For the last few days, international attention has focused on the small fishing town of Wukan in southern China, where villagers are in open revolt. Simmering tensions caused by corruption and illegal land sales have escalated into an armed uprising by locals against security forces and local government, both of which have been driven into at least temporary exile.
Over the past two weeks, the Western press has focused on a striking story out of China: a riveting series of protests in Wukan, a fishing village in the country’s prosperous south. The story is depressingly familiar: Corrupt cadres sell off public land and villagers get nothing. Anger builds and protests erupt. Inept local officials negotiate and then turn to violence, in this case encircling the town with police in hopes of starving the population into submission.
This autumn, China has been marking the one hundredth anniversary of the collapse of its last imperial dynasty, the Qing, with a series of grand celebrations. The government has released an epic film showing how the revolution of 1911 prepared the way for the Communists’ takeover in 1949. It’s also just opened a museum about the uprising in the Yangtze metropolis of Wuhan where the revolution started. And the National Library in Beijing is hosting an exhibition with the not-so-subtle title “Awakening of the East.”
Late spring is art fair season, and last week's dramatic news that Art Basel, the best art fair in the world, will take ownership of Asia's new star Art HK has caught much of the art world by surprise. Under new ownership, the fair, already recognized as the premier contemporary art event in Asia, has the chance to become truly world-class. China has wanted a world-class fair for about as long as it's had an art world to speak of (as opposed to a tiny art "circle"), which is to say, for about five years.
On September 29, 1910, a young Chinese cook in Berkeley named George Fong bought himself a .38 caliber revolver. The next day he hiked up into the hills behind the fraternity house where he worked at the University of California, found a secluded valley amongst the brown grasses and sprawling nurseries of eucalyptus, and taught himself how to shoot. One week later, he made his way down to the Oakland Ferry Terminal and joined a crowd of onlookers who thronged its railway platform in wait for the arriving train of Prince Zaixun, the uncle of the emperor of China.
Shortly after his arrival in China, the late great 19th-century Sinologist Robert Hart would write his frustrations in his private diary, confiding that the convoluted phonemes of the Chinese language struck him like nothing so much as “the sounds one would make talking to a horse,” and bemoaning his placement in Shanghai, a damnable city far from the imperial capital where he considered it impossible to pick up Mandarin “through one’s skin.”
The Chinese government agency that English speakers know as SARFT has several monikers. Its full name is the State Administration for Radio, Film, and Television.
Our podcast this week is all about books and money in modern China. If you, like us, are tired of Lu Xun and Lao She, listen to Sinica this week as we look into the state of contemporary Chinese literature, asking what writers are hot, what writers are not, and even the more humdrum question of how much authors make these days.
Today, we’re pleased to share a special live edition of Sinica recorded last Saturday at Capital M in Beijing. Held to a standing-room only crowd, we talked all about our ongoing love-hate relationship with Beijing, and asked what on earth is happening to the city that so many of us have known since the 1980s and even earlier. As housing prices and rents soar, hutong get ripped down, and “crazy bad” air becomes the new normal, will Beijing maintain its heart as a cultural capital, or is the city losing itself and our affections?
Falling housing prices, soaring inflation, and an export market peering over the brink of what seems a cataclysmic abyss. If you’ve been following the economic news lately, you can be forgiven for being overwhelmed by the chorus of bearish voices crying out that now—at last—the time has come for the Chinese economy to pay penance for its years of impressive economic growth. Is this really the end of good times?
