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New patriotic education law

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Source: The China Project (8/1/23)
China’s new Patriotic Education Law reveals Xi’s deepest fears for the future
China is attempting to codify patriotic education practices into law, with extensive reach. When passed, the implications will extend beyond its borders.
By Kathy Huang and Kay Zou

Illustration for The China Project by Alex Santafé

Last month, a draft of the “People’s Republic of China Patriotic Education Law” was introduced to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body. The expansive law contains 37 clauses that set forth the enforcement of patriotic education in a variety of institutions, including schools, religious communities, businesses, and families.

The new law codifies existing practices, but more importantly it expands its scope to include Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, overseas Chinese, and the internet. In short, it indicates what the party feels are its biggest vulnerabilities for the future control of China: the youth, cyberspace, and Chinese communities beyond the mainland.

A tried and true tactic

Since its founding, the People’s Republic of China has promoted several ideological indoctrination campaigns, the most extensive being the patriotic education campaign of the 1990s.

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese state recognized that the demise of Communist ideology internationally and democratic tendencies domestically threatened the foundation of its legitimacy. The party turned to state-led nationalism to revive its popularity. The campaign, which gained full momentum in the fall of 1994, focused on re-educating the youths, who led the Tiananmen protests. It contained three broad goals: the institutionalization of patriotic education, the reforms in history education, and the construction of patriotic public monuments. Continue reading New patriotic education law →

Leo Ou-fan Lee memoir

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Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee’s memoir, 𝑀𝑦 𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑡ℎ 𝐶𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑦: 𝐴 𝑀𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑖𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑒𝑜 𝑂𝑢-𝐹𝑎𝑛 𝐿𝑒𝑒, was published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in July, 2023:

https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/MyTwentiethCenturyAMemoir

The English translation of the preface to this memoir was published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal  and is available here:

https://chajournal.blog/2023/08/05/twentieth-century/

Heidi Huang <heidihuang@ln.edu.hk>

Babel of Chinese SF Aug. event

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Babel of Chinese SF August Event
Lu Hang on “Tongji Bridge:” When Tradition Meets Robotics
To join us, send an email to babelofchinesesf@gmail.com for the event link!
Beijing Time: 20:00, August 11, 2023.
UK Summer Time: 13:00, August 11, 2023.

Fiction: “Tongji Bridge” by Lu Hang
Translated by Li Yi

Chinese Version: https://freewechat.com/a/MjM5OTAxMzMwMA==/2652021465/2

English Version: In Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology (https://www.amazon.ca/Galaxy-Awards-Chinese-Science-Anthology-ebook/dp/B0BR5Y8Q5Z/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

Walk across Tongji, ward off worries.
[……]
I knew that the unison cheering would turn into diverse comments once I took off the Lion Head at the closing of the show. What a miserable imitator and disgrace to the national essence, some might criticize; or, what a genius innovator and ground breaker, others might applaud. However, I did not do this to get their feedback.

But, for my seventh great-uncle to watch a dragon and lion dance show once more.

Or better, if our performance attracted new interest, and new apprentices came to learn the traditional art from us. I would pass it on without reservation to anyone who would dedicate themselves to the art, no matter where that person was from, or rather, no matter that was a person or not. (From “Tongji Bridge” By Lu Hang) Continue reading Babel of Chinese SF Aug. event →

Global web of Chinese progaganda leads to US tech mogul

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Source: NYT (8/5/23)
A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul
The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide.
By Mara Hvistendahl, David A. Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel and Ishaan Jhaveri

Neville Roy Singham, right, in 2016 with the activist Jodie Evans. In 2017, they married and he sold his tech firm. Credit…Jim Spellman/WireImage, via Getty Images

The protest in London’s bustling Chinatown brought together a variety of activist groups to oppose a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. So it was peculiar when a street brawl broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators.

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide. Continue reading Global web of Chinese progaganda leads to US tech mogul →

Mei Niang’s Long-Lost Writings

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NEW PUBLICATION
Mei Niang’s Long-Lost First Writings: Young Lady’s Collection
By Norman Smith. Routledge, 2023.

In 1944, the novel Xie (Crabs) by Mei Niang (1916-2013) was honored with the Japanese Empire’s highest literary award, Novel of the Year. Then, at the peak of her popularity, Mei Niang published in Japanese-owned, Chinese-language journals and newspapers in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-1945), Japan, and north China. Contemporaries lauded her writings, especially for introducing liberalism to Manchuria’s literary world. In Maoist China, however, Mei Niang was condemned as a traitor and a Rightist with her life and career torn to shreds until her formal vindication in the late 1970s. In 1997, Mei Niang was named one of “Modern China’s 100 Writers.” The collection that is translated in this volume, Xiaojie ji (Young lady’s collection), was published in 1936, when she was 19 years old. Long thought forever lost in the violence of China’s civil war and Maoist strife, the collection was only re-discovered in 2019.

This is the first book-length, English-language translation of the work of this high-profile, prolific New Woman writer from Northeast China. Mei Niang’s Long-Lost First Writings will appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, the Japanese Empire, historic fiction, history, women’s/gender history, and students in undergraduate and graduate level courses. To date, English-language volumes of translated Chinese literature have rarely focused on Manchukuo’s Chinese writers or centered on those who left the puppet state by 1935. This volume fills an important historical lacuna – a teenaged Chinese woman’s views of life and literature in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

Waiting To Be Arrested at Night

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Source: NPR (8/1/23)
‘Waiting To Be Arrested At Night’ is the story of a Uyghur poet’s escape
By Emily Feng, NPR

Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the best-known living Uyghur poets. He left Xinjiang amid a Chinese crackdown on the Uyghur people — an escape at the heart of his book, Waiting To Be Arrested At Night.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

One of the greatest living Uyghur poets lives in Washington, D.C. Tahir Hamut Izgil escaped from his native Xinjiang to the U.S. in 2018. At that time, rights groups say the Chinese government was detaining at least hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and imprisoning writers that Izgil worked with. His new book about this experience, “Waiting To Be Arrested At Night,” has just been published, and NPR’s Emily Feng talked to him about the process of writing it.

TAHIR HAMUT IZGIL: (Speaking Uyghur).

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: To remember is important. But for those who remember, like Tahir Hamut Izgil, the memories are a painful responsibility.

IZGIL: (Through interpreter) I myself don’t like to reread my own book. Every time I read part of it, I feel like I’m going through those events again. Continue reading Waiting To Be Arrested at Night →

Eulogy for Maureen Robertson

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Eulogy for Dr. Maureen Robertson

Dr. Maureen Annette Robertson passed away on July 27 2023 in Stoughton, Wisconsin at the age of 87, in comfort and peace.

Dr. Robertson was a professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa from 1976 to 2017, and was one of the pre-eminent scholars of Chinese medieval women’s writing.  She inspired and trained a generation of women scholars in what she entered as an overwhelmingly male discipline, forging ties between literary translation, comparative literature, and feminism.  Her pathbreaking analytic work on identifying and magnifying women authors in the Ming and early Qing Dynasties – a period during which women were officially forbidden to be literate – was matched by the precise elegance and clarity of her translations; what one colleague called “her exacting words, a model of intellectual vigor and stylistic beauty.” She poured matchless energy into mentoring, and her advisees recall the tirelessness and generosity of the line-editing and compositional notes she provided, her house always open and her ear always ready.  Her work and her advisees stand as a formidable legacy, the more so because of the forces arrayed against women of her generation trying to establish a space and a voice in academia. Being a scholar, a mentor, and a writer was her passion and her deepest calling.

She earned her MA from Indiana University in 1960 and her PhD from the University of Washington in 1970 as a student of Dr. Hellmut Wilhelm.  Her dissertation was on the male T’ang poet Lǐ Hè (李贺), but during a year doing research in Taiwan in 1965 she was already laying the foundations for a life of work on women’s writing.  This was, her advisors assured her, empty and meaningless work, because it was well known that women didn’t write in medieval China.  Knowing this to be false, she nonetheless, in her own initial notes towards the very idea of exploring a literary thematics of gender, tentatively asked “of what interest is this topic?”.  Unsure and finding no external validation, she made her own.  By 1990, she was a senior figure in a small but prolific group of women researching the lives and writing of medieval women in China, who met that year at UCLA in the Colloquium on Poetry and Women’s Culture in Late Imperial China, and included Kang-i Sun Chang, Ellen Widmer, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann.  Over her long career, she directly advised nearly 50 graduate degrees and sat on over 150 graduate committees. Continue reading Eulogy for Maureen Robertson →

Shi shenghuo/Poemlife site to close

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The website Shi shenghuo 诗生活 (www.poemlife.com) will close on August 12. Here’s the announcement. Shi shenghuo was founded in 2000. Through a community effort sustained for over twenty years, it has been a clearing house for Chinese poetry in the internet age and now constitutes something of an archive. Its emergence was part of the dynamic of poetry going online at the turn of the century, but its content is by no means limited to born-digital material. As is true for most archives, it can lay no claim to completeness by a long shot, and contributors differ greatly in what they have contributed and for how long, for instance in the “Poet chapters” (诗人专栏) that allow individual authors to showcase their work and its paratexts. Regardless, Shi shenghuo is a low-threshold treasure trove of source material, including the kind that is unlikely to be officially published. It will be sorely missed.

Maghiel van Crevel <m.van.crevel@hum.leidenuniv.nl>

Untamed Shrews

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China (Cornell University Press, Cornell East Asia Series, 2023).

ABSTRACT

Untamed Shrews traces the evolution of unruly women in Chinese literature, from the reviled “shrew” to the celebrated “new woman.” Notorious for her violence, jealousy, and promiscuity, the character of the shrew personified the threat of unruly femininity to the Confucian social order and served as a justification for punishing any woman exhibiting these qualities. In this book, Shu Yang connects these shrewish qualities to symbols of female empowerment in modern China. Rather than meeting her demise, the shrew persisted, and her negative qualities became the basis for many forms of the new woman, ranging from the early Republican suffragettes and Chinese Noras, to the Communist and socialist radicals. Criticism of the shrew endured, but her vicious, sexualized, and transgressive nature became a source of pride, placing her among the ranks of liberated female models. Untamed Shrews shows that whether male writers and the state hate, fear, or love them, there will always be a place for the vitality of unruly women. Unlike in imperial times, the shrew in modern China stayed untamed as an inspiration for the new woman. Continue reading Untamed Shrews →

Orphaned Images–cfp

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Greetings,

We are pleased to share a new CFP for our May 2025 issue (15:1) of Trans Asia Photography.

Orphaned Images: Found or Inherited
Guest edited by Sabeena Gadihoke

This call focuses on the image whose origins are uncertain and history unknown. Photographs have usually been linked to the idea of the evidentiary. Even as the digital turn opens up possibilities of endless transmutation of the image, the photograph’ still retains its evidentiary status in official documents or in the everyday practice ofmaking memories.’ The idea of photographic evidence grounds the subject, whatever it may be, to a world that exists and can be known. But how do we understand the photograph that has floated away from its context and come unmoored from its history?  Or a photograph that carries traces of partial or incomplete histories or has tenuous links to original circumstances of production and circulation. How have `finders’, ‘discoverers’ or inheritors of such images, engaged with them?  How does the orphaned and found image tell its story?

The issue will explore the stories that have been mapped onto photographs of unknown provenance or ones for which only partial information is available thereby confronting the reader with challenges. It explores the possibilities that such an image can take its reader, precisely because it has been liberated from its own history, on an uncharted imagined journey. It is perhaps possible that an orphaned image, either found or inherited, has the potential to turn us into detectives, story-tellers, poets or visionaries. Continue reading Orphaned Images–cfp →

East Asian Serial Dramas

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The Global Storytelling journal is happy to announce the publication of our special issue, “East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming” (edited by Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu), which has gone live:

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/gs/issue/214/info/.

The featured articles in the special issue include —

“The Therapeutic and the Transgressive: Chinese Fansub Straddling between Hollywood IP Laws and Chinese State Censorship,” by Ying Zhu

“Japanese Dramas and the Streaming Success Story That Wasn’t: How Industry Practices and IP Shape Japan’s Access to Global Streaming,” by David Humphrey

“Transmedia Adaptation, Sonic Affect, and Multisensory Participation in Contemporary Chinese Danmei Radio Drama,” by Yucong Hao

“The Nostalgic Negotiation of Post-TV Legibility in Mom, Don’t Do That!,” by Eunice Ying Ci Lim

“How Pachinko Mirrors Migrant Life: Rethinking the Temporal, Spatial, and Linguistic Dimensions of Migration,” by Winnie Yanjing Wu

Regards,

The Editorial Team of Global Storytelling

Academic poaching

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Source: The China Project (7/28/23)
Inside China’s annual academic poaching competition
Every summer, China’s top two universities, Beida and Tsinghua, go to war. The competition is intense, like Division I powerhouses in the U.S. recruiting the same five-star athletes, only Beida and Tsinghua are after the country’s best students.
By Justin Olsvik

Illustration for The China Project by Derek Zheng

Each year, within minutes of the posting of the national college examination (gāokǎo 高考) results, a fierce battle erupts in provinces across China. The fight is not between students, though, but between two of China’s most admired institutions: Tsinghua and Peking University.

Armies of phone operators barrage families with calls. Teams of recruiters that were dispatched in the preceding days have already established “bases” in hotel conference rooms, ready at a moment’s notice to pick up the candidates from their homes and bring them in to be wooed and pressured into signing on. Each school has the goal of recruiting the country’s top academic performers to boost their respective minimum entrance requirements — the higher the threshold, the more prestigious their reputation.

And indeed, the prestige these universities enjoy within the borders of the country is difficult to understate, coming as a surprise to many foreigners. Chinese society holds formal education in high regard, and Tsinghua and Peking (usually referred to colloquially as Beida) are in a league of their own, verging on legendary. There are just over 3,000 universities in mainland China, and “TsingBei” (à la “Oxbridge”) top the school rankings from both Chinese and Western assessments every year. Crowds of tourists can be seen year-round snapping selfies at the gates, and mentioning to someone that you come from the alma mater of Lǐ Kèqiáng 李克强 (Beida) or Xi Jinping (Tsinghua) is a ticket to instant approval. Entry to all that glory is largely based on a single number from each hopeful applicant — their gaokao score. Continue reading Academic poaching →

Onstage and online, it’s the Party’s rules

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Source: China Media Project (7/25/23)
Onstage and Online, It’s the Party’s Rules
As the pandemic raged, live online performances took off in China, filling the offline gap and giving post-90s audiences a much-needed outlet. Now, say the authorities, it’s time to retune — and reassert control over a growing market.
By David Bandurski

Image by Azchael available at Flickr.com under CC license.

Over the past three years, as the global pandemic and China’s strict lockdown policies closed the curtain on performances at live venues across the country, the spotlight turned instead to streaming platforms, which offered a new way for performing artists to be seen and heard. By June 2022, the audience in China for live online performances through streaming and short video platforms reached 469 million, more than double the audience at the start of the Covid lockdown just two years earlier.

Those numbers point to a market rapidly on the rise. But last week, a state-backed professional organization for the performing arts sector offered a more mixed assessment as it issued a set of new standards for live performance on streaming platforms.

“The rapid development of live online performances has played a positive role in boosting consumption, especially during the difficult period during the Covid-19 pandemic,” said the China Association of Performing Arts (CAPA), which doubles as a control and regulatory body for the performing arts sector. “However, it has also led to problems and negative events. The healthy environment for live online performance needs to be strengthened.” Continue reading Onstage and online, it’s the Party’s rules →

China erases Qin Gang

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Source: NYT (7/27/23)
After Ousting a Top Official, China Erases Him and Evades Questions
China blasted “malicious hype” around the abrupt removal of Qin Gang. The Foreign Ministry’s fumbling response pointed to its diminished influence under Xi Jinping.
By David Pierson

A man in a dark suit and tie waves into the distance.

China’s former foreign minister, Qin Gang, in Beijing earlier this year.Credit…Thomas Peter/Reuters

China’s abrupt removal of Qin Gang as foreign minister did not stop the questions that had dogged Chinese officials in the month since he vanished from public view: Where is Mr. Qin? Does he have health issues? Is he under investigation?

Representatives of the Foreign Ministry have struggled to respond when pressed by reporters, repeatedly saying that they had no information to provide. After China replaced him on Tuesday, nearly all references to Mr. Qin were scrubbed from the ministry’s website, an unusual erasure that has only deepened the intrigue. On Thursday, asked by a reporter if China had been transparent about Mr. Qin’s ousting, a spokeswoman lashed out at what she called “malicious hype.”

For a department tasked with speaking to the outside world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s floundering response to the disappearance of one of its own top officials highlights the weakness of China’s diplomatic apparatus under President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has concentrated power under himself and enforced secrecy in an already highly opaque system, no matter the cost to China’s international image.

Mr. Xi has diminished the sway of the Foreign Ministry, analysts say, as he’s pursued an increasingly assertive, and some say risky, foreign policy. Continue reading China erases Qin Gang →

Made in Censorship review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeremy Brown’s review of Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film, by Thomas Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jeremy-brown/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen
Movement in Chinese Literature and Film

By Thomas Chen

Reviewed by Jeremy Brown

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)

Thomas Chen, Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, xii + 248 pp. ISBN: 9780231204019 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780231204002 (Hardcover).

Censorship and restricted research access can spark creativity and open up new paths, as Thomas Chen’s Made in Censorship shows. I first experienced this myself during the 2000s, when I went to the flea market in search of documents after archive staff denied me access to what I wanted to read. That denial of access shaped my project in fruitful and beneficial ways. And when I encountered state-enforced amnesia about June Fourth, I was so bothered by the lies and erasures that I chose to write a book about the topic. So did Thomas Chen. Like so many other artistic and scholarly projects related to China, our works were sparked by censorship and, as Chen argues, made in censorship.

Chinese censorship literally shaped Made in Censorship. Chen received Chinese government funding that contributed to the publication of his thought-provoking book. Think about that.  The Chinese party-state funded a project that resulted in a book with the words “Tiananmen Movement” in the title, although Chen wisely framed his project in safe and innocuous terms while researching in China. Chen also participated in what he calls a “collaborative” and “collegial” (133) process of censoring a Chinese translation of one of his articles, a revised version of which appears in this book, revealing what censors excised. These backstories, which Chen recounts with thoughtful reflexivity, enliven and enrich the book. They support Chen’s point that cinematic, literary, and scholarly output about June Fourth is not only possible, but has been occurring continuously in China since 1989. Continue reading Made in Censorship review →