Culture

posts related to Chinese culture

‘Garbage time of history’ (1)

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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 Yan Zhuang

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

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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

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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.

Shifts of Power review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Theodore D. Huters’ review of Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by Luo Zhitian, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/huters/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Shifts of Power:
Modern Chinese Thought and Society

By Luo Zhitian
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Theodore D. Huters
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Luo Zhitian, Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Xvi + 425 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35055-7 (hardbound) ISBN 978-90-04-35056-4 (e-book)

Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by the prolific historian Luo Zhitian 罗志田 and admirably translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, was originally published in Chinese in 2014 as Quanshi zhuanyi: jindai Zhongguo de sixiang yu shehui (权势转移: 近代中国的思想与社会). With one exception, this important book consists of an assemblage of nine separate articles that appeared over almost twenty years in academic journals between the late 1990s and the date of its Beijing publication as a monograph. The titles of the chapters and their original publication dates are as follows: (1) The Worship of the New: A Shift of Power in Modern Chinese Thought under the Impact of the Western Tide (1999-2000); (2) The Abolition of the Examination System and the Disintegration of the Four-Class Society: Modern Social Change in the Eyes of an Inland Member of the Gentry (1997); 3) The Impact of the Abolition of the Examination System on Rural Society (2006); (4) Shifts of Social Power in Modern China: The Marginalization of Intellectuals and the Rise of the Marginal Intellectual (1999); (5) The Worries and Responsibilities of Educated Chinese in the Age of Transition (2009); (6) The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic (2003); (7) The Divided West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era (1999); (8) Reflections on the Uniqueness of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2003); and (9) The State Advances, the People Retreat: The Rise of a Trend in the Late Qing (no date). Continue reading Shifts of Power review →

Made in China 9.1

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Dear Colleagues,

We are happy to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Made in China Journal. You can download it for free at this link: madeinchinajournal.com/2024/08/27/bending-chineseness.

Below you can find the editorial.

Best,

Ivan Franceschini (franceschini.ivan@gmail.com)

Bending Chineseness: Culture and Ethnicity after Xi

A new Chinese Government textbook for university students, An Introduction to the Community of the Zhonghua Race (中华民族共同体概论), promotes President Xi Jinping’s vision for governing the country’s diverse population. This approach shifts away from celebrating cultural differences—what the political scientist Susan McCarthy once termed ‘communist multiculturalism’—and towards a Han-dominant identity, which is a form of racial nationalism inspired by sociologist Fei Xiaotong’s concept of ‘multiple origins, single body’ (多元一体). While the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as amended in 2018 guarantees minority rights and political autonomy through the framework of ‘minority nationalities’ (少数民族 ), the textbook suggests that Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols, and other Indigenous groups should eventually assimilate into Han culture, raising concerns about the future of minority languages and traditions. President Xi’s new approach to national unity has faced significant resistance from both minority and Han officials. Yet, this resistance only prompted an even more muscular response: revamping government departments, harsh crackdowns in minority-populated areas, and removing minority officials who oversaw ethnic affairs. In this issue, we ask contributors to reflect on the state of ethnic minority culture in the wake of Xi’s new ethno-nationalist order and explore what remains of cultural differences at the end of dreams of communist pluralism and ethnic autonomy. Continue reading Made in China 9.1 →

Pema Tseden film retrospective

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Pema Tseden
A Complete Film Retrospective of the Groundbreaking Tibetan Filmmaker
Museum of the Moving Imagem NYC
Sep 6 — Sep 15, 2024
Guest programmed by Shelly Kraicer
Co-sponsored by OVID.tv

“His ability to speak eloquently of individual despair and the emergency of cultural obliteration is masterful; his ability to do this in films of such eloquent, quiet beauty is nothing short of astonishing.”
—Cinema Scope

“Tseden’s work is remarkable for shedding light on daily life in an oft-mythologized part of the world.” 
—Sight & Sound

“The most important independent Tibetan filmmaker.”
—Shelly Kraicer, VIFF

One of the most exciting and inspiring filmmakers to emerge so far this century, Pema Tseden died last year in mid-career, at 53. Born to farmer-herder parents in the Tibetan highlands of Amdo, Qinghai Province, China, he studied Tibetan literature and in the early 1990s began publishing short stories in both Tibetan and Chinese. The first Tibetan to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, where he shot two short films, he became the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature entirely in Tibetan: 2005’s The Silent Holy Stones. Pema Tseden created seven more features, with largely the same group of collaborators, who are now the nucleus of a Tibetan film community continuing his legacy. Continue reading Pema Tseden film retrospective →

China’s genocide tourism strategy

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Source: The Diplomat (8/19/24)
China’s Genocide Tourism Strategy
The use of tourism as a propaganda weapon is an old trick of authoritarian regimes
By Magnus Fiskesjö

China’s Genocide Tourism Strategy 

Credit: Depositphotos

A journalist based in Poland recently described a surprising find: a Nazi tourist guidebook from 1943 for tourists going to the so-called General Government, Nazi Germany’s most infamous dumping zone for deported undesirables on the ashes of occupied Poland. The region’s many sightseeing spots were recast as German heritage, which proud German tourists visited with the guidebook’s help.

This is exactly what we see today in China’s own genocide zone in Xinjiang (called East Turkestan by the native Uyghur population). Having suppressed all possible resistance – through a formidable surveillance apparatus, mass detention of anyone remotely suspect of pro-native sentiment, and mass forced labor for camp survivors – the Chinese government is now promoting both domestic and foreign tourism to the Uyghur region.

The campaign is accompanied by a propaganda blitz, hoping to thwart foreign criticism of the genocide launched in 2017. A major goal is also to recruit both domestic and foreign tourists into supporters who “see for themselves” that Xinjiang is safe and good.

Domestic tourists are lured to Xinjiang with new infrastructure, remodeled cities and new attractions, from fake dinosaur parks to wholly new faux-historical “mystery” sites that re-appropriate Uyghur culture while exoticizing and primitivizing it. Continue reading China’s genocide tourism strategy →

A disappearance in Xinjiang

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Did not see this gripping feature on our imprisoned anthropologist colleague Rahile Dawut, until today. It says her elderly 80+ mother was allowed a prison visit, only through a screen. Unclear when. The Chinese Communist regime is so profoundly cowardly, it is hard to grasp, no-one can make sense of it. –Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Financial Times (4/26/24)
A Disappearance in Xinjiang
By Edward White

© Iris Legendre. Based on a portrait by Lisa Ross

A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.”

Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions. Continue reading A disappearance in Xinjiang →

Who is Hua Mulan?

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Source: Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton (6/10/24)
Who is Hua Mulan?
By

So you think you know who Mulan is? Perhaps you know the feisty girl from the eponymous cross-dressing warrior of the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. She is the rebellious teenager who escapes the suffocating social expectations for a maiden and heads to the battle zone, where she finds peace with who she is. Or, if you are a Chinese speaker, you may have first learned about the weaver-turned-soldier from the “Ballad of Mulan,” the lyrics of a folk song first preserved in writing in as early as the sixth century. In the memorable rhyming text she is the filial and brave daughter who is determined to shield her aging father from a perilous military life.

Mulan’s story is included in an advertisement booklet titled Women’s Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars in Color Pictures 女子二十四孝彩圖, published by a pharmaceutical company in Shanghai in 1941. Whereas the historic figures featured in the classic Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars were nearly all male, the booklet focuses on young Chinese girls’ and women’s filial piety. The caption emphasizes that when Mulan returns home after serving eleven years in the army, she is “apparently still a virgin” (page 7). The facing page advertises fish liver oil, said to have ingredients supplied by an American vitamin company. In Nü zi er shi si xiao cai tu. Shanghai: Xin Yi Pharmaceutical Company, 1941. (Cotsen 75832)

China’s Bravest Girl: The Legend of Hua Mu Lan, told by Charlie Chin 陳建文; illustrated by Tomie Arai 新居富枝; Chinese translation by Wang Xing Chu 王性初. Emeryville, CA: Children’s Book Press, 1993. (Cotsen 17732)

Have you ever wondered, however, what kind of Chinese girl Mulan was? Weren’t women in ancient China supposed to have their feet bound? How could Mulan have gotten away from the crippling practice? Was Mulan’s family rich or poor–and does it matter? Did Mulan really grow up in those circular communal buildings portrayed in Disney’s live-action adaptation of 2020? If not, where was her hometown? [CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE]

Bookstores as sites of subtle protest

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Source: China Digital Times (6/18/24)
Bookstores Become Sites of Subtle Protest Against Xi Jinping
By 

The novel “Changing of the Guard” displayed at left, alongside “Study Outline for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”

Chinese bookstore shelf arrangements rarely go viral—that is, unless they contain a hidden message calling for Xi Jinping to step down. Since Xi has risen to power, placing Xi’s works next to other books to make a political point has become a relatively common, low-key mode of political dissent. It’s often unclear whether the juxtapositions are created by bookstore employees or the product of cheeky swaps by politically astute customers—or simply accidental.

The latest incident occurred last week. A photograph taken inside a Hangzhou bookshop showed the novel “Changing of the Guard” displayed next to the 2023 edition of “Study Outline for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” a juxtaposition that some read as an implicit call for Xi to step down:

The novel itself is not a work of secret dissent, but rather a paean to Party governance. Written by Zhang Ping, a former vice-president of the Party-dominated China Writers Association, the novel is set in the fictional city of Linjin. The novel’s plot centers on unprecedented rain and flooding striking the city just as the provincial and municipal authorities are set to undergo a leadership transition. Yet put alongside Xi’s works, the implication is obvious.

Previous instances have seen Xi’s books paired with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, novels by Ernest Hemingway, childhood psychology books, Winnie the Pooh, books on Hitler, and studies of China’s imperial system. CDT has compiled a slideshow of the works: Continue reading Bookstores as sites of subtle protest →

Shangyuan Art Museum demolition

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Below is a link to a very good documentary by Chen Jiaping 陈家坪. He climbed in to join us at the demolition site of Shangyuan Art Museum last Saturday, June 15. The local powers were paranoid that day. Invitations to a party on the ruins had been circulating. So they tried to block off exit and entry. But they could not prevent this excellent film:

https://www.xiaohongshu.com/discovery/item/66717a1d000000001c0374e2

I have been documenting the demolition with poems and photos on my WeChat. The poems can be found on the following blog posts:

SOUND 声音
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/18/sound-%e5%a3%b0%e9%9f%b3/
美 BEAUTIFUL
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/17/%e7%be%8e-beautiful/
躲 HIDING
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/16/%e8%ba%b2-hiding/
SHANGYUAN ART MUSEUM 上苑艺术馆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/14/%e4%b8%8a%e8%8b%91%e8%89%ba%e6%9c%af%e9%a6%86-shangyuan-art-museum/
IT HAS BEGUN 开始了 DAS IST DER ANFANG
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/13/anfang-%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b%e4%ba%86/
DEMOLISH 拆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/04/%e6%8b%86-demolish/

Thank you for watching, reading and circulating!

Martin Winter 维马丁
in the ruins of Shangyuan Art Museum

‘Nikah’ review

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Source: Art of Life in Central Asia (5/29/24)
‘Nikah’: An astonishing portrait of Uyghur life on the edge of erasure
By Darren Byler

A still from “Nikah,” a fictional film by Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan, showing Dilber and Rena preparing for Rena’s wedding.

Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan’s Nikah is extraordinary. It is a quiet film, a portrait of a young Uyghur woman and her family living in a Uyghur world in the late 2010s. It is astonishing in its restraint, in the way it remains true to a ground-level view of what it looked and felt like to be on the verge of internment. Nikah is a portrait of the impossible becoming reality.

The story on the surface is a simple one. Two daughters in their twenties, Dilber and Rena, are caught between their own ambitions — careers, travel, love — and community pressures to follow gendered norms dictating what young women should do, whom they should get married to, and the life path of a wife and mother. After the younger sister, Rena, is married to a young man in the community, the pressure builds on the older sister, Dilber, to marry as well — or be lost to old age or, more ominously, as whispers imply, be married off to a Han man.

In 2017, the Chinese state criminalized much of what is portrayed in the film as signs of religious extremism. Drawing on one of the world’s broadest counterterrorism laws and a mandate from Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, police and civil servants began to use face-recognition video surveillance, informants, and torture to “round up those that needed to be rounded up.” Dilber and Rena — plus other characters portrayed in the film — are exactly whom that mandate was for. As viewers, we are placed on the precipice of the largest mass internment of a religious minority since World War II.

But it doesn’t feel that way until the film’s final sequence, when we witness the quiet shattering of the families we have met. This narrative technique, holding in reserve the immense tragedy that is about to emerge, is what makes this film so astonishing. It allows viewers to understand the stakes of that shattering, the absurdity of traditions misread and flattened by digitized anti-Muslim racism. And it also lets the viewer appreciate the extreme beauty of Uyghur communal life. Continue reading ‘Nikah’ review →

Chasing Traces

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This rich collection of essays on history and anthropology in China/SE Asia is out from Hawaii:

Chasing Traces. History and Ethnography in the Uplands of Socialist Asia, edited by Pierre Petit and Jean Michaud. University of Hawaii Press, 2024. (Don’t understand why the publishers would have a website w/o the ToC? But one can buy the book at the above link. )

My own chapter in it is on the Wa people, whose ancient land was cut up by Burma and China, “Wa History: Agency and Victimization”

For chapter abstracts, and all contents, see JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6505269

Sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö

Red Renaissance

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Source: China Media Project (5/6/24)
Red Renaissance
China’s leadership is actively pushing culture throughout the country’s vast rural hinterland, including through hundreds of thousands of “rural bookrooms.” But the overriding goal is to push the Party’s continued dominance at China’s grassroots — to the detriment of real cultural development.
By David Bandurski and Dalia Parete

Rural Bookroom.

In early February, Chinese media teemed with stories of cultural festivities in rural villages countrywide. In a “rural bookroom” in Xinjiang’s Ha’ermodun Village, a series of events “enriched the spiritual lives of villagers,” according to a local news release. More than 4,000 kilometers away, in Fujian’s Shuqiao Village, residents held a “Rural Spring Festival Gala” featuring song and dance performances. Down south, in a remote corner of Hunan province, more than 50 residents gathered for a “village lecture.”

These and thousands of similar events across China’s vast rural hinterland are part of a concerted push to achieve what the Chinese Communist Party leadership has called the “revitalization of rural culture” — and at first glance, the ambitious policy seems to offer an unprecedented level of cultural access at the grassroots.

Take, for example, the country’s growing network of rural bookrooms (农家书屋). First introduced as a pilot project in 2005, rural bookroom growth boomed through the 2010s, their numbers soaring past 580,000 nationwide by the end of 2021. For perspective, those numbers translate to 428 rural bookrooms on average in each of China’s 1,355 counties. Given these astonishing numbers, one might assume the rapid development of rural bookrooms has put literature in the hands of millions. Continue reading Red Renaissance →