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Prof. Aili Mu (1958-2025)

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Professor Aili Mu
(March 21, 1958–December 7, 2025)

Aili Mu, 67, Professor Emerita of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University, passed away on December 7, 2025. Aili was born in Beijing and grew up in Shandong Province, China—the homeland of Confucius. Her life and career bridged China and the USA. After completing her B.A. (1982) and M.A. (1985) in English at Shandong University, she taught at China Foreign Affairs University (1985–1989). She later moved to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Brook, which she completed in 1996. Aili joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 2001 after teaching at Vassar College. Over the next twenty-five years, she made Ames her home.

Aili singlehandedly established the Chinese Studies Program at ISU. In addition to developing the Chinese curriculum, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to teaching. She taught Chinese language courses at all levels, as well as classes on Chinese film, literature, cultural traditions, translation, and contemporary China. She also organized numerous extracurricular cultural activities, lectures, and events to enrich student learning. Seeking to bring together the best values of Chinese and American culture, she infused passion and love into her work. Her genuine care for the intellectual and personal growth of her students earned their lasting admiration; many remained in close contact with her long after graduation.

Aili was also a dedicated scholar, developing her research in close dialogue with her teaching. She published extensively in both English and Chinese on Chinese aesthetics, literature and culture, translation studies, calligraphy, instructional technology, and pedagogy. In addition to numerous journal articles, she authored two refereed books with Columbia University Press: Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts (2006) and Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text (2017). The latter earned her the 2018 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Aili received both a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2004) and a Fulbright Scholar Research Grant (2007).

Aili was the youngest of three siblings. She is survived by her husband, her elder sister, elder brother and her nephews and nieces. Beyond her family, Aili’s profound knowledge, sincerity, and humility earned her lasting friendships near and far. A loving person, she delighted in exchanging thoughts and ideas, taking long walks in nature, sharing life stories, cooking and dining, gardening, and the arts. Her legacy will continue to inspire all who knew her.

Tonglu Li <tongluli@iastate.edu>

A Chinese Artist’s Love Letters from Jail

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Source: NYT (12/8/25)
A Chinese Artist’s Love Letters From Jail
As Gao Zhen awaits trial in China, his wife is in limbo, sustained by the portraits he fashions from paper.
By Lily Kuo, Photographs and videos by Andrea Verdelli

The pictures were carefully torn by hand from sheets of letter paper, crafted by her jailed husband at night when he couldn’t sleep.

Some are scenes from their life in New York City — like the time they saw Henri Matisse’s “The Dance” at the MoMA — before they made the mistake of coming back to China, where he was arrested.

Others are abstract family portraits, the outline of his head and within it, her silhouette and that of their 7-year-old son, Jia.

Continue reading A Chinese Artist’s Love Letters from Jail →

Archival Hong Kong: Places, Practices and Public Culture

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Archival Hong Kong: Places, Practices and Public Culture
An online symposium on 11th and 12th Dec 2025

Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/821833860853744
Program: https://chajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/archivalhk2025.pdf

Organised by Hong Kong Studies, this two-day symposium presents papers from across the humanities and social sciences that examine the idea and function of the archive—understood in the broadest terms—in relation to Hong Kong’s cultural, historical, and spatial imaginaries. From official state repositories and institutional holdings to ephemeral, vernacular, or community-based practices of collecting and remembering, the archive has long figured as a site where power, identity, and cultural memory are negotiated.

While Hong Kong has often been described through the lenses of displacement and erasure, it also remains a city of remarkable reinvention and creative resilience. In light of recent transformations—spatial, political, and epistemological—the archive emerges as a record of what has been lost and a generative site for imagining what may yet come. We ask: what roles do archives play in preserving or reframing Hong Kong’s pasts and futures? How do artists, writers, educators, curators, activists, and others engage with the archive as form, method, or provocation? And how might we understand “archiving” not solely as an institutional practice but also as an everyday, affective, and often hopeful negotiation with the present?

Posted by: Eddie Tay <eddietay@cuhk.edu.hk>

TIAS Society of Fellows

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TIAS Society of Fellows (a special Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar Program)

Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS) hosts the TIAS Society of Fellows, a postdoctoral program at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Incorporated with the high-profile “Shuimu Tsinghua Scholar Program,” this program aims to attract exceptional and creative early-career scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Fellows are appointed to conduct full-time research at TIAS for three years.

The TIAS fellows are joined by TIAS resident and visiting scholars who take part in the Society as faculty fellows.  Seminars, reading groups, workshops, and lectures are organized regularly for formal and informal discussions. TIAS supports interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences. Fellows in the Society engage in innovative and productive research and contribute to intellectual exchange within the university community and beyond.

TIAS recruits its postdoctoral fellows globally and especially encourages applications from developing countries or underrepresented groups. Every year, about ten fellows are recruited. Those recruited are expected to join TIAS in the fall semester of 2026 (usually no later than October 1). All selections are based on both external and internal reviews.

Eligibility and Requirements: 

To apply for a TIAS postdoctoral fellowship in fall 2026, an applicant must have received their PhD degree after 09/01/2023 and before 09/01/2026.

Fellows work full-time and are required to remain in residence at Tsinghua University. They are expected to attend TIAS activities. Fellows may apply for an extension of the fellowship beyond three years if solid research progress can be demonstrated. If they wish, fellows may also participate in teaching activities.

Benefits

TIAS fellows are provided with a package of benefits that includes (but is not limited to):

  • An annual salary of 300,000 RMB (before tax) during the fellowship period.
  • On-campus housing opportunities, or housing subsidies of 42,000 RMB per year.
  • Funds and allowances for attending international conferences upon application.
  • The same medical plan privileges as Tsinghua faculty.
  • Fellows’ children are offered positions at Tsinghua University’s kindergarten and primary school.
  • Opportunities to teach and attend career management workshops offered to Tsinghua faculty.

Application:

In either English or Chinese, applicants should submit an application package (download here), which requests: 1) a cover letter; 2）an application form (which includes a curriculum vita and a statement of current and future research plans); 3) a writing sample; and 4) names and email addresses of three references. Please email all materials in PDF or Word to tiastalent@tsinghua.edu.cn.

Deadline: Completed applications must be submitted by February 15, 2026. Reference letters must be submitted by March 1, 2026.

Inquiries may be sent by email to tiastalent@tsinghua.edu.cn

Posted by: Matteo Cavelier <matteo.cavelier@gmail.com>

Only the Lonely

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Source: NYT (12/4/25)
How to Find a Date in a Country With Over 30 Million Extra Men
OpDocs: Only the Lonely
A decade after the end of the one-child policy, China has over 30 million so-called surplus men. Can this dating boot camp help them find love?
By Violet Du Feng (Ms. Feng is a documentary filmmaker from Shanghai.)

In America, romance and sex — or the lack thereof — have become preoccupations for millions of people struggling with intimacy. “Are young people having enough sex?” The New Yorker asked this year. In China, the situation is even more pressing. Its one-child policy left it with over 30 million more men than women. These men confront a smaller dating pool, and it’s even harder for working-class and rural men to find a partner.

In my feature-length documentary “The Dating Game” I follow a group of young single men as they complete a weeklong dating camp. In “Only the Lonely,” the short film adaptation above, I captured something else: the stakes of lonely young men struggling to find love across the world. “I’ve been alone since I was little,” Wu, a young delivery driver, told me. “The feeling of loneliness,” he added, “it’s been the same my whole life. The only difference is I’ve learned to feel numb to it.” But at night, he continued, “the feeling comes back strong. It never disappears.”

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Wasteland Elegy

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Source: China Unofficial Archives (12/4/25)
Wasteland Elegy: Official Records and Private Memories of China’s Northwestern Labor Camps
By Hai Xing

An Dianxiang the author of A Bitter Journey to the End of the World in Qinghai.

[中国民间档案馆 China Unofficial Archives is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. ]

In the historical landscape of mid-20th century China, the Northwest represented more than just a geographic concept; it was a metaphor for destiny. This seemingly desolate expanse, marked by wind, sand, salt flats, and extreme cold, was also a unique testing ground where the state exercised its will through large-scale, enclosed social experiments.

Reflecting on that sealed history today often results in a fractured perspective: one is the macroscopic, official narrative constructed from data and documents; the other is the microscopic narrative crystallized from blood, tears, and personal memory. The Qinghai Province Laogai Gazetteer (hereinafter, the Gazetteer), compiled by the Laogai (Reform Through Labor) Work Administration of the Qinghai Provincial Department of Justice, provides the rigid framework of the former, while An Dianxiang’s A Bitter Journey to the End of the World in Qinghai (hereinafter, Bitter Journey) and Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou provide the latter’s most searing, human detail.

By juxtaposing the private memories captured by An Dianxiang and Yang Xianhui with the vast historical backdrop established by the Gazetteer, we can observe not only the individual’s struggle under the state machine’s relentless pressure, but also, through the mutual corroboration of official and civilian accounts, gain insight into the institutional roots of the era’s absurdity and tragedy. This is a confrontation between the merciless logic of violence and the enduring dignity of the human spirit. Continue reading Wasteland Elegy →

Cold Window Newsletter no. 10

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CWN#10: Webfiction as subversion // Literary news bulletins
Feminism, queerness, and nationalism on the Chinese internet
By Andrew Rule

Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter. In this issue, we approach the end of my 13 Ways of Looking at Chinese Internet Literature series with a close look at online fiction and systems of power in today’s China. Then, a few flash bulletins on this season’s literary awards and releases.

Thirteen ways of looking at Chinese internet literature: Fiction, identity, and the state (#9-11)

A lot of what I know about Chinese internet literature comes from conversations with friends who have been reading this stuff much longer than I have, and one common refrain I’ve heard has puzzled me since the very beginning. Friends often warn me that the approach to gender and identity in web fiction is regressive, lowest-common-denominator, unliterary. Before I’d read a word of online fiction, I’d heard classmates dismiss all female-oriented novels as 霸总文 (stories about “domineering CEOs,” an archetype for cold, dominant male love interests) and 后宫文 (“harem” stories, a typically male-oriented genre in which the protagonist collects or seduces an endless parade of women). If you flip through Megan Walsh’s chapter on internet fiction in The Subplot, or even just scroll down the front page of Webnovel, you’ll also come away with the impression that Chinese web novels are sexist to the core.

And yet feminist discourse is surging in ever other corner of Chinese popular culture that I interact with: books, movies, social media. Clearly, between an increasingly gender-aware youth culture on the one hand and the latent sexism of many internet genres on the other, all under a strictly heteronormative censorship regime, there are some rich contradictions to explore here. Let’s get into it.

Way #9: Internet literature as a vehicle for feminist identity formation

Internet literature may only have come of age at the beginning of this century, but that’s plenty long for it to have already gone through several generations of development in its portrayal of gender. The Chinese internet evolves fast, and that’s especially true when it comes to gender discourse. As a new fan entering in the 2020s, internet literature looks to me like a bewildering palimpsest of novels from different eras overlaid on one another, each bearing traces of the trends, gender norms, and censorship environment of when it was written.

The Chinese translation of Misogyny 《厌女》, by Chizuko Ueno 上野千鹤子. Over 100,000 reviews on Douban!

Continue reading Cold Window Newsletter no. 10 →

Creative Belonging

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New Publication: Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China by Yanshuo Zhang is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press on January 12, 2026. Pre-order of the book is available and UM Press is offering significant holiday sales:  https://press.umich.edu/Books/C/Creative-Belonging3 . The book is also available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

This book has about thirty full-color images and is printed on high-quality matte-glossy paper similar to an art catalogue or art book at a very affordable price. It offers a luxurious and intimate view of contemporary ethnic minority life in China. It would make for an excellent holiday read. The book’s wide-ranging sources, evidence, and visual aids make it an excellent textbook and can be easily adopted for any courses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture, film, history, or other types of China- and Asia-related courses.

The author of the book, Yanshuo Zhang, is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. She is the Principal Investigator of the national winner of the Inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies in 2024. Titled “Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” the winning project is an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional project that aims to build understanding of ethnic diversity and minority voices within China by developing a multicultural China studies curriculum that is integrated with global studies on race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and identity. Prof. Yanshuo Zhang is leading a group of scholars, translators, artists, and ethnic minority and indigenous collaborators in mainland China and Taiwan on developing a collective database that would offer innovative and original materials on teaching multiethnic China for the English-speaking and multilingual audience internationally. Continue reading Creative Belonging →

Intl Symposium onf Chinese Language and Discourse–cfp

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Dear colleagues,

The International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse (ISCLD) is a biennial international symposium that advances the exchange of scholarship and emphasizes an empirical orientation in functional discourse studies of the Chinese language, with participation from local and international scholars, not only from linguistics, but also related fields of communication, sociology, anthropology, education etc. with regards to the use of Chinese languages. The 8th ISCLD comes to Spain with the theme “Topic-Comment in Chinese Language and Discourse Research: Insights and Applications”.

Organizer: Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAO), Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)
Date: June 15-16, 2026
Location: Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain

Call for Papers (open until January 2th, 2026).

https://eventos.uam.es/135780/detail/the-8th-international-symposium-on-chinese-language-and-discourse-8th-iscld.html

Abstracts or panel proposals may be accepted. Abstracts in English should be 300-500 words, including positions, affiliations, email addresses and mailing addresses for all authors. Panel proposals reflecting the conference theme may be submitted. All panel proposals should provide a 300-500 word rationale and a 200–250-word abstract of each panellist’s paper; include affiliation and email addresses for each panel list.

The conference continues to focus on Chinese language and discourse but would also like to encourage researchers working on other areas previously not discussed in the past conferences, including minority languages related to Chinese, AI application, bi/multi-lingual and multicultural settings. Continue reading Intl Symposium onf Chinese Language and Discourse–cfp →

Blossoms Shanghai review

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Source: NYT (11/27/25)
‘Blossoms Shanghai’ Review: In the Mood for Commerce
Wong Kar-wai’s first TV series, streaming on the Criterion Channel, is a lush melodrama about an economic miracle.
By Mike Hale

A man in a suit walks in front of a neon-drenched restaurant.

Hu Ge stars as the Gatsby-like protagonist of “Blossoms Shanghai,” the first television series from Wong Kar-wai. Credit…Criterion Channel.

Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” with its silences and stillnesses and utter stylization, seems longer in the memory than it actually is. It’s a surprise to return to Wong’s most famous film, released in 2000, and realize that it’s over in a relatively brisk 99 minutes.

You might think of that, wistfully, while watching “Blossoms Shanghai,” Wong’s 30-episode, 23-hour-plus television series, which was released in China in 2023 and had its American premiere this week on the Criterion Channel streaming service. (Criterion is releasing three episodes a week; 12 were available for review.) Maybe highly art-directed nostalgia is better in smaller doses, or maybe this was just the wrong project. In either case, the bloom goes off “Blossoms” pretty quickly.

The series is set in Shanghai in the late 1980s and early ’90s as the Chinese economy is opening up and the Shanghai Stock Exchange is re-established after a 40-year hiatus. Grainy footage, archival or carefully fabricated, provides evocative glimpses of the Huangpu River, the Bund and the shopping street Nanjing Lu in the days just before Shanghai’s breakneck modernization.

But the story takes place almost entirely on the elaborate, beautifully appointed sets Wong and his visual director, Peter Pau, built for the series. And within that artificial world, it is as if the entire early history of the Chinese economic miracle took place on one corner of Shanghai’s Huanghe Road restaurant strip, where the characters spend much of their time plotting and preparing an endless round of meals. Continue reading Blossoms Shanghai review →

Mirror review

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Source: Asian Review of Books (10/6/25)
“Mirror,” Poems by Zhang Zao
Reviewed by Peter Gordon

If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.

Zhang, whose career spanned from the 1980s until his untimely death from cancer in 2010, spent much of his working career in Germany. It is perhaps this that makes his poetry so immediately accessible in English. Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes in an introduction as readable as it is erudite:

Zhang Zao was versatile in not just one or two but several foreign languages. He was proficient in English, German, French, and Russian.

“In addition, he was able to read Latin. This too,” she deadpans, “was uncommon among Chinese poets at that time” (or any poets or indeed almost anyone at almost any time).

The title poem, written when Zhang was just 22, and still the one for which he is well-known, starts off:

Once regrets come to mind
plum blossoms fall
Like watching her swim to the other shore
Like climbing a pine ladder Continue reading Mirror review →

The Broken Circle

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Source: NYT (11/26/25)
Op-Docs: The Broken Circle
By Zhao Liang

Burning coal emits humanity’s greatest contribution to the planet since industrialization: atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In the northern grasslands of China, people mine for coal day and night. They contaminate groundwater and lay waste to fragile vegetation. The nomadic peoples who depend on these sources lose their pastures to desertification. In the nearby Gobi Desert area, worsening climate conditions and prolonged droughts force villagers to relocate from this already hostile region. To slow the creep of the desert, migrant laborers plant trees in this sea of sand. It’s an all too human attempt to atone for destruction with investment. Their toil and will to reclaim life from the desert brings forth a hint of green, but against the vast yellow dunes, it is but a drop in an ocean of dryness.

In this short film, I wanted to capture the absurdity of destruction and remedy on a massive scale.

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Cynicism in contemporary Chinese comedy films

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New publication: “Cynicism in Contemporary Chinese Comedy Films” (book chapter)

A chapter about Chinese comedy films in The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy, arguing that Cynicism is an essential feature of Mainland Chinese comedy films in the early twenty-first century, and cynical humor is symptomatic of the ideological dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, authoritarian politics, and patriarchal tradition. The chapter illustrates certain formal features of cynical humor: skepticism of the authority, self-mockery, reflexive distantiation, and conscious enjoyment of illusions.

Full text published online: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/60834/chapter-abstract/529642149?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Posted by: Yung-Hang Bruce Lai <brucelaiyung@gmail.com>

The Road to Miaoxi

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Source: NY Review of Books (11/22/25)
The Road to Miaoxi
By Ai Xiaoming, translated and with an introduction by Ian Johnson
Ruins of Mao-era “reform-through-labor” camps remain scattered throughout the mountains of Sichuan. Five years ago I decided to retrace one former prisoner’s path.

Ai Xiaoming. Farmland once worked by the “women’s brigade” at Miaoxi, a reform-through-labor camp in the Mao era, Lushan, Sichuan, 2020

During the Cold War, educated people in free societies were so familiar with figures on the other side of the Iron Curtain that they were referred to just by their last names: Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Havel, Forman. They knew the name, too, of the Soviet system’s most notorious instrument of control, the Gulag network of forced labor camps.

Chinese people have experienced seventy-six years of a similar kind of autocracy, longer than the entire existence of the Soviet Union. But outsiders still know little about independent thinkers in China—or even that they exist. That neglect extends to Ai Xiaoming, the author of the essay that follows, who is one of the most important public intellectuals in China today. A seventy-two-year-old native of Wuhan, she began as a scholar of Eastern European literature, translating Kundera into Chinese, before slowly migrating to feminist studies.

In the early 2000s, having become a tenured professor in literature at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, she adopted the new technology of digital cameras to make films about social issues in China. A dozen documentaries followed, on issues such as violence against women, rural resistance to Communist Party control, rigged local elections, and the lack of an independent judicial system. Her most important film is Jiabiangou Elegy, a six-and-a half-hour epic on the country’s most notorious labor camp.

Since that film was released in 2017, life for Ai has become increasingly difficult. She is banned from leaving the country and has had trouble with the government when she tries to make new films. Instead she has taken on the role of oral historian for elderly victims of the Mao era. She takes what are sometimes sprawling and disorganized manuscripts, reinterviews the authors, and edits the works into publishable texts. The stories often describe the early years of the People’s Republic, foreshadowing issues that remain important today. Continue reading The Road to Miaoxi →

Humans and Nonhuman Animals in China — cfp

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CFP: Special Issue of Études Chinoises – “Humans and Nonhuman Animals in China” (Ancient to Contemporary Times)
Guest Editors : Joachim Boittout (Université Paris Cité) and Christopher K. Tong (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

While nonhuman animals have gained an increasingly noticeable place in the histories of the Western hemisphere and Asian countries over the past thirty years, China, in comparison, seems still underrepresented. This dynamic academic trend, following the already much-discussed “animal turn,” focuses on the multifarious realities of animal life in human narratives. Acknowledging the importance of groundbreaking works that explore, for instance, the religious significance and evolving meanings of some animals in cosmological and political representations, this special issue seeks to encompass the diversity of the approaches and the disciplines involved in historical investigations of past animal lives, their interactions with humans, and how they effected changes in human societies.

This special issue of Études Chinoises welcomes contributions engaging with human–animal relations in the diversity of their historical dimensions, and encourages works that tackle the issues raised by the cohabitation of humans and non-humans in the Anthropocene. Both empirical approaches that focus on stand-alone cases, particular species, organizations, or individuals, and theoretical perspectives engaging with primary Chinese-language sources, empirical data, or ethnographic fieldwork are welcome.

We encourage submissions that address—but are by no means limited to—the following themes within the broad field of human–animal relations:

  • State-building, ideology, and propaganda
  • Animal ethics
  • Animals and social practices
  • Human–animal relations in a globalized world: health issues, animal factories, food production systems, breeding practices, and consumption
  • Transformations of ecosystems
  • Animals and the production of knowledge
  • Animals as cultural artifacts and representations in the arts

Abstracts should be no longer than 400 words and must be submitted by January 15, 2026 to the following email address: animalhistoryinchina@gmail.com. Accepted papers will be due September 1, 2026.

Posted by: Christopher Tong animalhistoryinchina@gmail.com