Taiwan opposition cracks apart

Source: NYT (11/24)
Taiwan Opposition Cracks Apart, and Invites the Cameras In
The split over a proposed joint ticket bolsters the governing party candidate’s chances in the coming presidential election. That won’t please Beijing.
By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien. Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan

Three men in suits sit behind a desk, one passing a microphone, one with his hands around his mouth, one smiling.

From left to right: Terry Gou, a presidential candidate; former President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan; and Hou Yu-ih, a presidential candidate of the opposition party Kuomintang, at a meeting open to journalists in Taiwan on Thursday. Credit…Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

For weeks, Taiwan’s two main opposition parties were edging toward a coalition, in a bid to unseat the island democracy’s governing party in the coming presidential election, an outcome that Beijing would welcome. The election, one elder statesman from Taiwan’s opposition said, was a choice between war and peace.

This week, though, the two parties — which both argue that they are better able to ensure peace with China — chose in spectacular fashion to go to war against each other. An incipient deal for a joint presidential ticket between the long-established Nationalist Party and the upstart Taiwan People’s Party unraveled with the speed, melodrama and lingering vitriol of a celebrity wedding gone wrong.

A meeting that was opened to journalists on Thursday seemed to have been meant as a show of good will within the opposition. But it featured sniping between rival spokesmen, a long-winded tribute to the spirit of Thanksgiving by Terry Gou — a magnate turned politician trying to cajole the opposition toward unity — and mutual accusations of bad faith between the two presidential candidates who had been trying to strike a deal: Hou Yu-ih of the Nationalist Party and Ko Wen-je, the founder of the Taiwan People’s Party.

Mr. Gou tried to break the icy tensions at one point by saying that he needed a bathroom break.

“I don’t want a silent ending on this Thanksgiving Day,” he later told journalists after Mr. Hou and his two allies had left the stage. “But unfortunately it looks like it will be a silent ending.”

Friday was the deadline for registering for Taiwan’s election, which will be held on Jan. 13, and by noon both Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko had officially registered as presidential candidates, confirming that there would be no unity ticket. Mr. Gou, who had also thrown his hat in the ring, withdrew from the race.

Taiwan’s young, vigorous democratic politics has often included some raucous drama. Yet even experienced observers of the Taiwanese scene have been agog by this week, and baffled as to why the opposition parties would stage such a public rupture over who would be the presidential candidate on a unity ticket, and who would accept the vice presidential nomination.

“It really defies theories of coalition building,” Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Chengchi University in Taipei, said of the week’s bickering. “How do you tell undecided voters ‘still vote for me’ after having a very publicly messy, willfully uninformed debate about who ought to be first and who ought to be second?”

The collapse of the proposed opposition pact could have consequences rippling beyond Taiwan, affecting the tense balance between Beijing — which claims the self-governing island as its own — and Washington over the future status of the island.

The situation also makes it more likely that Taiwan’s vice president, Lai Ching-te, the presidential candidate for the governing Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., will win the election — a result sure to displease Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Mr. Lai’s party asserts Taiwan’s distinctive identity and claims to nationhood, and has become closer to the United States. China’s leaders could respond to a victory for him by escalating menacing military activities around Taiwan, which sits roughly 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

A victory for the Nationalists could reopen communication with China that mostly froze shortly after Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party was elected president in 2016. And a third successive loss for the Nationalists, who favor closer ties and negotiations with Beijing, could undercut Chinese confidence that they remain a viable force.

Lai Ching-te, the vice president of Taiwan, waving as he stands behind microphones.

Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s vice president, and a candidate from the Democratic Progressive Party. A split between Mr. Hou and Ko Wen-je of Taiwan People’s Party may benefit his campaign. Credit…I-Hwa Cheng/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Taiwan’s first-past-the-post system for electing its president awards victory to the candidate with the highest raw percentage of votes. Mr. Lai has led in polls for months, but his projected share of the vote has sat below 40 percent in many surveys, meaning that the opposition could claw past his lead if it coalesced behind a single candidate. Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko for months sat around the mid- to high 20s in polls, suggesting that it could be hard for either to overtake Mr. Lai unless the other candidate stepped aside.

“This may scare off moderate voters who might have been into voting for a joint ticket for the sake of blocking the D.P.P.,” Mr. Nachman said of the falling out between the opposition parties. “Now those moderate voters will look at this team in a different light.”

For now, many Taiwanese people seem absorbed — sometimes gleeful, sometimes anguished — by the spectacle of recent days. “Wave Makers,” a recent Netflix drama series, showed Taiwanese electoral politics as a noble, if sometimes cutthroat, affair. This week was more like the political satire “Veep.”

Last weekend, the Nationalist Party and Taiwan People’s Party appeared poised to settle on a unity ticket, with each agreeing to decide on their choice of joint presidential nominee — Mr. Hou or Mr. Ko — by examining electoral polls to determine who had the strongest shot at winning.

But teams of statistical experts put forward by each party could not agree on what polls to use and what to make of the results, and the parties became locked in days of bickering over the numbers and their implications. At news conferences, rival spokespeople brandished printouts of opinion poll results and struggled to explain complex statistical concepts.

The real issue was which leader would claim the presidential nominee spot, and the quarrel exposed deep wariness between the Nationalists — a party with a history of over a century that is also known as the Kuomintang, or K.M.T. — and the Taiwan People’s Party, which Mr. Ko, a surgeon and former mayor of Taipei, founded in 2019.

“The K.M.T., as the grand old party, could never make way for an upstart party, so structurally, it was very difficult for them to work out how to work together,” said Brian Hioe, a founding editor of New Bloom, a Taiwanese magazine that takes a critical view of mainstream politics. On the other hand, Mr. Hioe added, “Ko Wen-je’s party has the need to differentiate itself from the K.M.T. — to show that it’s independent and different — and so working with the K.M.T. would be seen by many of his party membership as a betrayal.”

A group of people near a large flag of Taiwan.

A supporter of the Kuomintang, or the long-established Nationalist Party, holding a flag outside the Central Election Commission in Taipei on Friday. Credit…Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

Ma Ying-jeou, the Nationalist president of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016, stepped in to try to broker an agreement between his party and Mr. Ko. Hopes rose on Thursday when Mr. Hou announced that he would be waiting at Mr. Ma’s office to hold negotiations with Mr. Ko.

But it quickly became clear that Mr. Ko and Mr. Hou remained divided. Mr. Ko refused to go to Mr. Ma’s office, and insisted on talks at another location. Mr. Hou stayed put in Mr. Ma’s office for hours, waiting for Mr. Ko to give way. Eventually, Mr. Hou agreed to meet at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Taipei, and party functionaries announced with solemn specificity that the talks would happen in Room 2538.

Dozens of journalists converged on the hotel, waiting for a possible announcement. Expectations rose when Mr. Hou entered a conference room where the journalists and live-feed cameras waited. But he sat with a fixed smile for about 20 minutes before Mr. Ko arrived, glowering. Mr. Gou, the magnate, opened proceedings with his tribute to Thanksgiving and calls for unity, recalling his wedding ceremony in the same hotel. But it soon became clear that Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko were no closer.

On Friday, Taiwanese people had shared images online and quips ridiculing the opposition’s public feuding. Photographs of Room 2538, a suite at the Grand Hyatt, circulated on the internet. Some likened the spectacle to “The Break-up Ring,” a popular Taiwanese television show that featured quarreling couples and their in-laws airing their grievances on camera.

Some drew a more somber conclusion: that dysfunction on the opposition side left Taiwan’s democracy weaker.

“In a healthy democracy, No. 2 and No. 3 will collaborate to challenge No. 1,” said Wu Tzu-chia, the chairman of My Formosa, an online magazine. “This should be a very rigorous process, but in Taiwan, it’s become very crude, like buying meat and vegetables in the marketplace.”

Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley

Amy Chang Chien covers news in mainland China and Taiwan. She is based in Taipei. More about Amy Chang Chien

Nationalist pundit Sima Nan’s about-face (2)

I just wish that Western media, not least American media, could learn from this, as they keep interviewing Chinese “academics” and other people in China who pretend to have their own opinion that just happens to coincide with the regime — in reality those are just stooges of the regime that will shift any time required. They are interviewed because they are presumably “outside the government.” People like Victor Gao, et al, who are constantly interview by CNN etc. despite the false premise.

Generally speaking, Chinese people in China do not have opinions of their own — because that is not allowed, and it is too dangerous for them, so they typically will tell you (what they think are) the opinions of the government.

I feel it’s deeply misleading, and unethical, when Western media present such “opinionators” as if they represent something other than the regime.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Nationalist pundit Sima Nan’s about-face

Source: China Digital Times (11/16/23)
“Joke of the Year”: Nationalist Pundit Sima Nan Says He “Strives to Promote Friendly Sino-American Relations”
By Cindy Carter

As Chinese state media tone down their anti-U.S. rhetoric and promote the Weibo hashtag #感受中美民意暖流# (#Experience the Warm Current of Public Opinion on Sino-American Relations) in recognition of the Xi-Biden meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco, China’s nationalist pundits have followed suit. The most notable example is Sima Nan, whose fiery blasts against the U.S. have earned him legions of fans, as well as countless critics. His recent claim that he “strives to promote friendly Sino-American relations” was met with incredulity by many online, including the authors of the two essays below.

A screen-grab of a TV program featuring Sima Nan, wearing a dark suit jacket and white shirt, sitting in front of a wall of books in bookcases. 

Sima Nan declares, “I strive to promote friendly Sino-American relations.”

Over the years, Sima Nan has been the subject of a number of controversies, some of which he provoked, and others that were simply bad luck. During a visit to the U.S. in early 2012, he got his head caught between the escalator railing and the wall at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., necessitating a trip to the hospital and a neck brace. This prompted some pointed comment on the fact that the U.S. had been willing to grant a visa to such a strident critic. Later that year, after Sima Nan finished a lecture at Hainan University, a student hurled a shoe at him, earning cheers from others in the audience. In 2014, his social media post about hobnobbing with a young passenger with a leather jacket and mohawk on a Beijing subway backfired, as the young man was clearly not a fan. And in July 2023, Sima Nan was ridiculed and accused of hypocrisy after social media posts showed the inveterate critic of the U.S. apparently enjoying himself at an American Independence Day party thrown by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

A recent WeChat essay “Shocking! Sima Nan: I Strive to Promote Friendly Sino-American Relations” marvels at the hawkish pundit’s sudden change of tune. Published by WeChat account @玖奌杂货店 (Jiǔdiǎn záhuòdiàn, “9:00 Grocery Store”), the essay includes an angry, screenshotted message from one of Sima Nan’s loyal supporters, as well as some jocular comments from dismayed readers: Continue reading

Maoist blog attacks censorship

Source: China Digital Times (11/14/23)
Maoist Blog Republishes All-out Attack on Party-State Censorship
By  

In online slang, “rushing the tower”  (冲塔 chōngtǎ) means posting politically sensitive commentary knowing full well that it will be censored, with potentially worse consequences ranging from account deletion to detention. The term is borrowed from the language of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video games. A recent post from the WeChat account @冲破黎明前的黑暗 (Chōngpò límíng qián de hēi’àn, “Breach the darkness before dawn,” in English) is an illustrative example of the genre.

In an essay titled “Arise, Ye Bloggers Who Refuse to be Slaves!” (a reference to the first line of China’s national anthem, the “March of the Volunteers,” which has been repeatedly censored on Weibo), the author strikes out against censors who remove posts for unspecified “violations.” With “they” as an obvious stand-in for the powers that be, the author speculates that there can only be three reasons for censorship of the truth: “1. They’ve done wrong, and fear the people finding out. 2. They’re doing wrong, and fear the people’s criticism. 3. They’re planning to do wrong, and fear the people exposing them.” The essay perfectly captures the sentiments that drive Chinese netizens to “rush the tower,” consequences be damned. CDT has translated portions of the now-censored essay that demonstrate the bravery in the face of censorship exhibited by many Chinese writers, both famous and unknown: Continue reading

Chinese propaganda embraces US

Source: NYT (11/14/23)
As Xi Heads to San Francisco, Chinese Propaganda Embraces America
After years of anti-American propaganda, the softer, warmer depiction of relations with the United States has left some Chinese social media users confused or amused.
By Vivian Wang and 

Xi Jinping holds behind a steering wheel inside a green and yellow tractor. A man is next to him, smiling.

Xi Jinping, then-vice president of China, in Iowa in 2012 in a tractor with a farmer. Credit…Pool photo by Charlie Neibergall

Not long ago, Chinese propaganda was warning that American attempts at easing tensions were mere performance. Its state security agency was urging people to be on guard against American spies. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, declared that the United States was engaged in a campaign of “all-around containment, encirclement and suppression,” in remarks broadcast across state media.

Now, the tone used to discuss the United States has suddenly shifted. Xinhua, the state news agency, on Monday published a lengthy article in English about the “enduring strength” of Mr. Xi’s affection for ordinary Americans. It included old photos of him sitting in a tractor with an Iowa farmer, and revisiting the home where he once stayed in an American college student’s “Star Trek”-themed bedroom.

“More delightful moments unfolded when Xi showed up to watch an N.B.A. game,” the article continued, describing a visit by Mr. Xi to the United States in 2012. “He remained remarkably focused on the game.”

Separately, Xinhua has published a five-part series in Chinese on “Getting China-U.S. Relations Back on Track.” A torrent of other state media articles has highlighted recent visits to China by the American Ballet Theater and the Philadelphia Orchestra, or the story of U.S. veterans who helped China fight Japan during World War II, some of whom visited China this month. “Veterans visit Chinese cities, anticipating everlasting China-U.S. friendship,” one headline declared. Continue reading

Uyghur filmmaker who studied in Turkey prosecuted in China

Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (Bruce-Humes.com) (11/9/23)
Uyghur Film-maker Who Studied in Turkey Prosecuted in China

In “Uyghur film-maker claims he was tortured by authorities in China,” the Guardian reports that Ikram Nurmehmet, a director known for his Uyghur protagonists in films such as The Elephant in the Car, recently had his day in court in Ürümqi:

“I was held in a dark room for 20 days and physically tortured,” Nurmehmet reportedly said during the trial, adding that he had been made to give false confessions under duress while in detention. “I never joined any terrorist group or any political activities while I was in Turkey,” he said.

It is not clear who revealed what Nurmehmet testified, but the report notes that members of his family were present at the trial. That such a trial was open to anyone outside of the prosecution is rare, as China normally treats terrorism-related trials as state secrets. He has reportedly been charged with terrorism and participating in a separatist movement.

According to Peter Irwin, an associate director for research and advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, who also spoke to the Guardian, the Turkey connection is key:

“There are a lot of people being sentenced who went to Turkey. In some ways, what this film-maker was doing through his work – the humanisation of Uyghurs and [facilitating] communication between Uyghurs and Chinese people – I think the government is suspicious and worries about this kind of stuff.” Continue reading

Jewher Ilham on ‘All Static and Noise’

Source: China Digital Times (11/7/23)
Interview: Jewher Ilham on the Documentary “All Static and Noise”
By 

On November 5, 2023, the Double Exposure Film Festival in Washington, D.C. screened the U.S. premiere of the documentary “All Static and Noise,” which investigates the arbitrary mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim-majority ethnic groups in Xinjiang, China.

The film is titled after the Party Secretary of Xinjiang University’s 2017 call to eliminate any “static and noise,” i.e. dissent, about the “People’s War on Terror,” the Chinese government’s euphemism for its campaign against the Uyghur people. In 2020, CDT published a leaked censorship directive issued by central Party authorities to state media instructing that the still-unfinished documentary be blocked within China: “Please take note and block the following illegal videos: the Tibet-related documentary ‘A Fugitive for 60 Years: the Dalai Lama’s Old Age,’ the Xinjiang documentary ‘Static and Noise,’ and the Hong Kong documentary ‘City of Tears.’”

The official trailer for “All Static and Noise” can be viewed here:

After the showing, CDT conducted a brief interview with Jewher Ilham, rights activist and daughter of jailed Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti; David Novack, the film’s director; and Janice Englehart, a producer/writer. Their responses situate Jewher Ilham’s advocacy in the longer tradition of those initially drawn into broader activism by the plight of a loved one. The transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for grammar only: Continue reading

Women’s place is in the home

Source: NYT (11/2/23)
China’s Male Leaders Signal to Women That Their Place Is in the Home
The Communist Party’s solution to the country’s demographic crisis and a slowing economy is to push women back into traditional roles.
By Alexandra Stevenson

People in suits sit in rows beside and behind Xi Jinping in a room framed by red drapes.

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the state, including Xi Jinping, attending the 13th National Women’s Congress in Beijing last month. Credit…Yao Dawei/Xinhua, via Getty Images

At China’s top political gathering for women, it was mostly a man who was seen and heard.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, sat center stage at the opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the Congress was splashed on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi lectured female delegates at the closing meeting on Monday.

“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” he said in a speech, adding that it was the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

The Women’s Congress, held every five years, has long been a forum for the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate its commitment to women. The gesture, while mostly symbolic, has taken on more significance than ever this year, the first time in two decades that there are no women in the party’s executive policymaking body.

What was notable was how officials downplayed gender equality. They focused instead on using the gathering to press Mr. Xi’s goal for Chinese women: get married and have babies. In the past, officials had touched on the role women play at home as well as in the work force. But in this year’s address, Mr. Xi made no mention of women at work.

The party desperately needs women to have more babies. China has been thrust into a demographic crisis as its birthrate has plummeted, causing its population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. The authorities are scrambling to undo what experts have said is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another, such as cash handouts and tax benefits to encourage more births. Continue reading

China’s fake press problem

Source: China Media Project (10/26/23)
China’s Fake Press Problem
By David Bandurski
Controls on news and information in China, seen as key to protecting the CCP regime, are perhaps the strictest in the world. So how — and why — are entirely spurious media outfits operating right under the nose of the authorities?

When two men arrived outside the gates of a coal processing enterprise in the city of Zhengzhou back in May this year and began filming video, the company’s boss demanded to know their business. The men explained that they were journalists from Henan Economic News (河南经济报), and that they were documenting his company’s failure to comply with environmental standards.

From there, the conversation moved quickly beyond the facts of their planned report to a more practical question — how the company could make it disappear.

If the boss wished not to have his company’s violations reported publicly, a simple arrangement was possible. For 12,000 yuan (about 1,600 dollars) transferred directly to a designated account, the journalists could shelve the report. The transaction would be disguised as a payment for a company subscription to Henan Economic News. The men could even provide an invoice bearing the media outlet’s official stamp. Continue reading

The Political Philosophy of Ci Jiwei

New Publication
Thinking the Unthinkable: The Political Philsophy of Ci Jiwei
By Johannes Hoerning
New Left Review 143 (Sept-Oct. 2023)
[DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE HERE]

In his 1989–92 lecture series On the State Pierre Bourdieu, following Durkheim, proposed a provisional definition of the state as the basis for ‘both the logical and the moral conformity of the social world’. By ‘logical conformity’, Bourdieu meant that the agents of the social world would share the same categories of perception, the same construction of reality; by ‘moral conformity’, their agreement on certain core values. Taking his distance from classical state theory, such as that of Hobbes or Locke—in which the state, occupying a quasi- godlike viewpoint, oversees all and serves the common good—as also from Marxian traditions, from Gramsci to Althusser and beyond, which focus on the function of the state as an apparatus for maintaining public order in the interests of the ruling bloc, Bourdieu emphasized instead the need to grasp the ‘organizational magic’ of the state as a principle of consciousness—its monopoly of legitimate symbolic as well as physical violence. The social theorist therefore needed to be particularly on guard against Durkheimian ‘pre-notions’ or received ideas, against ‘thinking the state with state thinking’. A first step was to conceive the state as what Bourdieu called ‘an almost unthinkable object’.1

If there is one thinker who has met Bourdieu’s challenge to ‘think the state’ without succumbing to ‘state thinking’, it is the Chinese political philosopher Ci Jiwei. Recently retired from the philosophy department of the University of Hong Kong, Ci has devoted most of the past three decades to analysing the nature and evolution of China’s state and soci- ety since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Three of his four books—Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994), Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014) and Democracy in China (2019)—amount to a loose trilogy aiming to clarify the ‘logic’ of the Chinese experience and to track the evolution of the CCP regime since Mao. The collapse of Maoist utopi- anism and the liberalization of the economy after 1978 have left Chinese society in a ‘fundamentally unsettled’ condition, Ci argues.2 Each book in the trilogy addresses a different symptom of this situation: existential or social-psychological malaise in Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, the undermining of moral subjectivity in Moral China and the looming cri- sis of political legitimacy in Democracy in China. In different ways, they are all concerned with how the Chinese party-state might accommodate itself, for its own and the nation’s good, to citizens’ need to act freely and to understand themselves as free, while at the same time preserving its own stability and that of the country at large.3 [DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE HERE]

Chinese mourn the death of Li Keqiang

Source: NYT (10/27/23)
Chinese Mourn the Death of a Premier, and the Loss of Economic Hope
An outpouring on social media for Li Keqiang, the former premier who died Friday, reflected public grief for an era of greater growth and possibility.
By 

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, wearing a dark suit, bowing low while standing on a deep red carpet.

Premier Li Keqiang after delivering his state of the nation address in March. He served as China’s No. 2 official for a decade until eight months ago. Credit…Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

They posted videos on social media of the time he promised that China would remain open to the outside world. They shared photos of him, standing in ankle-deep mud, visiting victims of a flood. They even noted the economic growth target for the first year of his premiership: 7.5 percent.

The death Friday of Li Keqiang, 68, prompted spontaneous mourning online. Mr. Li served as premier, China’s No. 2 official, for a decade until last March.

Among many Chinese, Mr. Li’s death produced a swell of nostalgia for what he represented: a time of greater economic possibility and openness to private business. The reaction was jarring and showed the dissatisfaction in China with the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s hard-line leader who grabbed an unprecedented third term in office last year after maneuvering to have the longstanding limit of two terms abolished.

In post after post on social media, people praised Mr. Li more for what he stood for and said than for what he was able to accomplish under Mr. Xi, who drove economic policymaking during Mr. Li’s period in office. Continue reading

Viral mockery of official inspection tours

Source: China Digital Times (10/25/23)
Students to Receive ‘Proper Guidance’ after Viral Mockery of Official Inspection Tours
By 

An undergraduate’s video mimicking official “inspection” tours has become a flashpoint of discussion over cadres’ imperious attitudes and the reflexive deference shown to them in society. Shot on the campus of Yunnan State Land Resources Vocational College, the short video features a student clad in what might be called “cadre chic” (厅局风, tīngjú fēng) strolling around the site with a retinue of retainers. The undergraduate recreates official mannerisms—peering, pointing, pontificating. The performance as a whole was realistic enough to convince the school’s staff. This video splices together scenes from the original:

After the film went viral, the school did not move to punish the students but did say it would provide them “proper guidance” on their actions. The phrase raised eyebrows online. The WeChat essayist @亮见 suggested that it was school officials, not the students, who need a reckoning with their actions:

It’s not the students who need “proper guidance” but rather the school. Upon hearing of the arrival of a seemingly unannounced official, everyone’s first reaction—from the students to the lunch ladies, all the way up to the school president—was either to be slavishly cooperative and deferential, or to begin nervously working the phones to figure out who, exactly, had arrived for an inspection. Continue reading

Visual language of official press

Source: China Media Project (10/20/23)
The Visual Language of China’s Official Press
Understanding the political messages of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requires much more than mere summary and translation — and more even than close textual readings. Here’s a walk through the basics, looking at today’s edition of the Party’s flagship newspaper.
By David Bandurski

In the official Party-state media in China, design is driven by politics — and it is a crucial aspect of the political discourse. Want to see this principle in action? Today’s edition of the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) offers a prime example.

The oddest and most prominent feature of the front page of the People’s Daily today is the large vertical headline running down the left-hand side. The headline, which announces that top leader Xi Jinping met with international leaders attending the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, ties the rest of the headlines on the page together. All are announcements of separate meetings, each with a different foreign leader.

As has been the case all week in the official state media in China, the top story is the Belt and Road. Coverage has touted its great benefits for participating countries, and for the entire world — emphasizing the growing economic and political centrality of China and its top leader.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the global infrastructure development and trade promotion program, which has been a pillar of China’s foreign policy, and the forum this week is the year’s most prominent opportunity for state-run media to roll out related domestic and international propaganda.

They have not missed the chance. Coverage of the Belt and Road Forum has eclipsed all other stories, including one of the world’s most pressing concerns, the unfolding conflict in Gaza and its potentially disastrous implications for security in the Middle East. Continue reading

Chongzhen Emperor book withdrawn

China Digital Times (10/18/23)
Xi Parallels Suspected behind Withdrawal of Book on Ill-Fated Chongzhen Emperor
By 

On October 16, it was reported online that a recent reprint of the historical biography “The Chongzhen Emperor: Diligent Ruler of a Failed Dynasty” (《崇祯:勤政的亡国君》Chóngzhēn: Qínzhèng de Wángguó Jūn, ISBN 9787549640775) had been recalled by the book distributor Dook Media Group (读客文化Dúkè Wénhuà). A notice from the distributor stated that due to an unspecified “printing problem,” the book was being recalled from the shelves of all online booksellers, Xinhua bookstores, and private bookstores. At present, the cover image of the book is no longer displayed on online platforms, and the hashtag #Chongzhen has been search-censored on Weibo, with searches only showing content from verified users.

Continue reading