Pema Tseden retrospective

For the complete retrospective of the films of Pema Tseden that I’ve curated for TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, I’ve written a brief introductory essay on his work, and capsule descriptions of the 8 features and two shorts that we are showing in Toronto. This retrospective, if all goes well, will travel to several other venues in 2025: the Harvard Film Archive, the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and at the VIFF Centre in Vancouver. I’m open to other suggestions – Shelly Kraicer <shellyk@mac.com> (Toronto, Canada)

Source: TIFF.net
Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden
By Shelly Kraicer

Tibetan director Pema Tseden (1969–2023) became, during his all-too-short life, one of the most remarkable filmmakers of this century. He revolutionized the representation of Tibet and Tibetans and shared his visions of authentic Tibetan life with the entire film-going world by reimagining how narrative cinematic fiction could operate within so-called “Chinese minority cinema”. His alterative formal strategies and narrative framings were inspired by the contemporary lived experience of Tibetans, centering in his works their culture, language, religion, and ways of inhabiting and interpreting their world.

Pema Tseden died mid-career, at the age of 53. Born to farmer-herder parents in the Tibetan highlands of Qinghai Province, China, he went to rural schools and trained as a teacher. After studying Tibetan literature at Northwest Minorities University, he discovered a passion for making films. A scholarship enabled him to enrol in the prestigious Beijing Film Academy (BFA), where he studied screenwriting and film directing. He was the first Tibetan to graduate from the BFA in 2004. Since 1991, he has published short stories in both Chinese and Tibetan that use humour and a seemingly simple yet eloquent style to depict aspects of contemporary Tibetan life. Continue reading Pema Tseden retrospective

Statement on Uyghur asylum seekers in Thailand

See below for information on signing a statement protesting the Uyghurs being held by Thailand and who are at risk of being deported to China. –Magnus Fiskesjö

======================

Dear Friend and colleagues,

You will have seen the tragic news that 48 Uyghurs face immediate deportation from Thailand to the PRC where they will certainly face persecution.

We urge you to sign the following statement addressed to the Thai authorities asking for the group of detained Uyghur men to be given safe haven: https://forms.gle/zWw3GbTvvqiuNLRX7.

We hope that this statement will raise awareness of the detainees’ situation and prevent their deportation to the PRC.

Kind regards,

Nyrola Elimä, Rune Steenberg, David Tobin <d.tobin@sheffield.ac.uk>, and Emily Upson.

Call for article retraction

Greetings and Happy New Year. We write to bring to your attention a recent article on Tibetan children and “racial empathy bias” that was published in the US psychology journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (the journal of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race), by a pair of Han Chinese psychology scholars (Jing Sheng and Li Wang) and their graduate students at South China Normal University. In their article, they claimed that their research in the TAR among Tibetan “primary school” students received the approval of their university’s “human ethics” board, but we and others think the scholarship is deeply suspect both ethically and theoretically, in that they make racist claims about Tibetan children’s alleged “racial empathy bias” toward Han Chinese.

The scholars’ claims were so explicitly racist that the journal received complaints after it was published. To their credit, the editors published an apology, and required the authors to strike the most egregious statements (see below). However, the article was NOT retracted, and remains published in the journal. Given recent Chinese state efforts to shape scholarly discourse on Tibet abroad, we feel strongly that this article needs to be completely retracted and that the continued presence of this article and others like it in US academic journals threatens the credibility of these journals and the well-known scholars on their editorial boards (this journal seems to have a huge editorial board, as well as a large list of “editorial consultants,” scholars from major colleges and universities across the U.S.).

Please support our call to the journal editors to retract this article by signing the open letter (see below) to the editors through the Google Form link at the top of the letter. Your name and affiliation will be automatically added to the letter. Continue reading Call for article retraction

How China is erasing Tibetan culture

Here’s snippet of a long, multimedia-based article on the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Tibetan culture.–Kirk Denton

Source: NYT (1/9/25)
How China is Erasing Tibetan Culture, One Child at a Time
By Chris Buckley

China Central Television

Across China’s west, the party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the Communist Party.

Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the party is systematically separating Tibetan children from their families to erase Tibetan identity and to deepen China’s control of a people who historically resisted Beijing’s rule. They have estimated that around three-quarters of Tibetan students age 6 and older — and others even younger — are in residential schools that teach largely in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, culture and Buddhist beliefs that the children once absorbed at home and in village schools.

When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, visited one such school in the summer, he inspected a dormitory that appeared freshly painted and as neat as an army barracks. He walked into a classroom where Tibetan students, listening to a lecture on Communist Party thought, stood and applauded to welcome him.

Mr. Xi’s visit to the school in Qinghai Province in June amounted to a firm endorsement of the program, despite international criticism. Education, he said, must “implant a shared consciousness of Chinese nationhood in the souls of children from an early age.”

Chinese officials say the schools help Tibetan children to quickly become fluent in the Chinese language and learn skills that will prepare them for the modern economy. They say that families voluntarily send their children to the schools, which are free, and that the students have classes in Tibetan culture and language. . . [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE (paywall)]

Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands

Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (1/2/25)
The Battle over Politically Correct Designations for China’s Borderlands
By Bruce Humes

The word “Tibet” has been replaced by “Himalayan World” accompanied by “Tibetan art.”

Labels matter. As Confucius (reportedly) said:

名不正,則言不順
言不順,則事不成

If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate.
If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished.

— The Analects (Trans. Raymond Dawson)

New politically correct designations for China’s traditional frontiers — homelands to Tibetans, Mongols and Turkic Muslims  — are emerging, but their usage outside the Middle Kingdom is proving controversial.

According to a report by Radiofrance (le mot “Tibet” supprimé), two major museums in Paris made changes to their labeling of Tibetan art in 2023 and 2024. On the explanatory panels in its galleries, Quai Branly began replacing “Tibet” with “Xizang,” China’s name for the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Then Musée Guimet — which houses one of the largest collections of Asian Art outside of Asia — repackaged its “Nepal-Tibet” section as “Monde Himalayen” (Himalayan World).

These changes were noted and vigorously critiqued by French scholars, who accused the museums of bowing to pressure from China in its campaign to force the outside world to accept its colonialist terminology. “Is it the job of museums to rewrite history at the behest of an authoritarian regime? “ queries French Tibetologist Katia Buffetrille, according to Radiofrance. Continue reading Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands

Anime’s knowledge cultures

Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (11/14/24)
Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation
By Jinying Li

In the first two decades of the 21st century, we witnessed a widespread cultural movement of geekdom that went global and mainstream simultaneously. While American media were announcing “it’s hip to be square” and “geek is chic,” their East Asian counterparts were embracing otaku and zhai as trendy labels to identify a new generation of pop culture heroes who thrived on the transmedia arenas of the digital era. In 2008, “zhai” was chosen as the Chinese “buzz word of the year” to celebrate the cultural prominence of China’s zhai generation which, according to the Chinese news media, not only defined the cultural meanings of the “Internet pop” (网络流行) but also characterized “a state of living and being” (生存状态) in the 21st century.[1] During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, zhai as “a state of living and being” was further embraced in China as a crucial cultural strategy to survive the pandemic quarantines and lockdowns, displacing the fear of an infectious disease with the obsession with spreadable media.[2]

The worldwide rise of geek and zhai culture points to the emergence and significance of a new demographic of transnational knowledge workers in a global economy dominated by information networks. This knowledge class functions as a crucial yet often overlooked nexus in the ongoing transformations of information society that we are still trying to understand. These so-called geeks, otaku, and zhai are the active agents, as both consumers and producers, connecting techno-economic developments to socio-cultural changes. Therefore, critically examining this social group and its cultural values, I believe, is the key to understanding our current information society at large.

My work is about the cultural values of geeks, otaku and zhai: how they emerged, why they matter, and what they mean. Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, I explore the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time.  The key questions are why anime appeals to this rapidly expanding social group, and how anime constitutes a mediation environment that effectively translates between knowledge work and what Tiziana Terranova calls “knowledgeable consumption of culture.”[3] I study geek and zhai as informational knowledge culture in postindustrial society and investigates how anime constitutes a powerful media environment that cultivate and sustain this knolwge culture. Studying anime as the media environment of global geekdom, I want to shift the center of knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia, problematizing the supposed American whiteness in the popular imagination of the knowledge class. This shift from the techno-culture of computing to the transmedia system of anime also calls for a theoretical rethinking of how knowledge culture is mediated. I argue that the culturalization of informational knowledge work needs a media form, which is animation rather than computation. Continue reading Anime’s knowledge cultures

New sources on China’s annexations

New comprehensive essay collection on China’s brazen annexations of territory in Nepal and Bhutan, and related topics, such as the forced sinicization of Tibet, etc.:

Mapping China’s Himalayan Hustle: Revisionism Resistance Must be the Order of the Region. Edited by Jagannath Panda. Institute for Security and Development Policy [Stockholm], 2024, November 2024.

Note also these recent articles on China’s unilateral annexations:

https://turquoiseroof.org/forceful-diplomacy-china-cross-border-villages-in-bhutan/

https://thediplomat.com/2024/10/the-politics-of-chinas-land-appropriation-in-bhutan/

ps. I too recently published on China’s Himalayan annexations — in Swedish: “Kina annekterar delar av Nepal och Bhutan.” Kinamedia, 21 november 2024.

Magnus Fiskesjö nf42@cornell.edu

Soup dumplings

Source: The Guardian (11/10/24)
100,000 Chinese students join 50km night-time bike ride in search of good soup dumplings
Authorities impose restrictions on bike hire after huge group blocks a highway between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in China, as night biking trend takes off
By  in Taipei

College students from Zhengzhou cycle to Kaifeng.

College students from Zhengzhou cycle to Kaifeng. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

A night-time cycling trend that started with four Chinese students riding 50km for dumplings blew out to a reported 100,000 people on Friday, jamming major roads, overwhelming a small tourist city and drawing the attention of authorities.

The pack of students, mostly on public share bikes, rode several hours through Henan province from their campuses in Zhengzhou to the ancient city of Kaifeng.

“People sang together and cheered for each other while climbing uphill together,” Liu Lulu, a student at Henan University, told China Daily. “I could feel the passion of the young people. And it was much more than a bike ride.”

But Kaifeng quickly reached capacity, with accommodation, restaurants and public spaces packed to bursting, officials said. Video circulating online shows tens of thousands of cyclists filling the six-lane Zhengkai avenue, the expressway between Zhengzhou and the streets of the much smaller Kaifeng, as police used loudhailers to ask students to leave, by bike or on a free bus.

To prevent a repeat of Friday’s event, authorities announced temporary restrictions on roads and cycle paths for the weekend, and bike share apps warned they would remotely lock any bikes taken out of designated zones in Zhengzhou.

Some Zhengzhou universities also enacted measures including banning bicycles on campuses and requiring students to apply for passes to leave the grounds. Continue reading Soup dumplings

Harvard position in anthropology

TENURED PROFESSOR IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHINA
Harvard University
Department of Anthropology

Position Description:

The Department of Anthropology seeks to appoint a tenured professor specializing in the anthropology of China. The appointment is expected to begin in academic year 2025-2026. The successful candidate will have a distinguished record of ethnographic research on contemporary Chinese society and culture and will contribute to both undergraduate and graduate education. Candidates are expected to engage in ongoing research that advances the department’s commitment to intellectual diversity and excellence.

Basic Qualifications:

Candidates are required to have a doctorate in anthropology or a related field.

Additional Qualifications:

A demonstrated strong commitment to teaching, advising, and research is essential. Candidates should exhibit intellectual leadership and impact on the field and have the potential for significant contributions to the department, university, and broader scholarly community.

Application Instructions:

Applicants should submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal (https://academicpositions.harvard.edu) no later than December 30, 2024: Continue reading Harvard position in anthropology

Can men in China take a joke?

Source: NYT (10/31/24)
Can Men in China Take a Joke? Women Doing Stand-Up Have Their Doubts.
Comedy has become a way for women to skewer China’s gender inequality. Some men aren’t happy about it.
By  (Reporting from Beijing)

A woman in a sleeveless, striped top, is seen holding a microphone in her right hand.

Yang Li, China’s best-known female stand-up comic, in a screenshot from a variety show. She was dropped from an ad campaign after men complained to the company.Credit…iQIYI Variety via YouTube

On the list of topics best avoided by China’s comedians, some are obvious. Politics. The Chinese military.

Now add: Men’s fragile egos.

That, at least, was the message sent this month, when a major e-commerce platform abruptly ended a partnership with China’s most prominent female stand-up comic. The company was caving to pressure from men on social media who described the comedian, Yang Li, as a man-hating witch.

Speaking up for women’s rights is increasingly sensitive in China, and the stand-up stage is the latest battleground. Growing numbers of women like Ms. Yang are speaking out about — and laughing at — the injustices they face. On two hugely popular stand-up shows this fall, women were among the breakout stars, thanks to punchlines about the difficulty of finding a good partner, or men’s fear of talking about menstruation.

But a backlash has emerged, as men balk at being the butt of the joke. They have attacked the comics on social media; Ms. Yang has described receiving threats of violence. The women’s new visibility can also be easily erased. Not long after the e-commerce company, JD.com, dropped Ms. Yang, it deleted posts on its official social media account featuring two other female comedians.

The battle over women’s jokes reflects the broader paradox of feminism in China. On the one hand, feminist rhetoric is more widespread than ever before, with once-niche discussions of gender inequality now aired openly. But the forces trying to suppress that rhetoric are also growing, encouraged by a government that has led its own crusade against feminist activism and pushed women toward traditional roles.

On guancha.cn, a nationalistic commentary site, an editorial declared: “The fewer divisive symbols like Yang Li, the better.” Continue reading Can men in China take a joke?

China’s latest security target: Halloween partygoers

Source: NYT (10/29/24)
China’s Latest Security Target: Halloween Partygoers
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
Last year, the Shanghai government said Halloween celebrations were a sign of “cultural tolerance.” This year, the police rounded up people in costume
By Vivian Wang and  (Vivian Wang reported from Beijing)

Social media videos verified by The New York Times showed police in Shanghai escorting away people dressed in costumes. CreditCredit…

The police escorted the Buddha down the street, one officer steering him with both hands. They hurried a giant poop emoji out of a cheering dance circle in a public park. They also pounced on Donald J. Trump with a bandaged ear, and pushed a Kim Kardashian look-alike, in a tight black dress and pearls, into a police van, while she turned and waved to a crowd of onlookers.

The authorities in Shanghai were on high alert this past weekend, against a pressing threat: Halloween.

Officials there clamped down on Halloween celebrations this year, after many young people turned last year’s festivities into a rare public outlet for political or social criticism. People had poured into the streets dressed up as Covid testing workers, to mock the three years of lockdowns they had just endured; they plastered themselves in job advertisements, amid a weak employment market; they cross-dressed, seizing the opportunity to express L.G.B.T.Q. identities without being stigmatized. Continue reading China’s latest security target: Halloween partygoers

Laura Murphy on Uyghur forced labor

Laura Murphy’s powerful lecture on Uyghur forced labor, given on Sep 30, 2024, is now available on Global Cornell?s YouTube channel:

Fighting Uyghur Forced Labor: Government, Researchers, Industry, and Civil Society. By Laura T. Murphy, Policy Advisor, Department of Homeland Security, and Professor of Human Rights, Sheffield Hallam University.

Laura Murphy discussed the current situation for Uyghurs in forced labor in China, as well as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the landmark forced labor legislation that prohibits goods made in the Uyghur Region of China from import into the United States — including the effects of the law after two years of implementation.

Sincerely,
Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>

‘Garbage time of history’ (1)

Source: NYT (9/13/24)
Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy
The sports term refers to a time during a game when defeat becomes inevitable. Officialdom is warning against using it to take veiled jabs at the country’s political and economic system.
By 

Tall buildings rise behind intersecting overpasses. In the foreground, two men in office attire walk past bicycles and motor bikes.

Beijing’s central business district. Credit…Vincent Thian/Associated Press

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline. This summer, as the youth unemployment rate soared above 17 percent, the term became a popular shorthand on Chinese social media for describing a sense of hopelessness around the ailing economy.

Commentaries about garbage times of history, some written under pseudonyms, began appearing last year in blog posts and as opinion essays on respected Chinese news sites. They examined past regimes and dynasties and were broadly understood to be thinly veiled critiques of China’s political and economic system. They landed as discussion of the economy — even misplaced praise for the ruling Communist Party’s economic policies — was getting more sensitive. Continue reading ‘Garbage time of history’ (1)

How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends

Source: Think China (9/10/24)
How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends
By Ying Zhu

Black Myth: Wukong has revived interest in everything Monkey King, but the Chinese video game has also been criticised for not fully capturing the original myth. Even so, the game has given the Chinese gaming industry a boost, even though government endorsement may shift the focus from design to politics. Academic Ying Zhu explores the magic of Monkey King.

People wait in line to play Black Myth: Wukong at Gamescom 2023, in Cologne, Germany, on 23 August 2023. (Jana Rodenbusch/Reuters)

People wait in line to play Black Myth: Wukong at Gamescom 2023, in Cologne, Germany, on 23 August 2023. (Jana Rodenbusch/ Reuters)

In summer 2015, a Chinese animation film, Monkey King: Hero Is Back, made headline news for breaking the Chinese animation box-office record previously held by DreamWorks’ Kungfu Panda 2 (2011). The film features the Monkey King, a legendary trickster known for his mischief and magical powers, drawn from the beloved 16th-century Chinese literary classic Journey to the West.

Journey to the West narrates the 7th-century pilgrimage of Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travels from Xi’an (the Tang Dynasty capital) to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. This whimsical and fantastical tale chronicles Xuanzang’s challenging journey, accompanied by three troublesome apprentices who have been assigned to him as protectors to atone for their sins.

Among the three, the monkey named Sun Wukong stood out for both his magical power in fighting evil and his troublemaking penchant. His captivating character has enchanted generations of readers, making him a legendary hero in Chinese mythology.

Monkey King fever a decade ago

The Monkey King story has been updated through stage performances, TV series, film and video games in China and beyond. Research shows that from 1906-2021, roughly 170 theatre, film and TV adaptations were said to have been produced in the Chinese-speaking world alone. Among them, Monkey King: Hero Is Back stood out for its success in vanquishing Hollywood in the Chinese domestic market. Continue reading How Black Myth: Wukong navigates China’s political and cultural trends

China, Empire and World Anthropology

In this piece, I argue that China anthropologists today should not be the handmaidens of China’s imperialism.–Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>

China, Empire and World Anthropology
Magnus Fiskesjö
Anthropology Today, 40 (4) (2024)

Abstract

This comment critically examines the legacy of Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong and its implications for understanding China’s approach to non-Chinese peoples on the territory that became modern China. The author argues that Fei’s concept of ‘pluralistic unity’ has been misinterpreted and actually represents a continuation of China’s imperial ideology of absorbing conquered populations. The piece links this ideology to current Chinese policies, particularly the treatment of Uyghurs and other non-Chinese peoples. It contends that the Chinese Communist Party abandoned its original anti-imperialist stance in favour of continuing imperial practices, resulting in the transformation of multiple nations into nominal ‘minorities’ and then their erasure under the guise of national unity. The author calls for a reassessment of China’s anthropology through the lens of colonialism, racism and imperialism, arguing that China’s imperial legacy must be critically examined to understand its current policies and actions. The article situates this discussion within the broader context of emerging literature on Chinese settler colonialism. It emphasizes the need for a comparative approach in studying China’s past and present imperialism.