorce within a day.

Ms. Shi, a 38-year-old engineer, was trying to get ahead of a Chinese government rule that from Jan. 1, couples seeking a divorce must first wait 30 days. Ms. Shi said that forcing unhappy couples to stay married would only lead to more fighting.

“To anyone, this would be very unbearable,” she said. “The relationship is already broken.”

The new cooling-off period was introduced to deter impulsive divorces, but it prompted a scramble at the end of last year among couples urgently wanting to part ways.

China’s steadily rising divorce rate has compounded the challenges facing the ruling Communist Party’s efforts to reverse a demographic crisis that threatens economic growth. The number of marriages has plummeted every year since 2014, and officials have also grown increasingly concerned that more wedded couples were acting hastily to untie the knot. Continue reading Couples rush to divorce →

‘Hi Mom’ comedy about death and parenthood

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Source: The Guardian (2/25/21)
Hi Mom: comedy about death and parenthood becomes one of China’s biggest film hits
Written by and starring comedian Jia Ling, the film has started a conversation about mother’s love and women’s identity
By Helen Davidson in Taipei

Audiences are cramming into Chinese cinemas to watch the sentimental comedy Hi, Mom

Audiences are cramming into Chinese cinemas to watch the sentimental comedy Hi, Mom Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

A Chinese comedian’s directoral debut about a woman who travels back in time to see her dead mother has become the fourth highest grossing film in the country’s history and the highest ever for a female director.

Jia Ling’s Hi Mom opened a fortnight ago and has drawn ticket sales of more than 4.5bn RMB ($700m US), according to box office tracker Maoyan. It is the fastest any Chinese movie has sold that much, the tracker said.

Jia wrote, directed and starred in the film, described as a tearjerker comedy, as a tribute to her own mother, who died when Jia was 19. The film has sparked a conversation in China about women, motherhood and parenting.

Hi Mom follows the story of young woman, Jia Xiaoling, whose mother dies in a car accident in 2001. The character, who feels she hadn’t been a good enough daughter, travels back in time to 1981, determined to meet her mother and help give her a better life, including by attempting to set her up with a different man. Continue reading ‘Hi Mom’ comedy about death and parenthood →

Disgust at China’s state-sponsore ‘Uyghurface’

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Fascinating article copied below, on elected officials in New Zealand going along with Chinese state propaganda using “Uyghurface” Han Chinese enactments to try to project a happy face and twist back China’s image, so deeply tarnished in the wake of the recent, unending flood of revelations about the genocide Xinjiang (East Turkistan). A few things to keep in mind:

–“Uyghurface” is very much like the loathed “Blackface” in the US: At their core, both are enactments that obviously represent the moves by dominant supremacist elites to enact and sadistically enjoy their own secret wish of a smiling, obedient slave figure — in the current Chinese case, this is the fantasy “happy dancing Uyghur,” which contrasts with the stark reality of the ongoing genocide, with its massive racial profiling and extralegal internment; mass slavery; the decapitation of their people’s entire cultural elites; bulldozing of their history (cemeteries, pilgrimage sites, mosques), forced assimilation, including by way of the mass confiscation of children for Chinese-only state rearing; the mass prevention of births of new indigenes, and more (cf. my bibliography; or The Xinjiang Documentation Project).

— “Uyghurface,” the term newly coined, is of course also of great scholarly interest as a variety of “Cultural Appropriation” – here, Jason Baird Jackson’s new article “On Cultural Appropriation” (Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2021 • doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.58.1.04) is of great interest: Jackson impressively takes on the entire problem of “cultural appropriation” and usefully points out that as cultural borrowing, it is something common in human history, and as such it’s by no means always evil — yet it certainly can be evil and offensive, especially in situations of, precisely, systematic inequality and domination expressed in mockery and humiliation — such as in the situation of the Uyghurs, right now.

— There is also an important geopolitical context here. The small country of New Zealand is currently heavily targeted, as low-hanging fruit, by the Chinese regime’s state propaganda apparatus and by its United Front, which attempts “elite capture,” as in this act: making local elites buy into, obey, and promote the Chinese regime’s agenda. This “Uyghurface” incident is but one of many expressions of this. The Chinese regime actually won a major victory just recently, when it got the NZ government to berate neighboring Australia (!) for the current standoff in Aussie-Chinese relations, even though it’s clearly and entirely about Chinese political and economic intimidation unfairly piled on Australia as punishment (wine and other trade boycotts, etc. etc.), after its government dared criticize China’s atrocities in Xinjiang, and also for leading the world in demanding an open international inquiry into the origins of the Covid pandemic. (Thank you Australia; I am on my third box of 12 bottles of nice Australian wines now, since all this started).

–Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Newsroom (2/26/21)
Disgust at China’s State-Sponsored “Uyghurface” in Wellington
As further reports of torture and systemic rape emerge from Xinjiang, the PRC’s propaganda machine is hard at work in New Zealand. Laura Walters looks at why a Chinese New Year performance in Wellington was more than just cultural appropriation
By Laura Walters

Wellington Mayor Andy Foster is the latest New Zealand politician to be used as a propaganda tool in China’s campaign against Uyghur Muslims. Photo: Facebook

State-sponsored appropriation of Uyghur culture has been labelled “disgusting” and “disrespectful” by those whose families and communities are being persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. Continue reading Disgust at China’s state-sponsore ‘Uyghurface’ →

HK rewrites history

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Editors at the New York Times are incrementally making more accurate the headline to this story. The first online edition on Tues read, astonishingly, “Curates History”; yesterday’s print edition read, inadequately, “Edits History.” This one at least says “Rewrites History.” For its next appearance, perhaps they will use the more direct “Distorts History.”–Eva S. Chou

Source: NYT (2/24/21)
To Build Loyalty to China, Hong Kong Rewrites History
Through new lesson plans and expensive publishing projects, the government hopes to teach future generations a curated lesson about Hong Kong’s past.
By Vivian Wang

Golden Bauhinia Square, a symbol of Hong Kong’s return from British to Chinese rule in 1997. Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

HONG KONG — The orders seemed innocuous, even obvious: Primary school students in Hong Kong should read picture books about Chinese traditions and learn about famous sites such as the Forbidden City in Beijing or the Great Wall.

But the goal was only partially to nurture an interest in the past. The central aim of the new curriculum guidelines, unveiled by the Hong Kong government this month, was much more ambitious: to use those historical stories to instill in the city’s youngest residents a deep-rooted affinity for mainland China — and, with it, an unwavering loyalty to its leaders and their strong-arm tactics.

Students, the guidelines said, should develop “a sense of belonging to the country, an affection for the Chinese people, a sense of national identity, as well as an awareness of and a sense of responsibility for safeguarding national security.”

The Chinese government, in its efforts to quash dissent, has imposed a strict set of restrictions on Hong Kong, including new rules this week to bar any candidates deemed disloyal to the Community Party from elected office. Continue reading HK rewrites history →