Politics

posts on political issues relevant to Greater China

Ne Zha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters (2)

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Yes, Magnus. People are talking a good deal about all of what you query, and more. Whether they are writing and in which fora is unclear. Writing is not available in digital forms, in large part because of the scrubbing the China Digital Times notes. I’ve seen both films — Ne Zha 1 & 2, as well as the 1979 version — and have had a large number of conversations about them. You might recognize the limits of what can be said/written/ done in public at this point, in China or Hong Kong. Given the tech-heavy tech-concentrated sets of concerns in China/HK today — China’s desire for superiority in tech-related matters, HK universities’ huge investments in AI and technology, coupled with the gutting of US institutions and funding for everything under the sun — the technological achievements are receiving a lot of attention. Obviously, this and nationalist pride are modes of avoiding discussion of content. But NO ONE I’ve spoken to is unaware of the radically transformed family relations of the movie from the original story. And nor is anyone in doubt about how the mother is sacrificed to secure the patriarchy towards the end of Ne Zha 2. So, yes, you are not the only person to have noticed these issues. They are widely discussed and topics of huge numbers of conversations.

Rebecca Karl <rek2@nyu.edu>

The secret campaign to save a chained woman

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Source: NYT (3/25)
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck
By Vivian WangGraphics and illustration by Pablo Robles

Screenshot from a video showing a woman chained by the neck.

The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

And yet, it did. Continue reading The secret campaign to save a chained woman →

Aftermath of Thai handing Uyghur refugees to China

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If you read just one article about Thailand handing Uyghur refugees to China, this may be the one — it situates this stunning debacle in the context of the global US withdrawal from commitments, promises, and values:

“US Ally Kowtows to China as Old Order Crumbles Under Trump,” by Matthew Tostevin. Newsweek (Feb. 28, 2025). 

The Newsweek piece was published the day after the forced deportation, so it could not yet note the absolutely stunning admission from the Thai government, on March 6, that they knowingly lied about there being no other governments (or the UNHCR) ready to take the refugees — as top officials all the way to the PM had been insisting, until that day, as one justification for setting aside the Torture Convention.

Links on this and on the Thai government’s shocking parroting of various other Chinese talking points (the refugees are “safe”, because there is pictufre proof from Chinese-arrangeded photo ops, etc.):

“In reversal, Thai official acknowledges other countries offered Uyghurs resettlement“… (Radio Free Asia)

“Thailand had offers to take Uyghurs but deported them to China anyway: MP.” (Radio Free Asia)

“US offered to resettle Uyghurs that Thailand deported to China, sources say.” (The Guardian)

For more, including some of the Chinese propaganda around this whole incident, see my online bibliography (periodically updated) on the genocide in the Uyghur region (East Turkestan): https://uhrp.org/bibliography/

Sincerely,
Magnus Fiskesjö

Many Chinese see a Cultural Revolution in America

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Source: NYT (3/6/25)
Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版 | Leer en español
People in China are expressing alarm at what seems to be an authoritarian turn in the United States, long their role model of democracy, that feels familiar.
By Li Yuan

An illustration shows a mural of Mao Zedong on a brick wall that is crumbling, exposing the rear of a giant head wearing a red baseball cap labeled “Trump.”

Credit…Dongyan Xu

As the United States grapples with the upheaval unleashed by the Trump administration, many Chinese people are finding they can relate to what many Americans are going through.

They are saying it feels something like the Cultural Revolution, the period known as “the decade of turmoil.” The young aides Elon Musk has sent to dismantle the U.S. government reminded some Chinese of the Red Guards whom Mao Zedong enlisted to destroy the bureaucracy at the peak of the Cultural Revolution. Upon hearing President Trump’s musing about serving a third term, they joked that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, must be saying, “I know how to do it” — he secured one in 2022 by engineering a constitutional change.

The United States helped China modernize and expand its economy in the hope that China would become more like America — more democratic and more open. Now for some Chinese, the United States is looking more and more like China.

“Coming from an authoritarian state, we know that dictatorship is not just a system — it is, at its core, the pursuit of power,” Wang Jian, a journalist, wrote in an X post criticizing Mr. Trump. “We also know that the Cultural Revolution was about dismantling institutions to expand control.” Continue reading Many Chinese see a Cultural Revolution in America →

Thailand deports Uyghur refugees

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This morning, on Feb. 27, 2025, Thailand deported over forty Uyghur refugees to China, despite a pending court hearing set for next month. This was simply set aside — and was perhaps a lie to begin with. The shameful deportation was done under the cover of night, in buses with black-out windows, to prevent the press from seeing the prisoners [https://prachataienglish.com/node/11322]. A Chinese plane flew them direct from Bangkok to Kashgar in the Uyghur region, where China’s concentration camps now await them.

Thailand has now violated both the UN convention on torture, which it signed, and the principle of non-refoulement, against sending refugees in harm’s way. Thailand’s betrayal of human rights also overrides the Thai politicians and lawyers and others who tried to protest, arguing that refugees had suffered enough, languishing in Thai jails for over ten years, with five dying, including two children.

It is obvious this was done only to obey China — where state media celebrated getting their hands on the refugees.

For more see: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14jjxz8re6o

A week ago, I explained the global stakes of Thailand’s Uyghur refugee drama, that has now ended in such a gruesome way. Listen on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/wrfihumanrightsshow/magnus-fiskesjo-feb-21_4upload
(first aired Friday, Feb. 21 on the “Human Rights and Social Justice” local FM radio show hosted by Ute Ritz-Deutch, on WRFI.org, at FM 88.1 in Ithaca)

Sincerely, with great sadness, and frankly disgust at the Thai authorities’ betrayal,

Magnus Fiskesjö

Taiwan Democracy and the Chinese Humanistic Tradition

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“Taiwan Democracy and the Chinese Humanistic Tradition”
Capstone lecture by Professor Josephine Chiu-Duke 丘慧芬, on the occasion of her retirement

Details and registration: https://asia.ubc.ca/events/event/taiwan-democracy-and-the-chinese-humanistic-tradition/

Thursday, March 6, 2025
3:00-5:00pm reception and lecture
Asian Centre Auditorium
The University of British Columbia
UBC Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC

2025 Capstone Lecture by Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke

Taiwan’s peaceful transformation from authoritarian rule to a liberal democracy in the early 1990s has been praised as a remarkable political achievement. This achievement, despite the many challenges it has faced and still confronts, has been thriving in the face of China’s claim of sovereignty over the island and its constant threats of serious coercion. To be sure, Taiwan’s production of the world’s most sought for semiconductor chips has already made Taiwan a pivotal link in the world supply chain.

What should be noted is that Taiwan today is also the only place where Chinese culture, especially with regard to the values embedded in the Confucian humanistic tradition, has been best preserved since 1949 without being deliberately destroyed as it was during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

In her talk, Dr. Chiu-Duke will discuss why Taiwan’s successful search for liberty and democracy has yet to bring about a consensus on Taiwan’s dealing with China. She will also discuss how Confucius’ innovative re-interpretation of the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven laid the foundation for the Chinese humanistic tradition. This tradition was the key reason for China being identified as one of the “Axial civilizations.” However, it has never being able to make an institutional breakthrough in its pursuit of the Confucian ideal of a humane government, not even during the 1915 May Fourth New Culture movement when liberal democracy and science were advocated as the necessary goals for China’s path to modernity. Continue reading Taiwan Democracy and the Chinese Humanistic Tradition →

DeepSeeking Truth

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Source: China Media Project (2/10/25)
DeepSeeking Truth
When it comes to assessing the risks of DeepSeek, are we asking the wrong questions? Governments, journalists, and coders need to know that it’s a much more sophisticated propaganda tool than we all thought.
By Alex Colville

Can you tell me about the Tiananmen Massacre? When did China invade Tibet? Is Taiwan an independent country? When pointing out DeepSeek’s propaganda problems, journalists and China watchers have tended to prompt the LLM with questions like these about the “Three T’s” (Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet) — obvious political red lines that are bound to meet a stony wall of hedging and silence. “Let’s talk about something else,” DeepSeek tends to respond. Alternatively, questions of safety regarding DeepSeek tend to focus on whether data will be sent to China.

Experts say this is all easily fixable. Kevin Xu has pointed out that the earlier V3 version, released in December, will discuss topics such as Tiananmen and Xi Jinping when it is hosted on local computers — beyond the grasp of DeepSeek’s cloud software and servers. The Indian government has announced it will import DeepSeek’s model into India, running it locally on national cloud servers while ensuring it complies with local laws and regulations. Coders on Hugging Face, an open-source collaboration platform for AI, have released modified versions of DeepSeek’s products that claim to have “uncensored” the software. In short, the consensus, as one Silicon Valley CEO told the Wall Street Journal, is that DeepSeek is harmless beyond some “half-baked PRC censorship.” 

But do coders and Silicon Valley denizens know what they should be looking for? As we have written at CMP, Chinese state propaganda is not about censorship per se, but about what the Party terms “guiding public opinion” (舆论导向). “Guidance,” which emerged in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, is a more comprehensive approach to narrative control that goes beyond simple censorship. While outright removal of unwanted information is one tactic, “guidance” involves a wide spectrum of methods to shape public discourse in the Party’s favor. These can include restricting journalists’ access to events, ordering media to emphasize certain facts and interpretations, deploying directed narrative campaigns, and drowning out unfavorable information with preferred content.

Those testing DeepSeek for propaganda shouldn’t simply be prompting the LLM to cross simple red lines or say things regarded as “sensitive.” They should be mindful of the full range of possible tactics to achieve “guidance.” Continue reading DeepSeeking Truth →

Urgent action for artist Gao Zhen

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Dear colleagues,

The Heroes and Martyrs’ Protection Law in China is a so-called punitive memory law: a vaguely worded law prohibiting and punishing views of the past that question the official historical narrative.

Amnesty International is organizing an Urgent Action for U.S.-based artist Gao Zhen, who was detained for “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs” because he employed satirical humor to shed light on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and criticized former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976).

Please urgently write to the Chinese authorities in your own words or using the model letter below. Please remember to do so in your professional capacity.

With best wishes,
Antoon De Baets and Ruben Zeeman
(Network of Concerned Historians)

Source: Amnesty International (12/5/24)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/8821/2024/en/

CHINA — PROMINENT ARTIST ARRESTED FOR HIS WORK: GAO ZHEN
First Urgent Action (UA) — 106/24 Index: ASA 17/8821/2024 — China — Date: 5 December 2024

Prominent Artist Arrested For His Work
On 26 August 2024, Gao Zhen, a prominent Chinese artist, was detained by authorities while traveling in China with his wife and son. Gao is charged with “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs,” a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. His formal arrest has been approved, and his wife and child have been prevented from leaving China. Chinese authorities must release Gao Zhen immediately and unconditionally, and cease using this and other laws to stifle creative expression. Continue reading Urgent action for artist Gao Zhen →

China’s Counter-Histories

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Source: NY Review of Books (2/27/25)
China’s Counter-Histories
By Perry Link

In Sparks, Ian Johnson writes of Chinese people who risk their careers and even their lives to uncover suppressed truths about their country’s modern history.

Hu Jie: Let there be light #16, 2015; from a series of woodblock prints about China’s Great Famine of 1958–1962

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson. Oxford University Press, 381 pp., $27.95; $19.99 (paper)

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

The CCP presses them terribly and largely succeeds. The journalists, professors, rights lawyers, and primitively equipped filmmakers who make up Johnson’s “underground historians” (alternatively, “counter-historians”) appear to be only a tiny minority. But he shows how they draw on values that have not only survived dynasties but also helped to bring some dynasties down. Today’s rulers seem aware of that. Our best evidence of this is the highly expensive 24/7 “stability maintenance” measures that the regime uses to monitor, dissuade, and, if necessary, stifle them. The tools of dissuasion are basically two: threats designed to induce fear and offers of comfort to reward capitulation. Beyond that, punishment. Continue reading China’s Counter-Histories →

Thailand obeys China on refugees and kidnapping

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On the burning issue of Thailand’s pending forced repatriation to China of forty-some Uyghur refugees, to certain torture and probably death there, because of international protests (even from UN-appointed experts), and global media attention, top Thai political leaders and the national police chief have now come out, to tie themselves in knots while trying to defend their country’s actions and shore up an image of decency.

Thailand’s police chief has the audacity to say that the refugees, WHO HAVE BEEN DETAINED FOR TEN YEARS NOW, are “doing OK”.

This article also mentions the brave Thai senator Angkhana Neelapaijit, chairwoman of a Senate committee that has now asked to at last be allowed to see the detained men, and who also “expressed concerns shared by human rights organisations that the Uyghur group could face danger if they are sent back to China.”

She also reminded us all about how the coup government of general Prayut Chan-o-cha in 2013 already forcibly returned 109 Uyghur men to China at Beijing’s request, and to this day, their fate remains unknown. (Of course, we can assume they have all long since put to death).

In another report, a deputy PM and defence minister says Thailand will handle this decently (again, that’s after holding these refugees for 10 years!!), and “promises to adhere to human rights.” This minister’s pronouoncement has been seized upon as a hopeful sign, by Uyghurs in exile.

But I for one wonder, about Thailand and human rights. The country has refused to sign the international refugee convention on refugee treatment, and that same coup general once mocked the very same Uyghur refugees he sent to their probable death, as lowly animals. Continue reading Thailand obeys China on refugees and kidnapping →

Tibet dam project alarms neighbors and experts

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Source: NYT (1/27/25)
China’s Large and Mysterious Dam Project Is Alarming Neighbors and Experts
The hydropower dam, in quake-prone Tibet, is set to be the world’s biggest. But China has said little about the project, which could affect nearby countries.
By Tiffany MayIsabelle Qian and Suhasini Raj

A dramatic, mountainous landscape with a river in the foreground.

China says it will build a dam in Medog, a remote county in Tibet, that could generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Step aside, Three Gorges Dam. China’s latest colossal infrastructure project, if completed, will be the world’s largest hydropower dam, high up in the Tibetan plateau on the border with India.

China says the Motuo Hydropower Station it is building in Tibet is key to its effort to meet clean energy targets. Beijing also sees infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the sluggish Chinese economy and create jobs.

But this project has raised concerns among environmentalists and China’s neighbors — in part, because Beijing has said so little about it.

The area where the dam is being built is prone to earthquakes. The Tibetan river being dammed, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into neighboring India as the Brahmaputra and into Bangladesh as the Jamuna, raising concerns in those countries about water security. Continue reading Tibet dam project alarms neighbors and experts →

Suipian (Jan. 2025)

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碎篇 // Suipian // Fragments
By TABITHA SPEELMAN
JAN 26, 2025

Welcome to the 4th 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. See here for more information on Suipian. I’m happy to send you this dispatch from Beijing. Ahead of the New Year holidays, the city – never too loud these days, what with all the EVs and population control – is getting downright quiet. But it’s been a lovely (worryingly mild) winter here so far, with lots of blue skies. Since I last wrote, I’ve spent time reporting here, in Holland, and in Taiwan, working on some stories I’d long wanted to do. I’ll save you a blow-by-blow account, but see below for a few links and thoughts. 新年快乐.

随笔 // Suibi // Notes
Sharing thoughts or resources related to my work as a correspondent

  1. Reporting politics. When CNN’s Clarissa Ward recently interviewed a Syrian man who pretended to be someone he was not, the journalistic error was corrected within days. I’ve been wondering what it says about China reporting that it has taken years for some of the media that cited controversial, Holland-based dissident Wang Jingyu on topics including Chinese overseas police stations and influencing practices to retract those stories, following mounting evidence of his unreliability. NPR, which has led the way in uncovering that evidence, has cited journalism experts who think it is one of the largest cases ever of a single unreliable source influencing media coverage. Assisting two colleagues on a related investigation in recent months, I learned a lot from diaspora interviewees, some of whom had long been documenting and warning about Wang’s misconduct, exchanging information across big political divides (from dissident to United Front-adjacent) in search of the truth. Continue reading Suipian (Jan. 2025) →

The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet

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Source: NYT (1/20/25)
TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet
Leer en español | 阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.
By Li Yuan

Dongyan Xu.

The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.

Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?

Americans also posed questions to their new friends. “I heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,” an American RedNote user wrote. “Can you tell me how can I get it?” An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: “Believe me, it’s true,” the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.

I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view. Continue reading The Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet →

Statement on Uyghur asylum seekers in Thailand

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

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

Dear Friend and colleagues,

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

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

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

Kind regards,

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

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →