Society

news and reports on contemporary social issues in Greater China

Goodness Me

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Source: China Media Project (9/19/24)
Goodness Me
Good Me, one of China’s largest tea store chains, had a hard lesson in public relations this week after internet users decided its punchline video about workplace discipline was not funny, not at all.
By David Bandurski

On Wednesday, one of China’s largest tea chains found itself at the center of an online storm after a video emerged of employees for the company apparently wearing cardboard signs and makeshift cardboard handcuffs to enforce workplace discipline — public displays of shame that had disturbing echoes of the country’s political past.

The offending post, made on September 17 to the official Douyin and Xiaohongshu accounts of the Guangdong operations of Good Me (古茗茶饮) — a tea chain with more than 5,000 locations across the country — showed several employees on site at a Good Me shop standing with their heads cast down, their hands bound in front with what appeared to be cardboard cup holders. Handwritten signs around their necks read: “The crime of forgetting to include a straw”; and “The crime of knocking over the teapot.”

The meme the Good Me account seemed to be riffing on was not a contemporary, social media derived one, but rather an extremely painful episode from China’s past. In the midst of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, millions of Chinese branded as “class enemies” were persecuted in brutal public spectacles known as “struggle sessions” (批斗大会).  In many cases, they had their heads shaved, and were forced to wear dunce caps and signs identifying their supposed crimes as they were subjected to physical and verbal attacks by crazed mobs. Continue reading Goodness Me →

Man smashes Ai Weiwei sculpture

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Source: NYT (9/23/24)
Man Smashes Ai Weiwei’s Porcelain Sculpture at Italian Museum
The man behind the episode, at a reception for Mr. Ai’s new exhibition in Bologna, has targeted artists before, a museum spokesman said.
By Derrick Bryson Taylor

Pieces of a porcelain sculpture are scattered on the floor beside a small platform as several people in formal clothing look on.

“Porcelain Cube,” a piece by Ai Weiwei, was smashed to pieces at the Palazzo Fava on Friday. Credit…Genus Bononiae Press Office, via Reuters

A reception for a new exhibition by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Bologna, Italy, was disrupted on Friday when a man walked in and smashed a large, porcelain sculpture, leaving museum guests and the artist stunned.

The incident, which occurred during a reception for “Ai Weiwei. Who Am I?,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in the city, sent guests at the Palazzo Fava scattering and left the sculpture shattered on the floor.

Footage of the incident captured by security cameras and later shared on Mr. Ai’s Instagram account shows the man forcefully pushing over the sculpture and then raising its broken pieces above his head before being tackled by museum guards.

Mr. Ai said in an emailed statement on Monday that the loud sounds of the sculpture shattering made him first think of a terrorist attack or an explosion.

“When I learned that it was my large porcelain artwork that had been destroyed, I was astonished,” he said. “I never imagined that a piece nearly 100 kilos in weight could be damaged so easily.” Continue reading Man smashes Ai Weiwei sculpture →

Poem on the death of a delivery driver

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Source: China Digital Times (9/12/24)
Poem on the Death of a Delivery Driver: “A Man Is Not a Steed nor a Machine”
By

The plight of China’s delivery drivers is front-of-mind for the Chinese public. In August, CDT translated an account of one courier’s death in the summer heat, while a viral photograph of a Meituan driver kneeling before a security guard drew attention to the indignities many delivery drivers are forced to suffer. This week, a 55-year-old driver famous locally for his work ethic died while making deliveries. Video of the deceased driver, who had appeared to be sleeping on the back of his bike, went viral—spurring an outpouring of tributes to the deceased, and to the profession in general.

One such tribute, a poem titled “Algorithm” posted to the Bilibili account Koko the Earthling (地球人口口, dìqiúrén kǒukǒu), is translated in part below. The final lines of the second stanza, “A man/ Is not a steed/ Nor a machine” capture the long-unrealized desires of China’s working class. They closely mirror the Communist revolutionary Li Lisan’s stirring call for a worker’s strike at Anyuan in 1922: “Once beasts of burden, now we will be men!” A century later, the words still ring true.

Algorithm—dedicated to the departed delivery man

Your pose, lying flat
Never again to be seen as laziness.
Stretched all the way out,
Death allows you an ease that was long taboo.

Parsing your life is of no interest to me.
In this age of sound and fury
I’ll call you the simplest of names:
A man
Is not a steed
Nor a machine.

[…]

In the evening of this Republic,
Can the brand new algorithm
Tally the life of a slave—
His ancient fate
And fleeting existence?

Koko
September 10, 2024 [Chinese]

‘Garbage time of history’ (1)

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Source: NYT (9/13/24)
Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy
The sports term refers to a time during a game when defeat becomes inevitable. Officialdom is warning against using it to take veiled jabs at the country’s political and economic system.
By Yan Zhuang

Tall buildings rise behind intersecting overpasses. In the foreground, two men in office attire walk past bicycles and motor bikes.

Beijing’s central business district. Credit…Vincent Thian/Associated Press

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline. This summer, as the youth unemployment rate soared above 17 percent, the term became a popular shorthand on Chinese social media for describing a sense of hopelessness around the ailing economy.

Commentaries about garbage times of history, some written under pseudonyms, began appearing last year in blog posts and as opinion essays on respected Chinese news sites. They examined past regimes and dynasties and were broadly understood to be thinly veiled critiques of China’s political and economic system. They landed as discussion of the economy — even misplaced praise for the ruling Communist Party’s economic policies — was getting more sensitive. Continue reading ‘Garbage time of history’ (1) →

Enduring ‘public secrecy’ around 1989

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Source: China Digital Times (9/9/24)
Accused Tiananmen Informant’s Silence Reveals Enduring “Public Secrecy” Around 1989
By 

The violent repression of the 1989 student protests scarred Chinese society. The campaign to purge “two-faced” protest sympathizers that followed was similarly painful. Yet some of the greatest unresolved anguish from that tumultuous year stems from the realization among those who served prison sentences that dear friends and trusted colleagues informed on them—or even framed them.

Just such a case has re-entered the public eye 35 years after the fact due to the reporting of the investigative journalist Chai Jing, creator of the 2015 air pollution documentary “Under the Dome.” In 1989, the poet Zheng Shiping, better known by his pen name Ye Fu, was charged with revealing state secrets and sentenced to six years in prison. After his release, Ye Fu alleged that the Mao Dun-prize winning novelist Xiong Zhaozheng, his former classmate and friend, had set him up. Ye Fu’s allegation is decades old. Xiong has never publicly admitted to acting as an informant, although according to Ye Fu he has previously apologized in private. As part of a recent interview series for her YouTube channel, Chai Jing interviewed both Ye Fu and Xiong. Her brief interview with Xiong was dominated by silence. Far more than a rehashing of bitter recriminations about 1989, the call, which Chai Jing posted in full and whose transcript is translated below, proves an illuminating example of the “public secrecy” that surrounds the Tiananmen movement.

While the 1989 student movement is among the most sensitive and censored topics in China, the silence surrounding it is not solely a matter of government enforcement. “Public secrecy” is Margaret Hillenbrand’s term for the cult of self-interested silence that surrounds the most traumatic instances in modern Chinese history. Hillenbrand explained the term in an interview on her book “Negative Exposures” published by CDT earlier this year: Continue reading Enduring ‘public secrecy’ around 1989 →

In rural China, ‘sisterhoods’ demand justice and cash

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Source: NYT (9/8/24)
In Rural China, ‘Sisterhoods’ Demand Justice, and Cash
Growing numbers of Chinese women are challenging a longstanding tradition that denies them village membership, and the lucrative payouts that go with it.
By Vivian Wang (Vivian Wang traveled to Guangdong Province to see how women there were pushing a local government to recognize their land claims.)

A distant view of a village in a valley surrounded by green fields, with mountains in the distance.

A village in Guangdong Province, China. Women in rural areas are deprived of land rights if they marry outside their village. Credit…Phil Behan/VWPics, via Associated Press

The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there. Continue reading In rural China, ‘sisterhoods’ demand justice and cash →

Fighting sexual temptation in HK

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Source: NYT (8/26/24)
Fighting Sexual Temptation? Play Badminton, Hong Kong Tells Teenagers.
Top officials in the Chinese territory have defended new sex education guidance that critics call regressive. Young people are amused.
By Olivia Wang and Mike Ives, Olivia Wang reported from Hong Kong.

People playing badminton in a gym.

Playing badminton in Hong Kong. Credit…Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

In Hong Kong, the authorities advise the young man to continue studying or to seek a diversion, including badminton, to avoid premarital sex and other “intimate behaviors.”

Critics, including lawmakers and sex educators, say that the Chinese territory’s new sex education materials are regressive. But top officials are not backing down, and the standoff is getting kind of awkward.

“Is badminton the Hong Kong answer to sexual impulses in schoolchildren?” the South China Morning Post newspaper asked in a headline over the weekend.

Hong Kong teenagers find it all pretty amusing. A few said on social media that the officials behind the policy have their “heads in the clouds.” Others have worked it into sexual slang, talking about “friends with badminton” instead of “friends with benefits.”

The sex ed materials were published last week by the Education Bureau in a 70-page document that includes worksheets for adolescents and guidance for their teachers. The document emphasizes that the lessons are not designed to encourage students to “start dating or having sexual behaviors early in life.” It also advises people in a “love relationship” to fill out a form setting the limits of their intimacy. Continue reading Fighting sexual temptation in HK →

‘Road Trip Auntie’ files for divorce

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Source: NYT (8/21/24)
China’s ‘Road Trip Auntie’ Is Ready for a New Milestone: Divorce
Su Min became an internet sensation for leaving behind an abusive husband to drive across China alone. Now she’s ending the marriage, but there will be a price.
By Vivian Wang and Joy Dong, Vivian Wang reported from Beijing and Joy Dong from Hong Kong.

A woman in a bright jacket stands high in the mountains, with a few other people standing behind her. The hills behind her are barren.

A screenshot from one of Su Min’s videos, showing her near the foot of Mount Everest. Credit…Su Min

In the four years since she began driving solo across China, leaving behind an abusive marriage and longstanding expectations about women’s duties at home, Su Min, 60, has become an internet sensation known as the “road-trip auntie.”

She has driven to the foot of Mount Everest and camped on the beach in the tropical province of Hainan. She has been featured in an ad campaign about female empowerment and inspired a forthcoming movie starring a famous Chinese actress.

But one key step in Ms. Su’s emancipation eluded her: She wavered on whether to file for divorce, worried about how it would affect her family.

Until now. Last month, Ms. Su officially began divorce proceedings.

Her decision, she said, is a testament to how much she has learned to commit to her own happiness, and to the self confidence she has gained on the road.

But her experience in trying to end the marriage also shows the many barriers to independence that Chinese women still face. Ms. Su’s husband at first refused to divorce, and a legal fight loomed. Judges in contested divorce cases often deny petitions or force couples into mediation that disadvantages the woman, studies show, and they frequently ignore claims of domestic violence. Continue reading ‘Road Trip Auntie’ files for divorce →

‘When we die, our bodies are plundered for parts’

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Source: China Digital Times (8/16/24)
Quote of the Day: “When We Die, Our Bodies Are Plundered for Parts”
By  |

A recent scandal involving the organized theft and trafficking of thousands of corpses that were later processed into bone-graft material for dental procedures has prompted horror among the Chinese public, and tremendous censorship on Chinese social media platforms. CDT editors have identified 21 censored Weibo hashtags, about a dozen deleted posts and investigative reports, and many deleted comments and filtered comment sections on social media platforms.

Despite attempts to suppress discussion of the corpse-trafficking scandal, public interest in the case—currently being investigated by authorities in Taiyuan, Shanxi province—remains unabated. CDT editors have put together a selection of online comments, quips, poetry, and blog excerpts related to the case. Some of the writers described the corpse-trafficking scheme as just another example of how ordinary citizens are subjected to various indignities—treated as “chives” or “huminerals” to be harvested and exploited, both in life and in death. Others drew connections between this and previous scandals about melamine-tainted powdered milk and baby formula, recycled “gutter oil,” and tanker trucks used to transport both fuel and cooking oil without being sanitized between loads.

The following are some online reactions to news of the corpse-trafficking scandal and censorship of related hashtags: Continue reading ‘When we die, our bodies are plundered for parts’ →

Extreme fans

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Source: NYT (8/14/24)
China’s Extreme Fan Culture Makes Olympic Gold a Mixed Blessing
Fans have mobbed athletes in public and staked out their homes. State media outlets denounced their “visibly aggressive” behavior.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

A Chinese athlete, wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, is surrounded by fans at an airport.

Ma Long, the captain of the Chinese men’s table tennis team, being greeted by fans at an airport after returning to Beijing on Monday. His team won gold at the Paris Olympics. Credit…VCG, via Reuters

A gold medalist diver’s mother said she was afraid for her daughter to come home after their hometown was swarmed with her supporters. A champion swimmer whose hotel was staked out by admirers disbanded his official fan group and told an interviewer he would rather have performed worse if it meant he would be left alone.

Other athletes have been hounded by crowds at airports or been the subjects of vicious arguments online between rival fan camps, leading Chinese official media to denounce fans for being “visibly aggressive.” The police have even detained at least two people for allegedly defaming athletes.

After a stellar run at the Paris Olympics, where China tied the United States for the most gold medals, Chinese athletes are now facing a darker side of that success: extreme fans.

Celebrities globally have to deal with fans who are sometimes invasive, but in China this phenomenon can be especially intense. Fan groups spend lavishly on products endorsed by their idols, deploy bots to ensure their favorites stay atop social media trending lists and even mount harassment campaigns against other stars and their supporters. Some fans stalk their idols and sell their photos or personal information. Continue reading Extreme fans →

China’s Great Wall of Villages

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Source: NYT (8/8/24)
China’s Great Wall of Villages
China has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers. It calls them “border guardians.”
By Muyi Xiao and Agnes Chang

Qionglin New Village sits deep in the Himalayas, just three miles from a region where a heavy military buildup and confrontations between Chinese and Indian troops have brought fears of a border war.

The land was once an empty valley, more than 10,000 feet above the sea, traversed only by local hunters. Then Chinese officials built Qionglin, a village of cookie-cutter homes and finely paved roads, and paid people to move there from other settlements.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians.” Qionglin’s villagers are essentially sentries on the front line of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s easternmost state, which Beijing insists is part of Chinese-ruled Tibet.

Many villages like Qionglin have sprung up. In China’s west, they give its sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal. In its north, the settlements bolster security and promote trade with Central Asia. In the south, they guard against the flow of drugs and crime from Southeast Asia. . . [READ THE FULL ARTICLE, WITH IMAGES, HERE (Paywall)]

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Chris Berry’s review of Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality, edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chris-berry2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Routledge Handbook of Chinese
Gender & Sexuality

Edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao

Reviewed by Chris Berry

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024. Xvii + 379 pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-22729-0 (cloth); 978-1-032-22733-7 (paper); 978-1-003-27394-3 (e-book).

In their introductory essay in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao acknowledge that there are already numerous monographs and anthologies in the field. However, they stake a claim for their book as an intervention rather than just a representative round-up of leading work. All the essays are new. Furthermore, although the editors aim for broad coverage, they also have what I see as four corrective interventions. Whereas, they claim, the field has favored the pre-1949 era, they aim to spotlight the contemporary. Whereas the roots of much work in area studies approaches China and Chineseness as a site of difference or even exceptionalism, they highlight work that is transnational in approach, understanding China and Chineseness as constant processes of becoming shaped and responding to transnational flows. In response to the proliferation of work on the peripheral areas of the larger Sinosphere favored by Sinophone scholarship, they center the volume on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And finally, whereas the balance of existing work has tilted toward the social sciences, they emphasize arts, humanities, and cultural studies approaches, and, in particular, a “queering” approach that moves away from research that assumes fixed gender and sexual identities and toward work that questions them. In this review, I first briefly introduce the contents of this substantial volume of new writing, and then return to address some of the positions staked out by these four interventions. Continue reading Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review →

What a professor’s firing shows about sexual harassment in China

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Source: NYT (7/25/24)
What a Professor’s Firing Shows About Sexual Harassment in China
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
A top Chinese university described the conduct of a professor accused of sexual harassment as a moral failing, language feminists say downplays harm to women.
By Tiffany May and Zixu Wang, Reporting from Hong Kong

Students wearing red graduation gowns and black caps stand in a room. Several are checking their smartphones.

Graduates at Renmin University in Beijing in 2023. The university has faced public scrutiny after a graduate student complained about her professor. Credit…Wu Hao/EPA, via Shutterstock

In the video, the Chinese graduate student stared straight into the camera as she spoke. She wore a mask, but in a bold move, made clear who she was by holding up her identification card. Then she issued an explosive accusation: A prominent professor at a top Chinese university had been sexually harassing her for two years.

Shortly after the woman posted the video on her Chinese social media pages on Sunday, it drew millions of views and set off an online outcry against the professor she named, Wang Guiyuan, then the vice-dean and Communist Party head of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts in Beijing.

The next day, Renmin University fired Mr. Wang, saying that officials had investigated the student’s allegations and found that they were true.

The swift response by the university reflected the growing pressure that Chinese academic institutions have come under to curb sexual harassment on campus. In recent years, several schools have been accused of not doing enough to protect their students from tutors and professors who preyed on them. Continue reading What a professor’s firing shows about sexual harassment in China →

Private Revolutions review

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Source: NYT (7/5/24)
6 Years, 4 Raw Human Stories From the New China
In “Private Revolutions,” Yuan Yang follows the lives of women in a rapidly changing modern superpower.
By Michelle T. King (Michelle T. King is the author of “Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.”)

PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order, by Yuan Yang. Viking | 294 pp. | $30

There’s an unforgettable moment in Yuan Yang’s new book, when an idealistic university student is tasked with conducting a survey by going door-to-door to random addresses in Shenzhen, China’s manufacturing megalopolis.

In one poor neighborhood, the female student asks a young man, living in a tiny apartment with four other adults and a baby, to rate his current job satisfaction. His immediate reaction is to ask whether she has been sent by the Communist Party.

Though she denies it, he responds, “I’m guessing they did send you, so let’s just say we are completely, utterly satisfied with everything in our lives.”

That story, which takes place in the early 2010s, highlights Yang’s concern with the fate of China’s laborers, as well as the class distinctions that structure the encounter.

In 2016, Yang returned to China, where she had spent her early childhood, to work as a journalist for The Financial Times. Over the next six years, Yang followed four young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order.” All of them, like Yang, were born in the late 1980s and 1990s, coming-of-age after the “optimistic giddiness” of their parents’ generation, one characterized by increasing prosperity in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in the 1980s. Continue reading Private Revolutions review →

Crackdown on extreme nationalism

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Source: China Digital Times (7/3/24)
Chinese Social Media Platforms Launch Crackdown on Extreme Nationalism and Xenophobic Hate-Speech after Fatal Suzhou Stabbing
By

Chinese social media platforms have announced a belated crackdown on “extreme nationalism” and xenophobic hate-speech online, following last week’s fatal stabbing at a school bus stop in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in which a Japanese mother and child were injured by a knife-wielding man, and Chinese school bus attendant Hu Youping was killed after trying to intervene. Just two weeks earlier, four visiting American teachers were stabbed and injured by another man at a public park in Jilin, in northeastern China. Both stabbings are believed to have been motivated by xenophobic sentiment, and many online commenters have witheringly described the attackers as “modern-day Boxers,” referring to the anti-foreign rebels who launched the Boxer Rebellion approximately 125 years ago.

In the last few weeks, CDT editors have compiled numerous essays, articles, and netizen comments pointing out apparent links between the recent spate of attacks and the vitriolic anti-Japanese and other xenophobic content that is tolerated on Chinese television, social media, and even in school textbooks. It is worth nothing that several of these essays were censored and taken offline in the days following the Suzhou attack. The hate-speech crackdown announced by social media platforms this week seems to reflect a belated realization that xenophobic online content may be fueling hatred and even radicalizing some individuals to carry out offline attacks. Continue reading Crackdown on extreme nationalism →