Sources

Kindness to animals (1)

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Michael Day posted the following on the MCLC Facebook page as a response to my query:

“Well, it wasn’t until the 1990s that pets were even allowed in China (for obvious reasons, I should think)… so, only Hu and Xi would be fair game on this one…. so, nothing I can find on Hu, but lots on Xi … as in his wife and him have a dog as a pet, and pics like this: http://english.sina.com/china/p/2012/0219/441270.html“–Michael Day

I still can’t find traces of dictator Xi having his own dog — but will keep looking. Would be fascinating to look at how the dog is presented to the public, if it is.

(It’s hard to believe that he would keep a dog. Many dogs owned by the rich and powerful in China seem to be mainly for social prestige, not for petting or companionship, and it still is surely an un-Communist thing to do, insofar as the powerful still pretend to be Communists – as Xi would. There is also a certain newly antagonistic social gap between the masses, and those rich cadres who can keep dogs for prestige or other purposes, as opposed to the pets of the middle classes. Example: https://www.refworld.org/docid/51b0458d18.html.) Continue reading →

Kindness to animals?

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A friend asked: has any Communist leader in China ever been seen in public showing kindness to an animal. Not sure of the answer. Seems one has to go back to Buddhist emperors doing the fangsheng thing

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2658389?seq=1

although that is mostly a kind of hypocrisy, of course.

There is one obvious “branding” reason Chinese Communist leaders do not have pets like lapdogs or cats: such animals were long associated with bourgeois habits and this political tradition is still strong. Also includes bourgeois wastefulness in wasting food on a pet when it could go to the Poor, hypocritically speaking. So, for a leader to hold a dog or a cat and suggest it was his, or even petting a different dog, would probably NOT look good politically.

Does anyone have a better theory, or better observations?

–sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö

Access to free resources

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Dear Chinese scholars,

We’ve been working with vendors supplying Chinese language e-resources to seek free full access to their databases through June to support online teaching and research in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. We are glad to share that we have prepared a list of over 100 databases with generous support from a variety of vendors and publishers.

We have also been communicating with vendors and asking for flexible pricing models to address our unique needs, such as tier-based or user size-based models. We’d like to encourage you to ask your library to advocate for flexible pricing models when contacting the vendors so that more libraries could afford the needed resources.

We are grateful to the vendors and publishers for understanding the impact of the current global COVID-19 pandemic on our community and making content available and accessible during this challenging time. We hope these resources will facilitate your teaching and research. Wish you, your family, and students stay healthy and safe.

Best wishes,

Yao Chen
East Asian Studies Librarian at UC Santa Barbara
Secretary (2018-2021), Council on East Asian Libraries
Chair (2020-2022), Committee for Information Exchange, Society for Chinese Studies Librarians

Chengzhi Wang
Chinese Studies Librarian at Columbia University
Chair (2020-2023), Committee on Chinese Materials, Council on East Asian Libraries

sources on spring festival couplets?

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My name is Lesya, 爱丽丝 in Chinese. I live in Bologna, Italy where I’m finishing my studies. I’m attending graduate school, specializing in Far East Studies, so I’m also studying Chinese language and culture. The subject of my final thesis is 春联, Spring Festival Couplets. My purpose is to give a deep analysis of the couplets from a social and anthropological point of view. I want to focus on the evolution of the couplets in an urban area, such as Beijing or Shanghai, then offer a comparison with a more rural area, such as Hakka regions of Fujian province. Unfortunately, I have had problems finding a lot of information about this subject in English. So I wonder if list members could suggest scholarly articles, books, or websites about Chinese Spring Festival, Chinese New Year Couplets, and other important celebrations that would be helpful for my work. Please contact me off-list at the email below.

Lesya Uhrak <olesya.uhrak@gmail.com>

Unofficial Poetry Journals from China

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Dear MCLC List members,

Leiden University Libraries holds an internationally unique Special Collection of unofficial (minjian) poetry journals from China.

These journals travel widely among Chinese poets, critics, and researchers. As such, they are hugely influential. But paradoxically, they are difficult to access, sometimes to the point of becoming almost legendary — because they generally operate outside the official infrastructure of bookstores and libraries.

Now, a digital collection of twelve early items in the Leiden collection (about 1000 pages in all) is full-text available online, for students, educators, researchers and other readers.

This pilot project was undertaken in close collaboration with the editors of the journals in question. Fundraising efforts to digitize more material are underway.

The entry page offers a list of related content, including a web lecture by Maghiel van Crevel, with abundant visuals and intended as an educational resource. (Rotate the prezi / slides / speaker screens using the pop-up button in the top right corner of the biggest screen.) Continue reading →

Muslin detentions updates

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My running bibliography on the Xinjiang concentration camps has been updated, at:

https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/chinas-re-education-concentration-camps-xinjiang

Also, three important things to report from yesterday:

1. In Geneva, in her FIRST speech, the new UN chair of the human rights commission, Michelle Bachelet (former Chilean president who was once herself a political prisoner), expressed grave concerns about the Xinjiang camps, and demanded full access to all of China, including Xinjiang, for her high office:

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2163587/new-un-rights-chief-takes-stabs-worlds-mighty-ranging-china

2. Big report from Human Rights Watch was released: A massive refutation of the Chinese govt denials of these atrocities:

“Eradicating Ideological Viruses” – China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims. HRW, September 9, 2018. https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs

Continue reading →

Xinjiang bibliography updated

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F.y.i.: the Xinjiang bibliography posted here earlier, is now online, and updated: https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/chinas-re-education-concentration-camps-xinjiang. It will be updated again later.

BTW, this new video, “Are Muslim Uyghurs being brainwashed by the Chinese state? Eye-witnesses and human rights experts claim up to 1 million people are being held in ‘re-education camps’ in China.” – BBC Newsnight, Published on Aug 30, 2018,

According to eyewitness accounts in this video, victims imprisoned in the Xinjiang camps face the erasure of not just their ethnicity and religion, but their dignity and personalities:

“Like robots … they were like someone who lost their memory after a car crash…” one of them says, of people he used to know, seeing them after they’ve been broken in the camps. Continue reading →

Angels Wear White

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List members might be interested in my review of ANGELS WEAR WHITE (嘉年华, Vivian Qu, 2017) for CINEASTE magazine. I analyzed the film as a cruel coming-of-age story in which girls are coerced into a femininity of objectification and victimization, and discussed the film’s use of the tropes of neo-noir and its avoidance of melodrama. Many thanks for your advice or comment!

https://www.cineaste.com/fall2018/angels-wear-white

Sincerely,

Lux Chen

Xiqu English terms?

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Dear list members,

Hong Kong West Kowloon Cultural District’s first major performing arts centre — the Xiqu Centre — opens this December: https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/the-district/architecture-facilities/xiqu-centre/

Our marketing and comms team has asked me if there exists a standardization of Xiqu terms somewhere for their baseline reference and use.

Does East West Centre at U of Hawaii, or someone at HKU or elsewhere know of such a database or listserv or other resource? A kind of Chicago Manual of Style for Xiqu terms in English that they can use as a reference point for why they choose the English terms they choose (right now it is up to the preference / conventions of the translators they engage, but we would prefer something more standardized to reference.)

All directions appreciated!

Many thanks,

Alison Friedman <alison@pingpongarts.org>

China Academic Network on Gender

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China Academic Network on Gender – Launch and Inaugural Conference

We are delighted to introduce a new network for Postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers working on Gender in China. The China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE) will be launched at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels on 14-15 May 2018 in partnership with SOAS, King’s College London, and East China Normal University. The network aims to be a platform where younger scholars working on Gender in Chinese humanities and social sciences will be able to network and share resources. We will also organise biannual themed conferences at partner universities starting in 2019.

All details and the membership form are available on the website of CHANGE: https://change.hypotheses.org Continue reading →

Oral history archive of Sunflower Movement

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Hi all, I recently released an online, open-source oral history archive of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, compiling interviews with participants at all levels of the movement.

The overall archive is over 300,000 words. The website also contains a detailed day-by-day timeline of the movement, an interactive map of the occupation site, translations of key documents, a dictionary of terms that come up frequently in Taiwanese activist discourse, and other features.

I hope it may be of interest to members.

Brian Hioe <bch2131@columbia.edu>

USC Eileen Chang digital library collection

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New USC Eileen Chang Digital Library Collection

Original article: https://libraries.usc.edu/article/new-usc-digital-library-collection-related-chinese-literary-figure-eileen-chang

The USC Libraries recently digitized a collection of nearly 200 items related to the influential Chinese writer Eileen Chang and made them publicly accessible through the USC Digital Library.

Chang (Ailing Zhang, 1920-95) first gained fame in 1943 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She earned a large readership as well as critical acclaim with her novels, novellas, and short stories that explored themes of marriage, family, and love in an urban setting, and today her works are considered among the most important Chinese literature of the 1940s. In 1955 Chang emigrated to Los Angeles and continued her literary career; most of the digitized materials come from this stage of her career, including extensive correspondence between Chang and the literary critic C. T. Hsia.

The digitized materials represent a small portion of the Ailing Zhang papers, which are available for research by appointment at the USC Libraries’ Special Collections. For more information about Chang or the collection, please contact the East Asian Library’s Chinese studies librarian, Tang Li.

Posted by Brian Bernards bernards@usc.edu

Lexicopedia Manchu

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Online Lexicopedia Manchu

The team of Manc.hu would like to make you aware of the online Manchu lexicopedia BULEKU.org . Although still in beta, it is already ready to use.

It now includes Jerry Norman’s Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary, as well as the Qing Mirror lexicon of the Qianlong court. Over 20 modern and Qing-contemporary lexicons will follow in the coming months. For this project, Manc.hu works together with Helsinki University, Tohoku University (K-dic database), Georgetown University at Qatar, Leiden University, as well as ca. ten database volunteers.

So, for anyone learning or reading Manchu sources, try BULEKU.org. It works on any device. For questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to email fresco@buleku.org

Team Manc.hu,
Léon Rodenburg
Fresco Sam-Sin <fresco@manc.hu>

PS: if you wish to follow the addition of sources, then follow our FB Manc.hu