Xinjiang’s Ominous ‘Looking Back Project’

Source: Bruce-humes.com (12/30/23)
回头看工程 — Xinjiang’s Ominous “Looking Back Project”
By Bruce Humes

Uyghur poet’s memoir recalls the Xinjiang administration’s retrospective hunt for unPC content in textbooks once commissioned, edited and published by the state:

Following the Urumchi incident in 2009, the regional government had initiated the Looking Back Project. The Propaganda Department organized special groups to go over Uyghur-language books, newspapers, journals, films, television shows, and recordings from the 1980s to the present. These groups were tasked with identifying any materials that contained ethnic separatist themes or religious extremist content.

. . .  Several years later, as one result of these investigations, half a dozen Uyghur intellectuals and officials were arrested for editing Uyghur literature textbooks for grades one through eleven. The textbooks had been used in schools for over a decade before the “problem” with them was discovered in 2016.  

Word spread that similar “problems” had been found in nearly all Uyghur historical novels, and that they would soon be banned. The government had even banned a popular historical novel by Seypidin Ezizi, the highest-ranking Uyghur official in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. If the work of such a trusted party veteran could be banned, there was little question what the future held for other Uyghur writers.

(Excerpted from Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua  Freeman)

2023 Roll call of Chinese literature published in English translation

Here is the Paper Republic 2023 Roll Call of Chinese literature published in English translation: https://paper-republic.org/pers/eric-abrahamsen/2023-roll-call-of-chinese-literature-in-english-translation/

… this is an interesting and varied collection of titles, including classics, left-fielders, big names, and small(er) names. The non-fiction in particular is a wonderful spread of current events, political topics, and essays….

Click the link above for more details and our lists.

Nicky Harman <n.harmanic@gmail.com>

Online writers village

Source: Shine.cn (12/15/23)
Online writers village unveils five-year plan to boost genre
By Wu Huixin

Online writers village unveils five-year plan to boost genre

A forum on the social and market value of adapting online literature into film and television and its international success was held to mark six years from the establishment of the China Internet Writers Village in Hangzhou’s Binjiang District.

The China Internet Writers Village in Binjiang District is the nation’s only community aimed at boosting the development of online literature. Around 275 noted writers have signed contracts to set up studios in the village thus far.

The village recently unveiled its five-year plan (2023-27) to commercialize more Internet literature and expand the overseas market.

“The village will help writers cater to different market segments, since the customer positioning and target segments for different works can vary substantially,” said Guan Pingchao, vice chief of the village. “Official organizations are going to support writers building a bridge between domestic and foreign markets.”

The plan forecasts writer numbers to reach 600 with royalty income of 500 million yuan (US$70.3 million) by 2027. Some 500 Internet novels would be published in other countries with hopes of reaching revenue of 5 billion yuan overseas. Continue reading

Lit Mag closes

Source: China Digital Times (12/8/23)
Lit Mag Announces Sudden Closure after Cover Seemingly Satirizes Xi Jinping
By

A popular periodical featuring essays and nonfiction writing announced that it is suspending operations after 35 years. The announcement followed online chatter that the December cover was an oblique criticism of Xi Jinping. Xi is sometimes sarcastically referred to as the “Compass in Chief,” for his frequent pronouncements “pointing the way forward” on issues as niche as the marine economy and as grandiose as the progress of human society. The latest (and last) cover of “Selected Essays” (《杂文选刊》, Záwén Xuǎnkān) seems to reference that oft-censored appellation. The cover features a suit-wearing arm pointing the way forward. Miniature faceless masses sprint along the arm only to plunge over the end of the index finger into darkness. At China Heritage, Geremie Barmé published the cover art with a short note:

The cover of the December 2023 issue of “Selected Essays” features a pen-and-ink illustration of colorful, faceless human figures sprinting along a giant suit-clad arm, and leaping off the index figure into the abyss below.

Note: One of Xi Jinping’s many sobriquets is ‘Emperor Indicator’ 指明帝 [zhǐmíng dì]. State media frequently uses the expression ‘[he] shows us the way’ 指明方向 [zhǐmíng fāngxiàng] when referring to Xi Jinping’s latest policy directives. [Source]

The magazine, which was published by Jilin People’s Press (吉林人民出版社, Jílín Rénmín Chūbǎnshè), gave no explanation for its suspension of operations. In a message to readers, editors wrote: “The mountains are high, and the rivers are long. Take care.” The choice of words implies that the suspension was not the editors’ choice. Journalists for Anhui’s Dawan News reported that the magazine headquarters’ phone line had already been disconnected. Continue reading

The Yi of Southwest China

Source: Bruce-Hume.com (12/14/23)
The Yi (彝族) of Southwest China: Transmission of their Written and Performed Literature, Old and New
By Bruce Hume

A World History of Chinese Literature

Professor Mark Bender has brought to my attention the recent launch of the 422-page A World of Chinese Literature, which contains his short but fascinating article entitled Yi Literature: Traditional and Contemporary. It is an introduction to the “history, content and transmission of traditional and contemporary Yi traditions of written and performed literature.” The Yi people (彝族) of southwest China number around 9 million, and speak a language that is part of the Tibeto-Burman family of languages that are widely spoken in southwest China, Myanmar, northeast India, and other parts of the Himalayas.

Only a handful of non-Han peoples in China possess what he terms “fully workable” writing systems, mainly the Tibetans, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Mongolians, Manchu, Korean, Dai and the Yi. The Naxi and Shui employ “less-versatile scripts” used mostly in rituals and divination, and there exist bodies of writing in the epic and ritual literature of the Zhuang, Yao, Dong, Bai that use versions of Chinese characters (often for their sound value).

According to Bender, the most widely circulated works of traditional Yi literature are epics and narrative poems collected in the 1950s and 1960s and published in Chinese translation. They included Meige: Yi Epic (梅葛: 彝族史诗), the status of which Matthew Walsh documented in a Yunnan village — including a video complete with song — back in 2017 (Under Threat).

Chamu (查姆): A modern Chinese paperback rendition of an Yi creation story.

Bender also details the backstory to the Origins of the Yi, which has come down to us thanks to a bimo (毕摩) who stashed one version of it in a cave during the chaotic Cultural Revolution. This reminds me of a similar tale about a hand-copied version of the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas, that was also buried during the Cultural Revolution to save it from destruction by over-zealous Red Guards, and not unearthed until 2014.

Grasping the real significance of centuries-old oral literature that has been textualized — and translated in the process — is no easy task. Bender reminds us:

The pastiche of genealogies and sketches of origin stories [such as “Origins of the Yi”] — all in verse — are difficult to link together without the understanding that the assemblage is not made to be read but rather performed in ritual contexts. In fact, many of the texts seem to assume the primary listener is the soul of the dead being guided to the land of the ancestors. The lyrics may provide a sort of comfort by giving rationale for the inevitability of death, often using images from nature. Fieldwork reveals that bimo regularly recite the origins of local clans along with origins of the sky, earth, and its inhabitants as part of funerals, weddings, rituals for casting out negative forces, the recalling of wandering souls of children, etc.

Interview with Yu Hua

Source: The Paris Review 246 (Winter 2023)
Yu Hua, The Art of Fiction No. 261
Interviewed by Michael Berry

undefined

BEIJING NORMAL UNIVERSITY, 2021. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF YU HUA.

Yu Hua was born in 1960. He grew up in Haiyan County in the Zhejiang province of eastern China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. His parents were both in the medical profession—his father a surgeon, his mother a nurse—and Yu would often sneak into the hospital where they worked, sometimes napping on the nearby morgue’s cool concrete slabs on hot summer days. As a young man, he worked as a dentist for several years and began writing short fiction that drew upon his early exposure to sickness and violence. His landmark stories of the eighties, including “On the Road at Eighteen,” established him, alongside Mo Yan, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, and Can Xue, as one of the leading voices of China’s avant-garde literary movement.

In the nineties, Yu Hua turned to long-form fiction, publishing a string of realist novels that merged elements of his early absurdist style with expansive, emotionally fulsome storytelling. Cries in the Drizzle (1992, translation 2007), To Live (1993, 2003), and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995, 2003) marked a new engagement with the upheavals of twentieth-century Chinese history. To Live—which narrates the nearly unimaginable personal loss and suffering of the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution through the tragic figure of the wealthy scion turned peasant farmer Fugui—brought him his most significant audience to date, its success bolstered by Zhang Yimou’s award-winning film adaptation. Continue reading

Worldconned

Source: Uyghur Times (12/3/23)
Worldconned: How China Co-Opted Sci-Fi’s Crown Jewel Amidst the Uyghur Genocide
By Danielle Ranucci

Illustaration: IMAGE – AI image creator

Last month, Chengdu, China hosted the 81st World Science Fiction Convention. Known as Worldcon, this annual convention is the site of the prestigious Hugo Awards—sci-fi’s equivalent to the Oscars. Past Hugo winners include household names like George R.R. Martin and Stephen King. Yet as over 20,000 people flocked to Chengdu’s futuristic-looking Worldcon site, China was committing one of the largest genocides since the Holocaust.

China is detaining 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic populations in concentration camps in the East Turkestan region. Meanwhile, the regime seeks to avoid accountability and improve its image through reputation laundering, such as taking advantage of voting irregularities to become the host of the prestigious Winter 2022 Olympics. Or to buy Worldcon.

Worldcon happens in a different country each year. Countries submit “site bids” to host it—there’s no overarching organization regulating the process, and each host is independently in charge of overseeing its own year’s Worldcon.

Site bids are voted on two years in advance by members of that year’s Worldcon. Anyone can pay a fee to become a member. Members can attend Worldcon and vote on site bids. Meanwhile, people who pay to become “Supporting Members” don’t attend Worldcon, but can still submit mail-in votes for site bids.

In 2018, China submitted a bid to host the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu. Its main competitor was Winnipeg, Canada. Yet Chengdu won by a landslide: 2,006 votes to Winnipeg’s 807. More than 1,900 of the Chengdu votes were mail-in ballots, mostly from China. Of those ballots, 1,586 had no street address for the voter. Continue reading

Translating Chinese Internet Literature–cfp

Call for Contributions for an Edited Volume
Translating Chinese Internet Literature: Global Adaptation and Circulation
Publisher: Routledge (Routledge Studies in Chinese Translation)
Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2024
Editors: Wenqian Zhang, University of Exeter, UK; Sui He, Swansea University, UK

Chinese Internet literature (CIL), also known as Chinese online/web/network literature, refers to “Chinese-language writing, either in established literary genres or in innovative literary forms, written especially for publication in an interactive online context and meant to be read on-screen” (Hockx 2015, 4). While CIL is commonly equated with Chinese web-based genre fiction known for entertainment value, it encompasses a broader range of genres such as poetry and comic strips, covering realistic themes prevailing in serious literature (Inwood 2016; Feng 2021). CIL is born-digital, but it differs essentially from ‘electronic literature’ or ‘digital literature’ that originated in the West. While Western e-literature is “more technology-oriented” (Duan 2018, 670) and usually involves “some sort of computer programming or code” (Hockx 2015, 5–6), CIL is relatively less technologised and experimental in format. In fact, what makes CIL stand out is its interactive features facilitated by professional literary platforms, its underlying profit motive, and mass participation in terms of literary writing, reading and criticism (Hockx 2015).

Over the past three decades, the proliferation of CIL has been fuelled by advancements in internet technology and formulation of larger social media communities, alongside other key factors such as economic growth and the constantly changing ideological and political discourses in and outside mainland China. One notable landmark in the trajectory of CIL is the implementation of a pay-per-read business model by the literary website Qidian (起点 Starting Points) in 2003 – in this model, Qidian charges readers for accessing serialised popular novels and their ‘VIP chapters’ (Hockx 2015, 110). This step marks the beginning of the commodification of CIL. It reshapes the literary writing practices and author-reader/producer-consumer dynamics in Chinese cyberspace (Schleep 2015, Tian and Adorjan 2016). Further developments along this line have enabled CIL to grow into a streamlined industry and mature ecosystem, with a vast number of popular titles being adapted into films, TV/web series, video games and other types of media products, generating enormous economic value and revenue. Continue reading

Writer delivers cold, hard fiction

Source: China Daily (11/17/23)
Writer delivers cold, hard fiction
By Yang Yang

Jack Liao (second left), vice-president of Blancpain China, and Liu Ruilin (right), founder of Imaginist, present prizes to the short-listed authors at the award ceremony, as Leung Man-tao, chief consultant of Imaginist, speaks at the event. The authors are (from left to right) Fei Ying (third left), Ning Buyuan, Shao Dong, Wang Ruoxu and Yang Zhihan.[Photo provided to China Daily]

The 2023 Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize has been awarded to 29-year-old author Yang Zhihan [杨知寒], for her collection of short stories Yituan Jianbing [一团坚冰] (literally, “a block of solid ice”), after beating four other short-listed writers.

The award, cofounded by the Swiss luxury watchmaker and the Chinese publisher in 2018, aims to discover young Chinese writers. The winner receives 300,000 yuan ($41,160) and a Blancpain timepiece.

The prize targets writers under the age of 45 and is open to all fictional genres, said Jack Liao, vice-president of Blancpain China, at the award ceremony in Beijing last month.

Consisting of nine short stories and novellas, Yituan Jianbing recounts the sometime hard life stories of people in Northeast China, including one about a dropout girl hiding in a temple, a wild animal trainer who sends his tiger to a zoo after it kills another trainer during a performance, and a jobless young woman who is kicked out of the WeChat group of her classmates in primary and middle schools after she tries to sell products to them. Continue reading

I Have No Enemies review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

I Have No Enemies:
The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo

By Perry Link and Wu Dazhi


Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright November, 2023)


Perry Link and Wu Dazhi, I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xiv + 553 pp. ISBN: 9780231216760 (Paperback); ISBN: 9780231206341 (Hardcover); ISBN: 9780231556446 (E-book).

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, makes a magisterial contribution to Chinese intellectual and political history. It is a comprehensive biography of an intrepid human rights promoter, leader, and thinker who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize during his fourth imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China, prior to his being in effect—deliberately or not—consigned to death, which arrived in 2017, during his last, eleven-year sentence. Liu Xiaobo’s 刘晓波 major opinions and the changes in them are briefly summarized, explained, and compared in the context of his life and times, speech by speech, essay by essay. One major dividend is an inside history of a major part of domestic Chinese ideological debate and political dissent in the post-Mao age, in 500 well-documented pages, so often did Liu Xiaobo’s dialogues and exploits interact with those of other freethinkers. The book also reflects on the larger social history of contemporary nonofficial protest and agitation for reform, whose content and strategies were transmuted not just by the failure of June Fourth, 1989, but also by the spread of internet communication early in the twenty-first century. Wu Dazhi and Perry Link meanwhile proffer insights into the emotional life of their main biographical subject. He was blessed with a brilliant intellect, nearly photographic memory, and the ability to deliver memorable and charismatic speeches, despite a tendency to stutter in daily life. Liu Xiaobo was both an inveterate contrarian and an eternal optimist. And yet, in his later years, he was constantly worried about causing unhappy consequences for others (already at Tiananmen in 1989, and later, in the 2008 leadup to Charter 08). He appears to have been tormented in those years by survivor guilt and what he felt was his inadequacy and irresponsibility as a family man. The biography tends to agree with him on the latter. Yet Liu Xiaobo was undaunted about what might happen to his own person, even as he incessantly questioned the logic of his own intellect and agency, and the very moral underpinnings of his personal motivation. The reader sees also the trials and tribulations of Liu’s second wife, Liu Xia 刘霞. A unique love story unfolds in chapter 20, the last chapter before the Epilogue. Continue reading

Book of Wreckage wins Taiwan Literature Award

Source: Taipei Times (11/4/23)
‘Book of Wreckage’ wins top prize
PAINFUL MEMORIES: This year’s TLA winner was chosen for its depiction of the White Terror era. It was also the first time New Bud recipients won Golden Book Awards
By Staff Writer, with CNA

The National Museum of Taiwan Literature on Monday announced the winners of the Taiwan Literature Awards (TLA) for Books, with the top prize going to The Book of Wreckage (殘骸書) by Chen Lieh (陳列).

Taiwan Literature Awards for Books prize winner Chen Lieh, author of The Book of Wreckage, is pictured in an undated photograph. Photo courtesy of Ink Publishing

Chen’s work of prose won the 2023 TLA Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award along with NT$1 million (US$30,957) in prize money after it sailed past 190 other submissions, the annual award’s organizing museum said in a statement.

Chen subtly and deftly depicted the suffering and humiliation that has stayed mostly buried while invoking memories and reflection of the White Terror era, using “plain and complex language to revisit history and his personal experiences,” the statement said.

Chen was sentenced to prison in 1972 for political crimes and spent four years and eight months behind bars.

The book won support from the majority of the judges, who touted Chen’s work as “not only bearing witness to an era, but also set to stun readers from future generations.”

Seven other works were awarded the TLA Golden Book Award, including Bullets are the Remaining Life (子彈是餘生) by Tsao Sheng-hao (曹盛濠, or his pen name, “寺偉哲也”), The Lost River (沒口之河) by Huang Han-yau (黃瀚嶢), and Late Night Patrol of the Abandoned God (夜觀巡場 Ia-kuan Sun-tiunn) by Tiunn Ka-siong (張嘉祥).

The other winners of the Golden Book Award were Brother (弟弟) by Chan Wai-yee (陳偉儀, or her pen name, “陳慧”), Here’s to Us, Bottoms Up (我隨意,你盡量) by Ong Chiau-hoa (王昭華), Mooyi (魔以) by Chen Shu-yao (陳淑瑤) and Eyelids of Morning (鱷眼晨曦) by Zhang Guixing (張貴興). Continue reading

Urban Scenes

New Publication
Urban Scenes, by Liu Na’ou; translated and introduced by Yaohua Shi and Judith M. Armory
Cambria Press, 2023

More than eighty years after his death, Liu Na’ou (1905—1940) remains a fascinating figure. Liu was born in Taiwan, but early on he wrote that his future lay in Shanghai and did indeed spend the entirety of his glittering but all-too-brief career in his adopted city, working closely with a small coterie of like-minded friends and associates as an editor, writer, film critic, scenarist, and director. Liu introduced Japanese Shinkankakuha (New Sensationism) to China and made it an important school of modern Chinese urban fiction. Urban Scenes, his slim volume of modernist fiction, in particular, has had an outsized influence on Shanghai’s image as a phantasmagoric metropolis in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection is especially valuable since there are no more works from Liu because shortly after producing this he was murdered purportedly for political reasons.

Like Japanese New Sensationists, who zeroed in on sensory responses to the new technologies rapidly transforming Tokyo after the Great Earthquake of 1923, Liu was fixated on the sights, sounds, and smells of Shanghai, that other throbbing metropolis of the Far East, and these came through in his writings. Liu’s urban romances depict, as he himself put it, the “thrill” and “carnal intoxication” of modern urban life. His stories take place in Shanghai’s nightclubs, race tracks, cinemas, and cafes—sites of moral depredation but also of erotic allure and excitement; therein lies the contradictory nature of his urban fiction, which gives us a vivid picture of early twentieth-century Shanghai.

This complete translation of Liu’s seminal work is available for the first time to researchers, students, and general readers interested in modern Chinese literature and culture. In addition to the eight stories in the original Urban Scenes, this collection includes an introduction by the translators and three additional pieces Liu published separately. The translations are based on the first editions of the Chinese texts. Urban Scenes is a valuable addition to collections in Chinese and Sinophone studies.

China’s Online Literature talk

Online Talk: China’s Online Literature and the Problem of Preservation
Dr. Michel Hockx
Thursday, November 16, 2023
6:00-7:30p.m. CST
Virtual event held on Zoom.

Please register to attend:

https://kansas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqfuqqrz4uH9YY5V5uoODOT6PN3sSzv6O2

Abstract

Since their introduction in the late 1990s, websites devoted to the production and discussion of literary work have been ubiquitous on the Chinese Web. Over the years, the study of online literature has become an established field of inquiry within the Chinese academy. General studies and textbooks have been produced, and especially for the first decade or so of online literary production, there appears to be consensus on what were the most important sites, authors, and works. This emerging canon of born-digital works, however, can rarely still be found online in its original location and context. This paper addresses the challenges of preserving early Chinese Internet literature, as well as the opportunities for literary analysis when preservation does take place.

About the speaker

Dr. Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His monograph Internet Literature in China was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.”

Posted by: Faye Xiao <hxiao@ku.edu>

HK Lit and the Taiwanese Encounter

New Publication
Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching’s Hong Kong Stories.” Cultural History 12/2 (Open Access)

Abstract

This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei’s case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.

Posted by: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung <jessicayeung@LN.edu.hk>