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posts related to Chinese culture

Ablimit Yasin sentenced to 12 years

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Today the web newspaper Uyghur Times (see full quote below) relays the horrific news of another unjust fantasy sentence against our academic colleague the folklorist Ablimit Yasin, who was first seized and disappeared in 2017 by the Chinese authorities at the airport, going to a scholarly conference in Beijing together with our more famous colleague Rahile Dawut, –that is, alongside the many hundreds if not thousands of professional and cultural leaders similarly and purposefully annihilated by the Chinese regime, so as to decapitate Uyghur culture as such.

As fellow scholars we cannot tolerate the Chinese regime’s mass atrocities, mass family separations, concentration camps, torture, destruction of local cultures and languages, targeting of cultural leaders, slave labor, endless disappearances, and endless prison terms (500,000 so far) that produce only dead corpses.

We must act with determined solidarity.

Magnus Fiskesjö <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>

Source: Uyghur Times (8/13/23)
Uyghur Professor Dr. Ablimit Yasin Sentenced to 12 Years

Dr. Ablimit Yasin, a young Uyghur professor of folklore at the School of Humanities, Xinjiang University, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison, sparking concerns among Uyghur scholars like Abduweli Ayup, who was the first to report this case, regarding the fate of prominent Uyghur academics in the region.

Dr. Yasin’s arrest took place at the end of 2017, along with that of his supervisor, Dr. Rahile Dawut, while they were en route to a conference in Beijing. The sentencing was handed down in 2019, amidst the escalation of the CCP’s genocidal policies in the region. Dr. Yasin, known for his studies in Islamic history, had also been sent to Iran by the university for religious studies. Continue reading →

What cuisine means to Taiwan identity

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Source: NYT (8/8/23)
What Cuisine Means to Taiwan’s Identity and Its Clash With China
Chefs and restaurant owners are using a multiplicity of ingredients and tastes to reflect Taiwan’s roots, shaping a distinct culinary culture.
By Li Yuan (Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan)

A man in a black chef jacket sitting at a table in front of a steaming pot.

Ian Lee at his restaurant in Taipei called HoSu, which means “good island” in the Taiwanese dialect. Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Taiwan is a self-ruling island of 24 million people that is officially known as the Republic of China. Only about a dozen countries recognize it as a nation because China claims it as one of its provinces. Taiwan is called “Chinese Taipei” by international organizations and at the Olympic Games.

The ambiguity of Taiwan’s nationhood contrasts with a growing Taiwanese claim of identity. More than 60 percent of the people living on the island identify as Taiwanese, and roughly 30 percent identify as both Chinese and Taiwanese, according to the latest results of an annual survey conducted by National Chengchi University in Taipei. Only 2.5 percent consider themselves Chinese exclusively.

But what makes them Taiwanese, not Chinese? How will they create a cohesive narrative about their identity? And how do they reconcile with their Chinese heritage?

For many people, it’s through food, one of the things the island is known for, aside from its semiconductor industry. In the past decade or so, restaurateurs, writers and scholars have started to promote the concept of Taiwanese cuisine, reviving traditional fine dining and incorporating local, especially Indigenous, produce and ingredients into cooking. Continue reading →

Waiting To Be Arrested at Night

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Source: NPR (8/1/23)
‘Waiting To Be Arrested At Night’ is the story of a Uyghur poet’s escape
By Emily Feng, NPR

Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the best-known living Uyghur poets. He left Xinjiang amid a Chinese crackdown on the Uyghur people — an escape at the heart of his book, Waiting To Be Arrested At Night.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

One of the greatest living Uyghur poets lives in Washington, D.C. Tahir Hamut Izgil escaped from his native Xinjiang to the U.S. in 2018. At that time, rights groups say the Chinese government was detaining at least hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and imprisoning writers that Izgil worked with. His new book about this experience, “Waiting To Be Arrested At Night,” has just been published, and NPR’s Emily Feng talked to him about the process of writing it.

TAHIR HAMUT IZGIL: (Speaking Uyghur).

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: To remember is important. But for those who remember, like Tahir Hamut Izgil, the memories are a painful responsibility.

IZGIL: (Through interpreter) I myself don’t like to reread my own book. Every time I read part of it, I feel like I’m going through those events again. Continue reading →

Interview with Tsering Yangzom Lama

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Source: China Digital Times (6/19/23)
Interview: Tsering Yangzom Lama on Colonialism, Exile, and the Importance of Listening to Tibetans’ Stories
By 

The cover of Tsering Yangzom Lama's debut novel, "We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies," features the title of the book in bold black text, and the shapes of five mountain peaks filled in with colorful textiles in shades of pink, red, aqua, yellow, and green.

The cover of Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies.

Tsering Yangzom Lama was born in Nepal to Tibetan refugee parents, and later moved to Vancouver. She received her B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, tells a multigenerational story of a Tibetan family over the course of 50 years. Opening with the invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces in 1950, the story then follows two sisters as they flee their country with their family, establishing a new home in Nepal and later Canada. It is a rich, lyrical story that touches on issues of displacement, colonialism, cultural preservation, and the struggles of life in exile. One of the first novels by a Tibetan author to be published by a major English-language publisher, it has received numerous awards and accolades and has been translated into eight languages so far (with a Tibetan version in the works).

Lama is also politically active in support of Tibet and is the founder of Lhakar Diaries, a website that platforms the voices of Tibetan youth. She recently spoke with CDT about her book, about the struggle to protect and promote Tibet’s cultural and religious heritage, and about the importance of sharing the stories of Tibetan exiles. The interview has been edited for length and clarity:

The author, wearing a vivid blue collared shirt, seated in front of a row of bookcases.

Tsering Yangzom Lama

China Digital Times (CDT): Tibetan traditions and cultural and religious customs play an important role in your book. Did you grow up hearing and learning about this history and these customs? How much research did you do when crafting the story? Continue reading →

His authorship, Xi Jinping

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Source: China Media Project (6/13/23)
His Authorship, Xi Jinping
These are dark days for writers and publishers in China. And in a telling sign of the times, one writer reigns supreme at the printing press, and in the headlines. Guess who?
By David Bandurski

Xi Jinping signs an order for the Central Military Commission in January 2019.

For most writers and publishers in China today, opportunities for expression have dwindled in the face of overt and covert repression and creeping political hypersensitivity. As one long-time publisher summed up the tight squeeze recently: “You cannot say China is bad, and you cannot say that foreign countries are good.”

On the reverse side, this repression can be seen saliently in the return of the use of the press as a tool of personal political power. In the digital age, Xi Jinping may be unable to create, as Mao Zedong once did, a media monoculture to serve his narrow political ambitions. But in an echo of the pre-reform era, when Mao‘s supremacy was trumpeted through the so-called “Two Newspapers and One Journal” (两报一刊), Xi Jinping now dominates not just the headlines — but often, as in the case of the CCP’s leading theoretical journal, the bylines.

The same is true when it comes to books. Xi Jinping is far and away the most published Chinese leader in four generations. Not since the time of Chairman Mao and his pervasive “Little Red Book” has any leader’s voice commanded the presses so convincingly. Continue reading →

Chinese companies’ vanishing acts in Xinjiang

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My latest piece on how Chinese companies try to pretend they are not in Xinjiang exploiting forced labor, when that’s what they most likely are doing. It’s another example of CCP doublespeak.–Magnus Fiskesjö  <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: The Diplomat (6/8/23)
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Chinese Companies’ Vanishing Acts in Xinjiang
There is a recurring pattern of Chinese firms attempting to hide branches in the Uyghur region, seeking to avoid association with human rights abuses.
By Magnus Fiskesjö

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Chinese Companies’ Vanishing Acts in Xinjiang

In this Dec. 3, 2018, file photo, a guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around a facility in the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China’s Xinjiang region. Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Gua

Lately, we’re seeing more and more examples of official Chinese doublespeak. At home, China wants to tout certain policies, while abroad Beijing changes its tune, realizing its actions will face a less receptive audience.

That explains Beijing’s amazing turnaround regarding the Xinjiang camps. At first, Chinese officials denied their existence outright. In late 2018, overwhelmed by the evidence, the Chinese government admitted having built “vocational training schools” (why these schools were surrounded by barbed wire was never answered). Chinese authorities even built a few fake camps to host gullible media.

One lesser-known and rather curious example of this new doublespeak is playing out, once again centered on Xinjiang, the Uyghur region in westernmost China.

The Chinese government requires pop artists and others to stand up and praise its policies in Xinjiang. Artists were even made to denounce H&M and other clothing firms for boycotting Xinjiang cotton. Which they are, thankfully, because forced labor is huge in Xinjiang and there is no way to make sure products made there would not be tainted by it. Continue reading →

Fight over faith in Yunnan

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Source: NYT (6/8/23)
Behind a Rare Clash, a Fight Over Faith in China
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China is destroying Arab-style architectural features of mosques, such as domes and minarets. The tightened control on religion has been met with rare resistance.
By Vivian Wang (Vivian Wang traveled across Yunnan Province in China’s southwest, talking to residents and officials about the government’s contentious plans to remake the region’s mosques.)

A person walks past a wall with Arabic script on it.

Arabic script on the walls outside a mosque in a village in Yunnan Province, China, in 2019. Mosques across Yunnan are being closed or renovated as part of a government campaign. Credit…Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Walking through Nagu, a small town in the mountains of southwestern China, the signs of a vibrant Muslim community are ubiquitous. Loudspeakers broadcast passages from a Chinese translation of the Quran. Women in head scarves shuttle rowdy children home from school. Arabic script decorates the outside of homes.

Towering over it all is the Najiaying Mosque, a white building topped with an emerald dome and four minarets that reach 230 feet into the air. For decades, the mosque has been the pride of the Muslim Hui ethnic minority that lives here.

Last month, it was also the scene of a confrontation.

On the morning of May 27, after the authorities drove construction cranes into the mosque’s courtyard, a crowd of residents confronted the hundreds of police officers in riot gear who had been deployed to oversee the work. As the officers blocked the mosque and used pepper spray, residents threw water bottles and bricks.

The rare clashes, described in interviews with eyewitnesses and captured on videos posted on social media, show how one aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to exert greater control over religion could grow more volatile.

Since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, rose to power more than a decade ago, the party has torn down Christian churches, razed Tibetan Buddhist enclaves and put Uyghur Muslims in internment camps in the name of political security. But it has also gone after lesser-known groups, including the Hui, who make up less than 1 percent of the population and have historically assimilated well with the ethnic Han majority. Continue reading →

Seeing Politics through Popular Culture

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List members might be interested in a new review essay I wrote titled “Seeing Politics through Popular Culture.”–Dan Chen dchen@richmond.edu

“Review Essay: Seeing Politics Through Popular Culture”
By Dan Chen
Journal of Chinese Political Science 28, 2 (Junee 2023)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11366-023-09859-x

Abstract:

This essay surveys the scholarship on Chinese cultural politics in the reform era and argues that popular culture is a crucial realm where politics is manifested, shaped, and challenged. Based on an overview of this literature, this essay finds that Chinese popular culture remains subversive despite evolving political rule and changing socioeconomic structures. Meanwhile, the state has kept up with popular culture and managed to dominate various cultural spaces ranging from television, film, literature, music, and comedy, to celebrities and public discussions on morality. The studies reviewed here collectively illustrate a fragmented yet vigorous popular culture that actively responds to changing political and socioeconomic conditions, challenging while also reinforcing how political power is received at the grassroots level. To explain the simultaneous advancement of state control over popular culture and the cultural creativity in popular expression, this essay proposes a framework centered on authority to capture and forecast the dynamics of power struggles in popular culture. To create, compete for, and manifest authority is a key mechanism of cultural power, and it can reveal the contentions among political, market, and traditional cultural forces.

CCP smear campaign targets the Dalai Lama (2)

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I expand this discussion of the Chinese propaganda against the Dalai Lama, and the stunning gullibility of the Western audiences that fell for it, in this new online interview with the new website Global Order, based out of New Delhi–Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Global Order (5/24/23)
“How the Chinese Communist Party ran a global propaganda campaign against the Dalai Lama”

The Chinese Communist Party is running a global propaganda campaign to destroy the credibility of the Dalai Lama. The most recent example of this, says Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell University, was the crude and brutal ‘suck my tongue’ controversy where an innocuous Tibetan gesture was attacked by trolling mobs, and even celebrities, around the world as sexual exploitation – all led by propaganda teams of the Chinese Communist Party. Fiskesjö talks to Hindol Sengupta about propaganda, cultural differences and misunderstandings and the redemptive power of compassion.”

China ramps up scrutiny of culture

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Source: NYT (5/24/23)
As China Ramps Up Scrutiny of Culture, the Show Does Not Go On
Performances across the country were canceled last week after Beijing began investigating a stand-up comedian.
By Vivian Wang, reporting from Beijing

A person walks in front of a building with bright yellow facade and a sign saying “You are part of the show.”

The Beijing venue of the stand-up comedy company Xiaoguo Culture Media Co., which was fined around $2 million after one of its performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke. Credit…Tingshu Wang/Reuters

The cancellations rippled across the country: A Japanese choral band touring China, stand-up comedy shows in several cities, jazz shows in Beijing. In the span of a few days, the performances were among more than a dozen that were abruptly called off — some just minutes before they were supposed to begin — with virtually no explanation.

Just before the performances were scrapped, the authorities in Beijing had fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million, after one of its stand-up performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke; the police in northern China also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online.

Those penalties, and the sudden spate of cancellations that followed, point to the growing scrutiny of China’s already heavily censored creative landscape. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity. Performers must submit scripts or set lists for vetting, and publications are closely monitored.

On Tuesday, Mr. Xi sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China for its 60th anniversary, reminding staff to “adhere to the correct political orientation.” Continue reading →

CCP smear campaign targets the Dalai Lama (1)

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Thanks to Magnus Fiskesjö for providing a reading for the Dalai Lama’s interaction with the child in April. I wasn’t aware of the linguistic and cultural aspects of this meeting, reductively sexualized and sensationalized in Western anglophone media. When I saw the clip, memed with a sort of gleeful meanness, the first thing I thought of is the trope of Buddhist monks and nuns in Chinese culture as lascivious, a sort of a parallel to Catholic clergy in European gothic literature (Lewis’ The Monk is the most well-known version but of course, the Catholic Church has its own historical cross to bear in this regard). The opera “The Little Nun Goes Down the Mountain,” a story of desire for the secular life, is one version of this. A fish-plank beating Buddhist monk is murdered by Shi Xiu in Outlaws of the Marsh for seducing a brother’s wife. And a similar lascivious Buddhist monk trope gets repeated when grandpa murders his mother’s Buddhist monk lover in Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum centuries later.

Maybe we need a social analysis of cancelling, which operates like a secular form of shunning in contemporary media, minus the semblance of consistent moral rationale, and with a multiplicity of actors possessing varying degrees of clout.

Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005@gmail.com>

CCP smear campaign targets the Dalai Lama

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Source: The Diplomat (5/20/23)
How a CCP Propaganda Campaign Targeted the Dalai Lama
The latest smear campaign succeeded beyond China’s wildest dreams by playing into Western ignorance about Tibetan culture – and self-righteous “cancel culture” on social media.
By Magnus Fiskesjö

How a CCP Propaganda Campaign Targeted the Dalai Lama

Credit: Depositphotos

On April 8, 2023, a new global smear campaign against the Dalai Lama was unleashed on social media.

This, in itself, wasn’t news. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, has lived in exile in India since 1959, when he was forced to flee his homeland, occupied by Mao’s China. He remains deeply loved in Tibet, but the Chinese regime has made it a criminal offense even to have a photo of him. And ever since 1959, Chinese officials have been vilifying him in every medium possible.

But while this latest round is almost certainly also disinformation “Made in China,” it represents a new approach: Attempting to paint the Dalai Lama as a pedophile. The trick succeeded beyond belief, with millions of people in the United States, Europe, and beyond – due to prior prejudice coupled with the self-righteous tendency to jump to conclusions, combined with widespread ignorance about Tibet.

As the Tibetan exile activist Lhadon Tethong pointed out in a recent public conversation, the goal was very likely also to distract the world from the new dramatic oppression inside Chinese-occupied Tibet. U.N. human rights experts just issued a warning that Chinese authorities are detaining large numbers of both children and adults in Tibet, to erase their culture and turn them into Chinese-speaking laborers – modeled after the massive parallel genocide against the Uyghurs. Continue reading →

Comedy studio fined for insulting the military

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Source: NYT (5/17/23)
No Joke: China Fines a Comedy Firm $2 Million for ‘Insulting’ the Military
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The penalty came after a popular comedian joked about a military slogan often used by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has strictly curbed expression.
By Chang Che and Olivia Wang

The entrance to a theater features comic drawings on its front wall.

Xiaoguo Culture Media’s theater in Shanghai on Wednesday.  Credit…CFOTO/Future Publishing, via Getty Images

Beijing fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million on Wednesday for a joke that compared China’s military to stray dogs, a reminder of the ever-narrowing confines of expression under the country’s leader, Xi Jinping.

The Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau accused a popular comedian, Li Haoshi, who is employed by the studio, of “severely insulting” the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, during two live performances in Beijing on Saturday. The authority said his joke had a “vile societal impact.”

“We will not allow any company or individual to wantonly slander the glorious image of the People’s Liberation Army,” the statement read.

The authority also said it indefinitely suspended all Beijing performances hosted by the studio, the Shanghai-based Xiaoguo Culture Media. The bureau also confiscated roughly $180,000 worth of what officials described as illicit income uncovered during the investigation, which was started on Monday. Officials in Shanghai followed suit, suspending all Xiaoguo performances there and ordering the company to “deeply reflect” on the lessons from the incident, according to a government social media account. Continue reading →

Picun Museum to be demolished

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The Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art 打工文化艺术博物馆, in Picun, on the outskirts of Beijing, will be demolished in the very near future, to make way for urban development. The Migrant Workers Home 工友之家, of which the Museum is a part, is organizing a get-together on May 20th to bid the Museum farewell. Here’s an announcement from the community, with beautiful single-shot video and beautiful, carefully paced voice-over by someone who sounds like they are poet Xiao Hai 小海:  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FJ7P9LMwcWInU2hk2dclrw

The Picun Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art. Source.

Founded in 2008, the Museum has been a unique monument to migrant worker culture, produced by migrant workers for migrant workers (while welcoming others as well) to document and reflect on the migrant worker experience. The announcement mentioned above says it has seen over 50.000 visitors over the years.

The Museum is a shining example of the cultural education 文化教育  that is a key element of the Home’s mission to advance migrant worker rights (other designations of this social group include “new workers” 新工人 and “battlers” 打工者). Alongside achievements in music, literature, theater, digital video, and so on, it embodies the rich and complex force field in which migrant worker culture emerges: socioeconomic insecurity, political constraints, class-based hierarchies of aesthetics, DIY infrastructure, media interest propelled by a mix of social concern and engagement with voyeurism and othering. Continue reading →

New sources on cotton slavery in China

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A new report on cotton industry slavery in China has been issued by the noted China anthropologist Adrian Zenz, who has been working mainly with Chinese government documents to reveal the staggering scale of the Chinese government’s ongoing mass atrocities launched in 2017 against the Uyghur and Kazakh peoples, in whose homelands most of China’s cotton is gathered. The report “dissects the evolution of China and Uzbekistan’s systems of state-sponsored forced labor and exposes an inside view of their brutal nature, scale, and motivations.”

Key findings include: Never before seen Chinese internal state documents show that despite some mechanization, Uyghurs continued to be sent to pick cotton through coercive labor transfers in 2021 and 2022, and such seasonal labor transfers continue to be part of Xinjiang’s Five-Year Plan for 2025 as premium-grade long staple cotton grown in southern Uyghur regions still cannot be harvested by machines.

Xinjiang now produces 90 percent of China’s cotton, up from 85 percent in 2020. This expansion was partly enabled through large-scale land transfer arrangements whereby Uyghur farmers are forced to surrender their land rights to large private or state-led entities, then subjected to state-arranged labor transfers. Hence, even when mechanically harvested, Xinjiang cotton is produced through exploiting the rights of ethnic groups. Continue reading →