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HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Man-Fung Yip’s review of Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War, by Po-Shek Fu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/man-fung-yip/. My thanks to our new media studies book review editor, Shaoling Ma, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War

By Po-Shek Fu

Reviewed by Man-Fung Yip

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Po-Shek Fu, Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 256pp. ISBN: 9780190073770 (paperback); 9780190073763 (hardcover)

Over the decades, Po-Shek Fu has established himself as one of the most respected scholars in the field of Chinese-language cinema. His latest book on the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on film and print media, offers the first systematic English-language study of this important but little-examined subject.

Divided into four main chapters, plus a preface and an epilogue, the book covers the period—from the late 1940s to the late 1960s—to which the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong was most germane. The first chapter offers a comprehensive mapping of the cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong and makes a convincing case for what Fu calls the “cinematic containment” of leftist or pro-communist “patriotic” cinema on the part of pro-Taiwan forces and the United States. Each of the following three chapters focuses on a case study to further explore the complex dynamics and meanings of the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong: the US-sponsored Chinese Student Weekly and its ties with the liberal “third force” movement in Republican China in chapter 2; Asia Pictures, a film studio founded by Chang Kuo-sin 張國興 with support from the Asia Foundation (a CIA-funded nongovernmental organization), in chapter 3; and the Shaw Brothers studio in chapter 4. The epilogue concludes the book by focusing on the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the rise of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, which in turn led to a gradual winding down of Hong Kong’s status as a battlefield of Asia’s cultural Cold War. Continue reading HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review →

JCLC 11.1

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I am pleased to share “Hearing Things: Voices of the Nonhuman in Chinese Literary and Visual Culture,” the newest issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (11:1), edited by Paula Varsano. The issue is now available in print and online. Browse the table of contents and read the introduction, made freely available, here:

https://read.dukeupress.edu/jclc/issue/11/1

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 
Volume 11 Issue 1    April 2024
Special Issue “Hearing Things: Voices of the Nonhuman in Chinese Literary and Visual Culture”

Paula Varsano, Special Issue Editor

Table of Contents

Just Listening: An Introduction
By Paula Varsano

Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Non-human Agents and Their Narrative Function in the Zhuangzi
By Romain Graziani

Simian Episteme, ca. 1200
By Jeehee Hong

Cauldron, Copper, Cash: Medieval Bronze in Motion and Flux
By Jeffrey Moser

The Crying Statue in Early Qing Drama
By Thomas Kelly

Dehumanized Voices and Traumatic Articulations in Late Nineteenth-Century Chinese Classical Tales
By Li Wei

Manuscript and the Human in Modern China
By Chloe Estep

What Noise Does a Psychotic Door Listen To? Information, Intermediality, and Guo Baochang’s Peking Opera Film Dream of the Bridal Chamber
By Ling Hon Lam

Posted by: Yuefan Wang <yuefanw2@illinois.edu>

When Worlds Collide

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Soure: China Media Project (7/22/24)
When Worlds Collide
State media have released a short, AI-generated series on Douyin. It’s the meeting point of several tools the Party has been using to modernize media and propaganda.
By Alex Colville

Government and private tech have teamed up to create the first AI-generated sci-fi short-video series in China. “Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse,” released on July 8, imagines a world far in the future where characters travel back to the Bronze Age Sanxingdui (三星堆) civilization of southern China. The series consists of 12 three-minute clips — generated with human guidance, edited through Douyin’s “Jimeng AI” (即梦AI) algorithm, and then released on their short video platform. The company has already reported views of over 20 million.

The series combines the slickness of Douyin tech with the media know-how of the State Council’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and the Bona Film Group, one of China’s biggest production companies and a subsidiary of the state-owned mega-conglomerate Poly Group. At a press briefing, Bona executives explained how the Jimeng algorithm had generated video through the input of original images, responding to prompts on camera angles and movement speeds.

This production process is a convergence of trends that the Chinese Communist Party has been pushing forward for years to modernize the media. To look at the show is to look at some of the first sprouts of the Party’s long-term goals for communication. Continue reading When Worlds Collide →

Dong Xi in the UK

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For all UK-based colleagues, if you’re free on the following dates we’d love to have you!

Dong Xi 东西 (Pen name of Tian Dailin 田代琳) award-winning author (Mao Dun Prize, Lu Xun Prize) will be touring the UK for the upcoming launch of his newest book in translation Fate Rewritten (篡改的命) (Trans: John Balcom).

London – 26th July – Living A Stolen Life – Dong Xi in Conversation with Susan Trapp
Fri 26 Jul 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM at Charing Cross Library
https://buytickets.at/sinoistbooks/1287210

Edinburgh- 31st July – The Price of Tomorrow – Dong Xi in Conversation with Jenny Niven
Wed 31 Jul 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM at Abden House, University of Edinburgh
https://buytickets.at/sinoistbooks/1294053

ABOUT THE BOOK

Translated from Chinese and due to be published in English on 25th October 2024. It’s a Dickensian novel giving voice to China’s 300 million-strong migrant workforce, Telling a harrowing story about the conditions they live in, what drives them, and how it can go horribly wrong. Continue reading Dong Xi in the UK →

Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act

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Is it naivete or negligence? The American law professor commenting in the article below, Mary Ellen O’Connell at Notre Dame, either really is, or pretends to be,  unaware of Chinese law requiring Chinese citizens to obey all orders to spy for the Chinese state intelligence services — and, not to reveal the circumstances. And it’s just not conceivable that a Chinese grad student in Minnesota takes off on his own initiative, with a drone, to a US naval base in Virginia, to make a spy film. He must have been pressed into it by agents of the Chinese state, just like those lab-thieving students at U. Florida a few weeks ago. On the circumstances of the Virginia case, see also here. –Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Nikkei (7/9/24)
Chinese student pleads guilty to violating U.S. espionage act
Shi Fengyun is accused of violating rarely used provisions of the Espionage Act
By MARRIAN ZHOU, Nikkei staff writer

Chinese 26-year-old Shi Fengyun pled guilty to espionage misdemeanors for flying a drone near a U.S. naval facility.   © Reuters

NORFOLK, Virginia — A Chinese student pleaded guilty to misdemeanor espionage charges at a federal courthouse here on Monday for taking photographs of U.S. military infrastructure using a drone.

Shi Fengyun, a 26-year-old graduate student from the University of Minnesota, walked into the courtroom in a light green and gray jacket and sports pants. He appeared nervous, taking several deep breaths while shaking his legs before he entered his plea.

Shi pleaded guilty to two out of six counts of violations under two provisions of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the photography of military installations and the use of unregistered drones to do so in national defense airspace. The U.S. Department of Justice dismissed the remaining four counts. Continue reading Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act →

‘Ink Girl,’ alive or dead?

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The number of people detained by China’s authorities that even family members are not told for years, whether they are alive or dead, is enormous — they include my fellow Swedish citizen Gui Minhai kidnapped by China 8 1/2 years ago, as well as untold numbers of disappeared Uyghurs. Dong Yaoqiong, whose case is raised here below, is also one example from among Chinese people. This sort of targeted news blackout is a particularly cruel weapon deployed by the Chinese regime.–Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Bitter Winter (7/8/24)
The “Ink Girl” Six Years After: Is She Alive or Dead?
Dong Yaoqiong sprayed with ink a portrait of Xi Jinping on July 4, 2018, and was taken to a psychiatric hospital. Her friends ask the CCP to prove she is still alive.
by Hu Zimo

Dong Yaoqiong and the portrait of Xi Jinping she sprayed with ink. From X.

Dong Yaoqiong and the portrait of Xi Jinping she sprayed with ink. From X.

Remember Dong Yaoqiong, the famous “Ink Girl” from Shanghai? If you don’t, this means that the CCP’s repression, which has tried to systematically erase any trace of her from the web, has been successful. We at “Bitter Winter,” however, do remember Dong Yaoqiong. Remembering may be the only way to keep her alive—unless she already died.

On July 4, 2018, Dong, a then twenty-nine-year-old woman who had come to Shanghai from Hunan and worked in a real estate agency, filmed herself in the act of spraying ink on a poster of Xi Jinping, calling for democracy, and posted the video on Twitter, which is banned in China but widely accessed through VPN, particularly by college students.

Dong was arrested a few hours after she had posted the video and later taken to a psychiatric hospital, reportedly with the complicity of her mother, who signed a statement that her daughter was mentally ill. It is rumored the mother was rewarded with a new and better home. The Ink Girl’s father, Dong Jianbiao, criticized his wife and insisted Dong Yaoqiong was not insane. As a result, the father was also arrested. On September 23, 2022, it was announced that he had died of “natural causes” in jail. His body was quickly cremated, but not before relatives had seen it, covered with bruises and other signs of violence. Continue reading ‘Ink Girl,’ alive or dead? →

Urban Culture in Imperial China panelist–cfp

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Dear Colleagues,

We are inviting expressions of interest for a fourth panelist to join our AAS panel focusing on urban culture in imperial China. This panel seeks to explore the multifaceted city life of premodern China and East Asia through various lenses such as literature, religion, entertainment, and ritual activities.  Our current three panelists will delve into diverse aspects:

  • Political legitimacy and the strategic placement of capitals in Pre-Song China
  • Court entertainment during the Northern Song dynasty
  • Interactions between commoners and monasteries in the Ming Dynasty

We are fortunate to have Professor Steven Miles from Washington University in St. Louis as our panel chair.

We are looking for a scholar whose research complements our theme by examining urban culture from a social, economic, or political perspective. If you are interested in contributing to this intriguing discussion, please contact I-Chin Lin and Frankie Chik at ilin17@asu.edu and HIC24@pitt.edu with your proposal.  We look forward to your participation and contributions to what promises to be a rich and engaging discussion.

Best regards,

Hin Ming Frankie Chik <HIC24@pitt.edu>

Look Back in Anger

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Thomas Chen’s “Look Back in Anger: The Long Season (2023),” an essay on the TV series The Long Season. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-long-season/. My thanks to Prof. Chen for sharing his work with the MCLC community.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Look Back in Anger:
The Long Season (2023)

By Thomas Chen

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July 2024)

Figure 1: Marketing poster for The Long Season.

First released in China in April 2023 and now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, The Long Season (漫长的季节) is the most popular and critically praised Chinese miniseries in recent memory. On Douban, China’s near-equivalent of IMDb, it has over 900,000 ratings, with an average score of 9.4 out of 10. What accounts for this stupendous acclaim?

The Long Season has an arresting storyline: complex, tightly written, and unpredictable. It is a double-plotted crime drama set in the fictional steel town of Hualin in northeastern China, deftly interweaving a mysterious hit-and-run incident in 2016—the present in which the series opens—with a case of murder by dismemberment in 1998.

Generically a whodunit, The Long Season is also a riot. The Northeast constitutes the wellspring of comedy in the Chinese cultural imagination. Some of the country’s most famous comedians hail from the region, and their skits and sketches on China Central Television’s annual New Year’s Gala have entertained generations of viewers. Directed by Xin Shuang 辛爽, a Northeasterner, the dialogue crackles with repartees, delivered impeccably in the distinctive local idiom by well-known actors Fan Wei 范伟 and Qin Hao 秦昊, both of whom themselves are from the Northeast. They play, respectively, Wang Xiang 王响, a former locomotive engineer for Hualin Steel who is now a taxi driver, and Gong Biao 龚彪, a fellow taxi driver who used to be an entry-level manager in the same factory. The third male lead is Ma Desheng 马德胜, a police captain turned amateur Latin ballroom dancer. All three give bravura performances in dual roles spanning almost two decades that anchor the temporal shifts in the narrative. Continue reading Look Back in Anger →

Chinese Theories of Literary Creation

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Dear colleagues and friends,

I am pleased to report that my first monograph on Chinese literary theory has come out at Duke UP. If you are interested in the book, you may place an order at the DUP or Amazon sites for the same price of $16. As Amazon needs to forward the order to DUP, it makes good sense to order directly from DUP unless you have free shipping from Amazon. Below are the DUP and Amazon links.
Thanks, Zong-qi Cai

https://www.dukeupress.edu/chinese-theories-of-literary-creation

https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Theories-Literary-Creation-Introduction/dp/1478026995/

Description

In this monograph, Zong-qi Cai surveys the long trajectory of Chinese thinking about literary creation, from remote antiquity to the early 20th century. By uncovering the complex connections linking key critical terms, concepts, and assertions, it debunks the common perception of Chinese literary theory as vague and elusive. Instead, Cai approaches Chinese critical pronouncements as engaged in a productive dialogue with each other. Through detailed scrutiny of 184 passages, he shows how critics from different dynasties exploited the polysemy of key terms—drawn from Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist sources as well as criticism of calligraphy and painting—to arrive at ground-breaking new perspectives on literary creation. The book concludes with a brief comparative look at Chinese and Western literary theory aimed at being mutually illuminating for both traditions. Intended for general readers as well as specialists, this monograph will be followed in the next few years by three similar studies on theories of literature, aesthetics, and interpretation.

Posted by: Prism Editorial Office <prism@ln.edu.hk>

Asian Food–cfp

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AAS 2025 Annual Conference: call for panelists
Topic: Asian Food: Culture, Literature, Philosophy, and Religion
Abstract submission deadline: July 22, 2024
Contact: Dixuan Chen <chenyuji@grinnell.edu>

In-person presentations at the AAS 2025 Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio, March 13 to March 16.

We invite submissions of paper abstracts for the panel “Asian Food: Culture, Literature, Philosophy, and Religion.” We encourage studies from diverse academic disciplines, transregional studies, and studies of local food cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc.).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • How does food consumption construct the collective memory of a cultural, religious, or social community?
  • Asian food choices and eating habits in the contexts of culture, society, philosophy, politics, and religious beliefs.
  • The concepts, values, and practices of taboo, purity, and spirituality in Asian diets.
  • The symbols of food, ingredients, and other edible materials.
  • Eating and identity.
  • Ethical food and sustainability.
  • Fasting and abstinence from food for health, ritualistic, religious, or ethical purposes.

Paper abstracts (250 words) and a short biography or CV should be sent to the panel organizer Dixuan Chen, Grinnell College, chenyuji@grinnell.edu by July 22, 2024 (Eastern Standard Time). Communication will be in English. Files should be sent as PDF or Word documents (doc or docx).

Contact the panel organizer with any questions at chenyuji@grinnell.edu

Beyong Exoticism: Rethinking Southwest China–cfp

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Call for Contributions – Beyond Exoticism: Rethinking Southwest China
Special feature for China Perspectives
Guest editors:

Peter Guangpei Ran (pran@nju.edu.cn), Assistant Research Fellow at Institute for Social Anthropology, Nanjing University
Paul Kendall (p.kendall1@westminster.ac.uk), Senior Lecturer in Chinese studies, University of Westminster
 
Deadline for abstracts: 2 August 2024 
Deadline for papers: 1 March 2025

Since the 1980s, southwest China has enjoyed considerable academic attention, including a particular focus on representations and everyday practices relating to the many “ethnic minorities” within this region (e.g., Oakes 1998; Rees 2000; Harrell 2001; Mueggler 2001). While important theoretical tools, such as the notion of internal orientalism (Schein 2000), have subsequently emerged, recent years have seen a decline in the profile of southwest China in English-language academia and beyond. At the same time, a major shift in ethnic policy and governance, the deepening of infrastructural development, the intensification of translocal exchanges encouraged by global economy, and the unprecedented measures to tackle environmental issues have all profoundly affected this region, which continues to be remembered, imagined, practiced and contested in discursive and material terms. This special feature for China Perspectives aims to renew scholarly attention towards the historical complexity and contemporary transformation of southwest China, as well as put forward new ways of thinking about and researching the southwest as indispensable to wider understandings of China today.

For the full CfP, please see https://www.cefc.com.hk/call-for-contributions-beyond-exoticism-rethinking-southwest-china/.

Paul Kendall <p.kendall1@westminster.ac.uk>

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 →

Prism 20.2

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Publication News | Prism 20:2
Edited by Prof Zhiyi Yang and Prof David Der-wei Wang

We are pleased to announce the publication of “Classicism in Digital Times: Cultural Remembrance as Reimagination in the Sinophone Cyberspace,” a special issue of Prism (20:2), edited by David Der-wei Wang and Zhiyi Yang.

Contributors to this special issue explore “Chineseness” in the digital age, presenting the many facets of the multicentered, multidimensional, and multifunctional phenomenon of “Sinophone classicism.” The authors posit that digital technology leads to intense disruption and fragmentation of geopolitical and ethno-cultural communities by building kinetic connections among atomized individuals who act as agents of cultural remembrance and imagination. The ramifications of this virtual cultural-linguistic nationalism remain to be observed in long-term academic studies, the authors argue, beginning with this special issue.

Contributors to this issue include Fangdai Chen, Yedong Sh-Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Rossella Ferrari, Chieh-Ting Hsieh, Liang Luo, Michael O’Krent, Xiaofei Tian, Laura Vermeeren, David Der-Wei Wang, Zhiyi Yang, and Michelle Yeh.

Browse the table of contents at https://read.dukeupress.edu/prism/issue/20/2. Buy this issue at https://dukeupress.edu/classicism-in-digital-times.

Prism Editorial Office <prism@ln.edu.hk>