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Cold Window Newsletter no. 10

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CWN#10: Webfiction as subversion // Literary news bulletins
Feminism, queerness, and nationalism on the Chinese internet
By Andrew Rule

Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter. In this issue, we approach the end of my 13 Ways of Looking at Chinese Internet Literature series with a close look at online fiction and systems of power in today’s China. Then, a few flash bulletins on this season’s literary awards and releases.

Thirteen ways of looking at Chinese internet literature: Fiction, identity, and the state (#9-11)

A lot of what I know about Chinese internet literature comes from conversations with friends who have been reading this stuff much longer than I have, and one common refrain I’ve heard has puzzled me since the very beginning. Friends often warn me that the approach to gender and identity in web fiction is regressive, lowest-common-denominator, unliterary. Before I’d read a word of online fiction, I’d heard classmates dismiss all female-oriented novels as 霸总文 (stories about “domineering CEOs,” an archetype for cold, dominant male love interests) and 后宫文 (“harem” stories, a typically male-oriented genre in which the protagonist collects or seduces an endless parade of women). If you flip through Megan Walsh’s chapter on internet fiction in The Subplot, or even just scroll down the front page of Webnovel, you’ll also come away with the impression that Chinese web novels are sexist to the core.

And yet feminist discourse is surging in ever other corner of Chinese popular culture that I interact with: books, movies, social media. Clearly, between an increasingly gender-aware youth culture on the one hand and the latent sexism of many internet genres on the other, all under a strictly heteronormative censorship regime, there are some rich contradictions to explore here. Let’s get into it.

Way #9: Internet literature as a vehicle for feminist identity formation

Internet literature may only have come of age at the beginning of this century, but that’s plenty long for it to have already gone through several generations of development in its portrayal of gender. The Chinese internet evolves fast, and that’s especially true when it comes to gender discourse. As a new fan entering in the 2020s, internet literature looks to me like a bewildering palimpsest of novels from different eras overlaid on one another, each bearing traces of the trends, gender norms, and censorship environment of when it was written.

The Chinese translation of Misogyny 《厌女》, by Chizuko Ueno 上野千鹤子. Over 100,000 reviews on Douban!

Continue reading Cold Window Newsletter no. 10 →

Creative Belonging

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New Publication: Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China by Yanshuo Zhang is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press on January 12, 2026. Pre-order of the book is available and UM Press is offering significant holiday sales:  https://press.umich.edu/Books/C/Creative-Belonging3 . The book is also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

This book has about thirty full-color images and is printed on high-quality matte-glossy paper similar to an art catalogue or art book at a very affordable price. It offers a luxurious and intimate view of contemporary ethnic minority life in China. It would make for an excellent holiday read. The book’s wide-ranging sources, evidence, and visual aids make it an excellent textbook and can be easily adopted for any courses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture, film, history, or other types of China- and Asia-related courses.

The author of the book, Yanshuo Zhang, is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. She is the Principal Investigator of the national winner of the Inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies in 2024. Titled “Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” the winning project is an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional project that aims to build understanding of ethnic diversity and minority voices within China by developing a multicultural China studies curriculum that is integrated with global studies on race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and identity. Prof. Yanshuo Zhang is leading a group of scholars, translators, artists, and ethnic minority and indigenous collaborators in mainland China and Taiwan on developing a collective database that would offer innovative and original materials on teaching multiethnic China for the English-speaking and multilingual audience internationally. Continue reading Creative Belonging →

Cynicism in contemporary Chinese comedy films

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New publication: “Cynicism in Contemporary Chinese Comedy Films” (book chapter)

A chapter about Chinese comedy films in The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy, arguing that Cynicism is an essential feature of Mainland Chinese comedy films in the early twenty-first century, and cynical humor is symptomatic of the ideological dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, authoritarian politics, and patriarchal tradition. The chapter illustrates certain formal features of cynical humor: skepticism of the authority, self-mockery, reflexive distantiation, and conscious enjoyment of illusions.

Full text published online: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/60834/chapter-abstract/529642149?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Posted by: Yung-Hang Bruce Lai <brucelaiyung@gmail.com>

Optimism, Literature, and Culture in American Capitalism and Chinese Socialism

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of my book Optimism, Literature, and Culture in American Capitalism and Chinese Socialism by Oxford University Press. The book came out in October 2025 in the UK and will be out in January, 2026 in the US. The press is now offering a discount of 30% with the code AUFLY30.

Abstract: This book examines and interprets the uncanny similarity between capitalism and socialism over the twentieth century as both systems found ways to encourage happiness and optimism in their citizens. As inheritors of the Enlightenment emphasis on scientific rationality, these cultures sought to instill in their citizens the belief in progress, settling on a future-oriented optimism as the favored state of mind. When progress as a theory of history is generally accepted, happiness becomes a transference of future advancement into present subjectivity, ultimately expressing acceptance of and satisfaction with society. Fundamentally a literary study strongly embedded in history, this project looks to fiction to show how narrative encouraged readers to engage in the struggle for new values. Characters both model optimism and also contest the way in which optimism encompassed a belief in progress that itself could be camouflaged and the demands for a happiness that insisted on everyone else’s well-being before one’s own. For example, the book compares Yang Mo’s famous Song of Youth (1958) with Horatio Alger Jr.’s Ragged Dick (1868), Eleanor Hodgman Porter’s Pollyanna (1913), and Frederick Kohner’s Gidget (1957); Wang Meng’s Long Live Youth (written 1953) and A Young Man Arrives at the Organization Department (1956) are put up against Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1958). This study also brings related cultural and political concepts such as revolutionary optimism, permanent revolution, literary typicality, the New Soviet Person and the positive hero, optimistic autosuggestion, cultural authenticity, and positive thinking, as well as challenges to those concepts.

Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

Tibetan Sky (1)

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Re this past Monday’s Tibetan Sky post:

There is additional info that some readers of MCLC might want. The novel was nominated for a Dangdai Magazine Best Novels of 2010 Award, as reported by Paper Republic in Jan. 2011, with Wang Danhua writing, in Canaan Morse’s translation, that “young critic from Peking U., Yan Shaojun recommended” Ning Ken’s novel and said it “was one of the best works of Chinese literature in the past 100 years.” In “The Myth of Shangri-La and Its Counter-discourses,” MCLC 34, no. 1 (Summer 2022), Jin Hao writes: “Tibetan Sky” debunks “the myth of Shangri-La as a utopian solution and cure” and so retains a “critical stance toward China’s history and reality.” It is important to know that protagonist Wang Mojie was on Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, which is why he eventually leaves Beijing to teach in a school in a village outside of Lhasa. Female protagonist Ukyi Lhamo grew up in Beijing—Han father, Tibetan mother—and is in Tibet to connect to her Tibetan heritage; her mother is the fictional daughter of the historical Lungshar (1880-1938). There is a bit of playful metafiction in Ning Ken’s first-person authorial intrusions in the narrative, which in the Chinese original are footnotes and in the translation are italicized breaks in the text. As I write in the afterword (which is in the Amazon Kindle edition but not in the UK hard copy), my translation is of the 2023 Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House revised edition of the novel, which includes none of the dialogue between the French Buddhist monk who is Ukyi Lhamo’s teacher and his father that in the original novel was sourced from a Chinese translation of Le Moine et le Philosophe by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard. The afterword was also my chance to thank many people, two of whom I would like to mention here: Ning Ken’s Czech translator Zuzana Li, who shared with me her many extremely helpful insights; and Rongwo Lugyal Dondrup རོང་བོ་ཀླུ་རྒྱལ་དོན་གྲུབ། of the Tibet Center at the University of Virginia, to whom I am indebted for his help with myriad details to do with Tibetan history, culture and language. Lastly, in 2022, as I was working on the final draft of the translation, Ning Ken asked Pema Tseden for Ukyi Lhamo’s name in Tibetan script, and we have included this name in Tibetan in chapter 12 as a small tribute to the late, great director and writer.

Thomas Moran <moran@middlebury.edu>

Tibetan Sky

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NEW PUBLICATION: Tibetan Sky, by Ning Ken; translated by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)

Wang Mojie’s dreams wilted in the Beijing heat. Leaving behind its constricting avenues at the end of the millennium,¹ the disillusioned academic seeks meaning in Lhasa. Instead, he finds Ukyi Lhamo. The soul of every party, her studied Parisian charms hide an inner rootlessness. Raised by a mother who stifled her beliefs to protect all she held dear, she searches for her grandmother,² the key to her lost heritage.

Crossing paths among a gathering of self-exiled intellectuals living among the cool mountains, the two bond on the sidelines of a fierce philosophical debate. However, as Wang Mojie’s masochistic fantasies resurface, can they cling to what they mutually lack? Or was it never possible to make peace with zero?

¹ After a divorce sparked by his unusual perversions

² A Tibetan Buddhist nun with a severed aristocratic lineage

Surrealism in the PRC

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New Book : Surrealism and the People’s Republic of China: From Mao to Now
By Lauren Walden

This study investigates cultural exchange between the Surrealist movement and the People’s Republic of China (1949-present). This book asserts Surrealism resolutely chimed with traditional Chinese thought whilst reflecting and refracting contemporaneous socio-political issues from Mao to now. A ‘historico-intrinsic’ relationship coalesces archival and primary sources consulted in Chinese, French and English, artist interviews as well as cosmopolitan political theory. The purported originality of European modernism is questioned, ascertaining traditional Chinese concepts of spontaneity were cited by Surrealists as redolent of automatism, the notion of creating without forethought. Surrealist art was officially prohibited under Mao’s rule (1949-1976). However, the book interrogates potent tensions in suppressed surrealist artworks by Zhao Shou and Sha Qi, who discovered the movement while studying abroad. Furthermore, Walden explores how several European Surrealists aligned Chinese calligraphy with automatism as well as Michel Leiris and Marcel Mariën’s travels to Maoist China and their diametrically opposed visions of the nation. Amidst post-socialism, the book posits that the ’85 New Wave consciously employed Surrealism to process the traumatic Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and react to newfound societal freedoms. Subsequently, the volume considers why a new artistic tendency of ‘surrealist pop’ emerged in the 1990s. At present, Lauren Walden reveals how Surrealism has become officialised and even promoted by Chinese authorities owing to revolutionary resonances between traditional Chinese art and the western avant-garde.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Chinese studies, and Surrealism. Chapter 4 is available open access here as well as the introduction via a preview PDF. An online book launch will take place on the 30th November 7pm UK time. Sign up here. Continue reading Surrealism in the PRC →

Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism

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I would like to share a free chapter from my new book, Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism: From Russia, with Squalor (Oxford UP, 2025), available till December 15th.

The Preface, which precedes this free introductory chapter, summarises the book’s main interventions.

A discount is available for the entire book here: Discount Code: AUFLY30

Best wishes,

Keru Cai <keru.cai@unsw.edu.au>
The University of New South Wales

On Youtuber Li Ziqi

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Source: Public Books (11/12/25)
China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
By Thomas Chen

Li Ziqi.

One year ago today—on November 12, 2024, after a three-year and four-month hiatus—China’s most popular YouTuber resurfaced. A woman in her mid-30s from the Sichuan countryside, Li Ziqi (李子柒) posted three new videos to her channel, which has over 28 million subscribers worldwide. In the first video, in order to lacquer her grandmother’s old wardrobe, she climbs up scaffolded lacquer trees to tap their sap. In the second video, she builds a large bamboo-themed hut for the display of her clothes. In the third video, with silk from silkworms she has cultivated herself, she makes a flower that she then wears, while playing the piano and singing a pop song. Each of these videos quickly garnered millions of views, as a global audience cheered her return, following the resolution of a legal and financial dispute with her former management company.

In Li’s videos, labor is not degraded but creative. Critics may argue that it is presented almost entirely as DIY: an individualistic rather than communal endeavor, even when traditionally communal activities like planting and harvesting are involved. What Li performs cannot be scaled up into a plan to mobilize the masses. But the vision she offers is, at the same time, emancipatory. In The German Ideology, Marx famously sketches this one day in the life of the man of the future:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Except for post-dinner debate, we could say that Li Ziqi realizes this passage in visual form (if not in reality). She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities. She does not restrict herself to one sphere of activity; indeed, she is masterful in numerous spheres, from making shoes, paper, and furniture from scratch to practicing woodblock printing and sericulture. Continue reading On Youtuber Li Ziqi →

Chen Wanli’s museum career

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New Publication: Feng Schöneweiß. “Precarity, Resilience, and Chen Wanli’s Museum Career in Twentieth-Century China,” Museum Worlds 13, 1 (2025): 82-93.

This article explores precarity and resilience in Chen Wanli’s 陳萬里 pursuit of a museum career. Through a critical biography approach, the article examines Chen’s professional development in three stages through his work as a physician at Peking University (1917–1927), his tenure as a provincial head of public health (1928–1949), and his career at the Palace Museum (1949–1969). It details how Chen negotiated various professions to become a museum archaeologist, how he acquired the competences necessary for a museum career, and how his critical biography reveals the sociopolitical conditions of the museum profession in twentieth-century China. Investigating his transnational networks, the article also demonstrates how Chen became a powerhouse of ceramic archaeology and knowledge dissemination, contributing to the training of generations of Chinese museum professionals.

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2025.130108

Keywords:
archaeology; China; Cultural Revolution; fieldwork; Fogg expedition; museum professionalization; Palace Museum; transnational networks

Posted by: Feng Schöneweiß <feng.schoeneweiss@khi.fi.it>

Pigsy Eats a Watermelon

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is pleased to announce the publication of Christopher Rea’s translation of the animated short film Pigsy Eats a Watermelon 豬八戒吃西瓜 (Wan Guchan 萬古蟾, dir., 1958). Subtitles were created by Yao Jiaqi.

https://chinesefilmclassics.org/pigsy-eats-a-watermelon-1958/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316XRGq_yQE

ABOUT THE FILM:

Pigsy Eats a Watermelon (Zhu Bajie chi xigua 豬八戒吃西瓜)
Directed by Wan Guchan 萬古蟾
Written by Bao Lei 包蕾
Assistant Director and Cinematographer: Chen Zhenghong 陳正鴻
Music composed by Wu Yingju 吳應炬
Art direction by Zhan Tongxuan 詹同渲 and Xie Yougen 謝友根
Animation design by Hu Jinqing 胡進慶, Qian Jiaxing 錢家騂, Shen Zuwei 沈祖慰, Ju Hui 車慧
Studio: Shanghai Art Film Studio 上海美朮电影制片厂
21 minutes, sound
Year of release: 1958
English subtitles translated by Christopher Rea
Subtitles created by Yao Jiaqi

Who can resist a delicious watermelon on a hot summer day? One day in June, Tripitaka and his companions Monkey King, Sandy, and Pigsy pause their journey to the west to take shelter at an abandoned temple. Monkey King offers to go find some food and drink for the parched travelers, and Pigsy tags along, but Pigsy soon decides that his friend can do the work while he takes “a nap beneath a giant tree / Just how lovely would that be?” While Monkey is foraging in the South Seas Melon Patch and Peach Orchard, Pigsy awakens to discover before his eyes a GIANT watermelon. What will our ever-famished friend do next?

This short film brings together Chinese paper cutting and stop-motion animation to tell a story featuring the main characters of the Journey to the West. Pigsy is perhaps the most famous comical character in Chinese literature and folklore, the personification of animalistic gluttony and other corporeal desires. Hs self-restraint is sorely put to the test in this episode, which does not occur in the original Ming dynasty novel. Director Wan Guchan, the most prominent of the pioneering animation trio, the Wan Brothers, had earlier been a driving force behind other animated films inspired Journey to the West, notably the landmark full-length animated film Princess Iron Fan (1941). Notably, Pigsy Eats a Watermelon, a film about hunger and thirst, was released just as China was entering the Great Famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962).

New publication on Chinese contemporary cinema

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We are pleased to announce the release of Chinese Contemporary Cinema. Genres, Storytelling, and Heroes (Il cinema cinese contemporaneo: Generi, narrazioni, eroi) by Chiara Lepri. The volume, published by Carocci (Rome), offers an in-depth exploration of contemporary Chinese cinema, tracing its evolution from the post-reform era to today. Through an analysis of genres, narratives, and heroic figures, it sheds light on the cultural and social dynamics shaping modern China.

Date of publication: November 7, 2025.

Chiara Lepri holds a Ph.D. in Asian and African Civilizations from Sapienza University of Rome. Her research interests focus on Chinese cinema, as well as on the relations between Italy and China in the field of cinema. She has conducted academic training and research in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Osaka, as well as at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. She is an Adjunct Researcher in the project Biographical Database of Italians in China (BDIC) at Sapienza University of Rome.

Chiara Lepri <chiara.lepri@uniroma1.it>

What is philosophy to me

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Source: Why Philosophy? (11/3/25)
What Is Philosophy to Me?
By Haiyan Lee

How were you first introduced to philosophy? 

Many philosophers have a charming origin story about how they became a philosopher. It typically involves some sort of happy serendipity, whereupon our protagonist willy-nilly fell in love with philosophy and never looked back. My story is none-too-charming, and my stumbling into philosophy did not turn me into a professional philosopher. I still am not a philosopher—neither by training nor by professional location. Instead, I’m a literature professor holding an appointment in a foreign languages and literatures department (and a joint appointment in Comparative Literature). I would not have presumed to intrude into this space but for the insistence of Gabriel Olano. In part to explain my interloper status, I have combined the first two questions and switched the order.

I grew up in Mao’s China and received a stultifying education (1970s and 80s). My scores on the National College Entrance Examinations were just high enough to be admitted into Peking University, China’s premier institution of higher education, but not enough to earn a spot in one of the more coveted disciplines, such as English and International Finance. So I got assigned to major in Religious Studies, which was housed in the Philosophy Department. I had heard of philosophy but not religious studies, coming as I did from the hinterland and having had little exposure to anything but my textbooks. I ended up not liking either philosophy or religious studies, and I blame the university (and the entire educational system) for it.

In my first year, I had to take a number of courses in Marxism-Leninism, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Mao Zedong Thought, and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. None of the classes assigned any readings. The instructor lectured, we took notes, and regurgitated everything back to him (yes, they were all men) on the exam. In my second year, I nearly failed the history of Western philosophy course because 1) I couldn’t follow the lectures and 2) instead of the usual final exam, the instructor required a paper and I had never written a paper up to that point and had received no instruction as to how. All this is to say that I had a terrible experience studying what passed as philosophy at Peking University. Religious studies also failed to draw me in for more or less the same reasons. After I came to the U.S. for grad school, I switched to literature, which has always been my first love. Continue reading What is philosophy to me →

Suipian no. 8

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碎篇 // Suipian // Fragments
By Tabitha Speelman
Oct 31, 2025

Welcome to the 8th edition of Suipian, my personal newsletter in which I share thoughts and resources that help me make sense of Chinese society and its relationship to the rest of the world. I am Tabitha Speelman, a Dutch journalist based in Beijing and Rotterdam. See here for more introduction to Suipian.

I wanted to send this out today to stick to my 两个月一更 schedule, if one can call it that. There was lots of news to cover these past months, all the way from China’s military parade in early September and public opinion on it (“in this economy?”) to the Dutch interference at the Chinese-owned, Dutch-headquartered chips company Nexperia, and the Xi-Trump meeting of yesterday.

Given my love of slower journalism, I was glad that I also got to write a feature on Chinese studying abroad trends, travel to Ningbo and Yiwu to explore how the area is adapting to the U.S. tariffs, and learn more about feminism (see below).

But some favorite moments of these months took place at public cultural events. Those are not nearly as abundant as, say, a decade ago, but the ones that do take place can be really great.

To mention one: last weekend at a literary festival in Mentougou, in the mountains just outside Beijing, French author Édouard Louis really connected to his Chinese audience during a dialogue with 单读 editor Wu Qi on the childhood poverty and violence shaping his writing. Louis talked about the challenges politically invisible groups share, both inside France (he mentioned Chinese migrants) and elsewhere, while members of the audience asked Louis for advice on how to tell their own stories of being class migrants in Chinese society. Continue reading Suipian no. 8 →