Book reviews

mclc book reviews

Sentimental Politics review

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Source: positions politics (9/2/25)
Fabio Lanza reviews Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past

Hang Tu. Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Harvard University Press, 2025. 326 pp. Hardcover $52.95

In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu reframes the complex intellectual and political landscape of the post-Mao decades, shifting emphasis away from what he describes as “ideological” positions and focusing instead on the role of emotions. He asks, “How does emotion—as a constellation of affective intensities, moral sentiments, and political judgments—factor in the post-Mao political debates about China’s revolutionary past?” (3) Tu argues that, “By analyzing how rival memory projects stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading for the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.” (8)

The book attempts to answer why “emotion” is a good entry into this material. Each of the five chapters is devoted to a set of intellectual/literary figures of the post-Mao era as well as a corresponding set of emotional attachments and sentimental approaches to the Maoist past. Tu moves from Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s differing conceptions of enlightened emotions, one based on pleasure the other on guilt (Chapter 1), to the elevation of the scholar Chen Yinke into a liberal martyr and a symbol of scholarship against politics (Chapter 2). Leftist melancholia is the topic of chapter 3, examined through the connection between Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen and Shanghai novelist Wang Anyi. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the “right” of the political spectrum and focus on conservative thinker Liu Xiaofeng and the neo-nationalists of the China Can Say No phenomenon. Continue reading Sentimental Politics review →

Why ‘Soft Burial’ resonates today

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The cover of the English translation of Soft Burial.

Source: China Unofficial Archives (8/15/25)
The CCP’s Original Sin: Why a Historical Novel About Land Reform Resonates Today
By Ian Johnson

[中国民间档案馆 China Unofficial Archives is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at the above link.]

Seen from today’s perspective, the early years of the PRC can seem like ancient history. Compared to problems facing people today—the end of term limits on top leaders, attacks on civil society organizations, ever-tightening ideological control, the refusal to discuss the origins of the COVID pandemic—events from the middle of last century might be regrettable but irrelevant.

And yet one campaign from that era continues to reverberate today: land reform—a violent, aggressive campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party used in the late 1940s and early 1950s to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel.

Its importance has made it the ultimate taboo, the regime’s original sin that can never be discussed. Over the decades it has been possible to criticize some upheavals, even major ones such as the Cultural Revolution. But land reform is so fundamental to how the party took power that it remains off limits to criticism, portrayed solely as a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.

This context is what makes Fang Fang’s 2016 novel, Soft Burial, so important. Independent historians had been exploring land reform for years before Fang Fang’s novel was first published by the People’s Literature Publishing House. But Fang Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, a 70-year-old member of the literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won the Lu Yao literary prize (named after the writer Wang Weiguo, who went by the penname Lu Yao) and was widely discussed, until a left-wing backlash prompted censors to ban it. Continue reading Why ‘Soft Burial’ resonates today →

Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized

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Source: Journal of Peace Research
Review of John Beck (2025) Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized (New York: Melville House)
By Magnus Fiskesjö (Cornell University)

China’s genocide against the Uyghurs and Kazakhs is ongoing since 2017, yet the world is mostly silent. East Turkestan (Chinese Xinjiang, the ‘New Territory’) seems remote, and it is not Biblical land. China has formidable resources to influence those who should be influenced (world opinion); and to intimidate and silence those who should be silenced (witnesses and refugees). This book is a riveting, stark, and beautiful writeup of the testimonies of four key native witnesses. The reader is invited into their real-life experiences over the last several years. There are no scholarly footnotes, bibliography or index. Instead, readers enter the gripping stories, which start well before the genocide launch, describing the previous fraught and unequal coexistence of Muslim natives and Chinese settlers. The deadly 2009 clashes in the regional capital Urumchi form a key watershed. Chinese officials  borrowed the rhetoric of terrorism and enabled settler violence against the remaining native people. (The Palestinian West Bank parallels are obvious.) The pace accelerates as the Chinese state launches the genocide, with massive sweeps of people for the concentration camps. The cruelty, the mass humiliation, the coercion, the drugging, the sterilizations, all emerge, as well as the struggle to escape. The book, a masterful and moving reportage, ends with the few narrators now in exile, struggling to tell us their story. The author could have added a chapter on how China is now completing the genocide, by seizing the future: mass separating all children, erasing their identities, culture, and language, force-replaced with Chinese: ‘Kill the native, save the man’, just like in North America in the last century (compare the UN Genocide Convention, §2E). I warmly recommend this book.

Mending Bodies review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s review of Mending Bodies, by Hon Lai Chu and translated by Jacqueline Leung. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/tammy-ho/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Mending Bodies 

By Hon Lai Chu

Translated by Jacqueline Leung

Reviewed by Tammy Lai-ming Ho

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2025)

Hon Lai Chu, Mending Bodies Tr. Jacqueline Leung. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2025. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1949641769.

In Hon Lai Chu’s 韓麗珠 Mending Bodies, originally published in Chinese as Fengshen 縫身 (which translates literally to “Sewn Body”) fifteen years ago and newly translated into English by Jacqueline Leung, the Hong Kong author envisions a society where connection and loyalty are measured by literal bodily attachment. Under a new law known as the Conjoinment Act, young adults are incentivized—indeed pressured—to surgically “conjoin” with a partner for life. These partnerships may be arranged through state-run matching programs that assess bodily compatibility, but they can also arise from personal choice, including romantic inclination. Yet love is no guarantee of harmony. Whether selected voluntarily or bureaucratically, conjoinment is depicted as a fraught compromise with an increasingly coercive society.

Hon transforms this surreal premise into an unsettling fable of personal freedom under siege, one that resonates far beyond its vaguely defined setting. Through spare, haunting prose and disquieting imagery, Mending Bodies interrogates what it means to relinquish autonomy “for the good of another person and for the good of the country.”[1] It’s a dystopian tale deeply rooted in Hong Kong’s contemporary anxieties, yet its questions about bodily sovereignty and identity feel unnervingly universal.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is a university student writing her dissertation on the history of conjoined humans. She is critical of the Conjoinment Act, even as friends and family urge her to “settle down” and join the program. In Hon’s alternate Hong Kong—a thinly veiled version of the real city—public opinion has been swayed to see conjoinment as the only path to a better life. The narrator observes with unease as newly conjoined couples are celebrated like heroes, showered with champagne by friends and touted as symbols of hope. Meanwhile, unjoined individuals face growing stigma as incomplete or selfish. This Orwellian social pressure is epitomized by the narrator’s close college friend, May. Once a free-spirited roommate, May now boasts about her own conjoinment and pointedly wonders when the narrator will “sacrifice” herself too (134). Through such interactions, Hon paints a chilling portrait of conformity, where even those close to us become agents of state ideology. Continue reading Mending Bodies review →

All under Heaven review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Peter Zarrow’s review of All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, by Zhao Tingyang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/zarrow/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

All under Heaven:
The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order

By Zhao Tingyang

Translated by Joseph E. Harroff

Reviewed by Peter Zarrow

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2025)

Zhao Tingyang, All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order Tr. by Joseph E. Harroff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 332 pp. ISBN 9780520325005 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780520325029 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780520974210 (ebook).

Tianxia 天下 is an ancient term, found on Zhou bronzes and in early classics such as the Book of Odes (詩經), Book of Documents (書經), and the Analects (論語). The Anglosphere has found it convenient either to translate the term more or less literally as “All-under-Heaven” or, capturing its practical usage, as “kingdom” or “empire”—that is, China.[1]  In the former guise, Tianxia might be regarded as similar to ancient theocratic empires: it performs legitimacy while also providing the conceptual basis for what was politically possible. The more territorialized sense of Tianxia, in turn, might be regarded as a self-reference that various dynasties found useful. This is not the understanding presented by Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳 in All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order.  For one, both understandings of Tianxia treat it as a form of the state, whereas Zhao points to the classical distinction between Tianxia and guo 國 (state) to suggest it is something else. Namely, Tianxia refers to the world and therefore in no sense does it refer to a state (in contrast to the Greek polis, for example).  Zhao finds the concept emerging in China’s most ancient period, “too early for its own time” (xiv), while the “Tianxia system” (if not the concept) emerged with the Zhou and ended in 221 BCE.

Haroff’s fine translation captures Zhao’s style and conveys his sometimes technical philosophical terminology and his restatements of ancient texts in ways that should make sense to Western political thinkers as well as Sinologists, yet without flattening the particularities of Zhao’s ideas. In this review, I first present a summary of Zhao’s argument, and then a critique.  Use of the term Tianxia in modern scholarship took off in the early 2010s, at least according to Google’s N-gram counter, in both the original Chinese and in its romanized form. Zhao’s first major work on Tianxia, published in 2005, did much to prompt discussion. This revival of an ancient concept has sometimes been seen as a kind of ideological mask for Chinese dominance: “The tianxia system is defined as a Sino-centric hierarchical relationship among unequals, governed according to Confucian principles of benevolence,” in June Teufel’s words.[2]  Zhao Tingyang would deny he seeks any kind of Chinese dominance. For Zhao, Tianxia is a resource or a “method” to ameliorate our anarchic, violent, and oppressive world order.  In All under Heaven, he argues for the need to reinvent Tianxia in the wake of the failure of the Kantian search for world peace and the contemporary disasters of international politics. Zhao begins his interdisciplinary but mainly philosophical study of Tianxia by calling it “an ideal concerned with achieving cosmopolitical order,” but also sees it as a tool (in the realm of reality as opposed to the ideal) and “also [as] a methodology” (vii).  In Zhao’s understanding, in the Tianxia system there is no dichotomy between the inner and outer, since nothing can exist outside of the world.  Likewise, there is no distinction between friend and enemy—there are differences but no goal of annihilating the Other. Zhao would keep “national sovereignty,” but the powers of states would be limited by “world sovereignty” (22), with both sovereignties existing in the same system.  When questions affecting all humanity are at stake, those would be in the field of world sovereignty. Conflict is thus ultimately futile; “relational reasoning” (mutual aid, in a sense) ultimately works better than “individual rationality” (maximizing self-interest). In a word, Zhao believes Western political theory, centering on the nation-state, can be and should be replaced by theories that define politics as the “art of shared living” (36) on the global level. Continue reading All under Heaven review →

Imperial-Time-Order review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Magnus Fiskesjö’s review of Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire, by Kun Qian. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fiskesjo/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Imperial-Time-Order: Literature,
Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire

By Kun Qian

Reviewed by Magnus Fiskesjö

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Kun Qian, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 368 pp. ISBN: 9789004309296 (hardback) / ISBN 9789004309302 (e-book).

It used to be, in China, that empire and imperialism were words associated with evil foreign powers—especially Western powers encroaching on Asia—and, to a lesser extent, with China’s own past empires, also characterized as unjust and oppressive.

Today, we see an increasingly explicit embrace of the idea of empire in China. In a complete reversal of Communist Party policy, there is even a renewed identification of today’s China with its own past empires, in discourse as well as in state actions both inside and outside of the modern Chinese nation-state that replaced the Qing empire after 1911.

Kun Qian’s Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire provides a very useful analysis of how this shift occurred, with particular focus on the cultural realm. Because of current developments, her remarkable and extremely rich book is gaining in timeliness every day. Grounded in a deep engagement with both Chinese and Western philosophy and literature, Imperial-Time-Order will continue to help explain the roots of the Chinese imperial imagination to readers and students for a long time to come.

The book begins, appropriately, with an introduction to the ambivalent figure of Mao, who regarded himself as a revolutionary overthrowing the old and creating something new—not just another imperial dynasty. And yet, at the same time, as many have observed, Mao took on imperial manners. Kun Qian emphasizes how deeply influenced Mao was by the history of the imperial eras that came before. She argues that Mao saw himself as part of a Chinese continuity, unfolding on a Chinese time, a “universal time” in which there always is a China. Continue reading Imperial-Time-Order review →

On the Edge review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Shaoling Ma’s review of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, by Margaret Hillenbrand. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/shaoling-ma/. This review is a leftover from Jason McGrath’s tenure as our media studies book editor. My thanks to Jason for ushering this review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

On the Edge:
Feeling Precarious in China

By Margaret Hillenbrand

Reviewed by Shaoling Ma

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. ??? pages, ISBN 9780231212151 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780231212144 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780231559232 (E-book)

On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China scrutinizes the role that contemporary cultural forms play in rousing feelings of precarity among the underclass—marginalized rural and urban Chinese populations subject to internal expulsion or what the book terms “zombie citizenship”—and its less disenfranchised counterparts. Rooted in cultural studies but with an ambitious interdisciplinary arc spanning sociology, art history, anthropology, political economy, and the law, Margaret Hillenbrand conceives of performance art, visual art about waste, workers’ poetry, suicidal protests, and short video and livestreaming apps as “factious forms,” which stage and vivify class strife at a time when the Chinese ruling party has banished class as part of its political lexicon. On the Edge extends existing scholarship on the well-acknowledged problems of inequality and migrant labor in the People’s Republic of China by excoriating the less perceptible threats of social descent and civic jeopardy confronting cultural workers, online platform employees, unemployed university graduates, tech workers, and other people not usually associated with the underclass. This book decisively rectifies China’s absence from influential discourses of precarity over the last two decades; more subtly, it marshals resurging discussions in China studies and beyond on the increasingly troubled relation between aesthetics and politics under late capitalism. It is the stakes of cultural production that are most salient in Hillenbrand’s searing study: do aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category assume or reject their own commodification? In other words, are the cultural practices in Hillenbrand’s consideration independent from the material determinations from which they emerge? Continue reading On the Edge review →

Hong Kong Crime Films review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of of Tom Cunliffe’s review of Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986, by Kristof Van den Troost. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/cunliffe/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Crime Films:
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986

By Kristof Van den Troost

Reviewed by Tom Cunliffe

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2025)

Kristof Van den Troost, Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 256 pages, ISBN 9781399521772 (Paperback)/ 9781399521765 (Hardback).

The term “Hong Kong crime film” conjures up numerous images, and ubiquitous among them would probably be Chow Yun-fat 周潤發 wielding dual pistols in a John Woo movie. But what of the rich history of Hong Kong crime cinema and its many sub-genres from the 1950s to the mid-1980s before Woo and others came along and shook the industry up? What of this genre’s complex relationship with Hong Kong society? How have crime films continuously exploited ambiguities in their representation of cops and gangsters? How did the politics of image making develop as colonial censorship protocols morphed? And how was cinematic realism shaped by a contesting array of forces? Kristof Van den Troost sets out to answer these questions and many more in this passionately written and extremely well researched study of Hong Kong crime films during this period. In the process, it lays out a huge watchlist for any crime film aficionado of films rarely written about in English or Chinese. Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 fills in several blanks in Hong Kong film history in its exhaustive coverage of the various sub-genres within Hong Kong crime cinema before the explosive success of A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色, 1986) kickstarted the heyday of the genre in the mid-to-late 1980s. Such achievements could inspire further research projects on Hong Kong film and media history. Understanding the roots and development of the crime film genre also explains the genre’s continuing popularity in Hong Kong, as exemplified by the recent huge success of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨之圍城, 2024). Continue reading Hong Kong Crime Films review →

Soft Burial review

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Source: The Atlantic (3/27/25)
The Chinese Communist Party’s Ultimate Taboo
Fang Fang’s newly translated novel uncovers the brutal, buried history of land reform in China.
By Ian Johnson

collage of images depicting land reform in China

Illustration by Colin Hunter / The Atlantic. Sources: Chronicle / Alamy; Tzido / Getty; Wikicommons.

Over its 75-year history, the People’s Republic of China has suffered numerous traumas, but perhaps none with longer-lasting consequences than land reform—a violent campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party enacted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The program’s stated intent was to redistribute property to landless farmers, but in reality it was used to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel through the brutal persecution of landowners.

This history is the governing party’s ultimate taboo, its unspoken original sin. Over the decades, independent historians and ordinary people in China have at times managed to publicly criticize some of the party’s actions—even major upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution—without facing reprisal. But land reform is so fundamental to how the current government took power that no citizen may portray it as anything other than a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.

This context is what makes Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial, recently translated into English by Michael Berry, so electrifying. Starting around the turn of the 21st century, independent historians began to explore land reform, drawing on oral histories to challenge the party’s narrative. But their works were either quickly banned or circulated only underground. Soft Burial, first published in China in 2016, was different. Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, and a longtime member of its literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won a sought-after literary prize and was widely discussed in mainstream Chinese media, until backlash prompted censors to ban it. Continue reading Soft Burial review →

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Wen-chi Li’s review of Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/wen-chi-li/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere

Edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma

Reviewed by Wen-chi Li

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2025)

Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds., Queer Literature in the Sinosphere London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. xii + 284 pp. ISBN 9781350415331 (Hardback) / ISBN 9781350415355 (ePDF) / ISBN 9781350415348 (eBook)

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, arrives at a pivotal moment when queer communities are gaining more visibility worldwide. The editors first justify their choice of using “queer literature in the Sinosphere” rather than terms such as “queer Chinese literature” or “queer Sinophone literature.” Whereas the former privileges China, the latter excludes works from the PRC. They adopt the term “Sinosphere,” as proposed by Chris Berry, to encompass all works in Sinitic languages. I am particularly impressed by the book’s introduction, which offers a literary history while also pointing to key academic works for readers to gain a foundational understanding. The volume is divided into four sections—“Trans Formation,” “Queer Women’s Spaces,” “Queer Intersectionality,” and “In Queer Memory”—and explores diverse dimensions of queer literature.

In the first section, “Trans Formation,” three scholars examine the possibilities of transgender identities within Chinese contexts. Aixia Huang revisits male homoerotic literature from the Ming-Qing period, highlighting how male characters often undergo male-to-female gender crossing to preserve their relationships with male lovers; the adoption of trans-femininity rationalizes or legitimizes their intimacy with men. This transformation is sometimes driven by practical concerns, such as improving their social or living conditions. Continue reading Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review →

China’s Counter-Histories

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Source: NY Review of Books (2/27/25)
China’s Counter-Histories
By Perry Link

In Sparks, Ian Johnson writes of Chinese people who risk their careers and even their lives to uncover suppressed truths about their country’s modern history.

Hu Jie: Let there be light #16, 2015; from a series of woodblock prints about China’s Great Famine of 1958–1962

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson. Oxford University Press, 381 pp., $27.95; $19.99 (paper)

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

The CCP presses them terribly and largely succeeds. The journalists, professors, rights lawyers, and primitively equipped filmmakers who make up Johnson’s “underground historians” (alternatively, “counter-historians”) appear to be only a tiny minority. But he shows how they draw on values that have not only survived dynasties but also helped to bring some dynasties down. Today’s rulers seem aware of that. Our best evidence of this is the highly expensive 24/7 “stability maintenance” measures that the regime uses to monitor, dissuade, and, if necessary, stifle them. The tools of dissuasion are basically two: threats designed to induce fear and offers of comfort to reward capitulation. Beyond that, punishment. Continue reading China’s Counter-Histories →

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Disoriented Disciplines review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to annnounce publication of Chuanhui Meng’s review of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation, by Sheldon H. Lu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chuanhui-meng/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our film/media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication. This is Prof. Ma’s first review since she replaced Jason McGrath in that position.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and
Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

By Sheldon H. Lu

Reviewed by Chuanhui Meng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2024)

Sheldon H. Lu, Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Xi + 256 pp. ISBN 978-1350234185 (hardcover)

Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 2016 blockbuster production The Great Wall (长城) presents a fantastical narrative where foreign mercenaries join forces with Chinese defenders to protect the Great Wall, and by extension the Chinese nation, from monstrous and foreign invasions. The film’s story and production embody two seemingly contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the diegetic narrative aims to consolidate the “border” of the Chinese nation by fortifying the Great Wall against external threats. On the other hand, the diegetic incorporation of friendly foreign forces and the extra-diegetic, transnational collaborations between U.S.-China-and-Japanese film production companies in the making of the film cross the proverbial “Great Wall” in today’s global film industry. These ongoing tensions—among nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization; among the “walling” and “de-walling” of culture and national borders—capture a central concern of Sheldon H. Lu’s most recent book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture. In theorizing nation-building in contemporary China within the context of transnationalism and globalization, Lu examines this distinguished phenomenon of “walling,” defining it not primarily as “setting up physical barriers,” but more as “the selective, restrictive flow of information, ideas, and ideology” in both physical and virtual spaces (12). Continue reading Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review →

The Unfilial

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Colleagues might be interested in this recent review on the Irish Times regarding a new novella collection in translation Find below relevant parts of the review and information about the book.–Daniel Li <Daniel.li@alaincharlesasia.com>

The Unfilial (Sinoist Books, £15.99) is a collection of four stories by Chinese writer Yao Emei 姚鄂梅. The long story – 50 or more pages – is a favourite format of mine, proving the perfect length for an evening’s reading.

In the first tale, It Runs in the Family (translated by Will Spence), a young man throws his lover from a bridge, making the family reliant on the local police chief. Things are complicated by the fact that the chief is the spurned lover of the murderer’s mother. Gran is on Her Way (translated by Olivia Milburn), is about a hospital cleaner who gave up her own child for adoption when the father was imprisoned. Years later, she finds herself drawn into the desperate circumstances of other young women, while also dealing with the hangover from her own past. It is one of the best stories you’ll read all year.

Skeletons in the Closet (translated by Honey Watson) follows a young woman’s clandestine affair with an older, married doctor. Though drawn into the passion and subterfuge, she is keenly aware of the betrayal involved. You’ll Do the Job With Skill and Ease (translated by Martin Ward) is a novella-length story about a father who gambles away his family’s house, forcing them into an itinerant living experiment, staying in hotels or squatting in friends’ houses. It is a parable about the foundational importance of home in a family.

There are common plot points among the stories – prison, mistakes, hospital, feckless men and unplanned pregnancy. Yao handles difficult subject matter with sensitivity yet also confidence. She makes bold choices and creates complex but credible human dilemmas rather than providing pat morality for reader comfort. Highly recommended.

The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China – Yao Emei (Trans: Will Spence, Olivia Milburn, Honey Watson and Martin Ward). 288 pp. Sinoist Books, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-83890-581-1. Pricing: £15.99