My head turned when I saw the poster. I was in China for the Dali International Photography Exhibition — where I was curating two shows — when I saw this beautiful image of a dignified little girl whose face bore the traces of some genetic disease. Yet there she was in her little pink dress, posed as if she were about to perform a complicated ballet move.
It all started with a question from the translator Nicky Harman: "What are you going to do about the market focus on China at the London Book Fair?" Well, I don't know, I just stared at my cup—we were in the Guardian canteen, of course. In my defence, I'd like to point out that this was months ago, way before Christmas, and by the time I'd finished my coffee we'd cooked up a plan to publish some of the most exciting new short fiction from China.
Say what you like about Mao, he did make it remarkably easy to keep up with developments in Chinese fiction. Thanks to his proscriptions on creative freedom, fictional output fell precipitously during his reign. An average of eight, increasingly socialist realist novels were published each year between 1949 and 1966. That figure shrank further during the Cultural Revolution. Staying abreast of translations was simpler still: until the early 1980s, it was virtually impossible for a mainland Chinese writer to strike up an independent relationship with a western translator. Anglophone readers had to rely on translations of establishment authors published by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press.
HONG KONG–At first glance, David Hogue seems like an unlikely reality TV star. He isn’t an acid-tongued Brit or a member of a once famous hair band. He has little penchant for drunken fist-fights, or marathon “smooshfests.” And, of course, his name isn’t “Snooki.” Instead, he’s a bookish, 26-year-old Princeton graduate completing a master’s degree in ancient Chinese classics at Nanjing University. Yet three years ago, as he was walking between classes, a producer from the Jiangsu Variety Channel, a television station in one of China’s eastern provinces, invited him to compete on a game show.
Southern Metropolis Daily‘s City Weekly compiled a list of “Hierarchies of Snobbery” or “Hierarchies of Contempt” on April 7th, 2012. These hierarchies show the multi-layered prejudices amongst Chinese when it comes to how the products, brands, sports, media, academic disciplines, music, movies, fashion, etc. they choose reflect their intelligence, sense of fashion taste and fashion, originality, or how “international” they are.
I realised that the history of Chinese literature has often been shaped from outside of its society—by exiled writers and thinkers. From [3rd century BC Chinese poet] Qu Yuan to Confucius, the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty, right up to modern novels today, you find that those authors who in the end became central to Chinese culture were at the time writing from outside of their country—exiled, pushed out or banned.
The doubts about reading an early Chinese text like Zhuangzi with French writers whose works are approached through criticisms totally soaked in (post-)structuralist theories, as well as the insistence in Chinese Studies on historical context and the tradition of textual commentaries that refuse to gel with the free-flowing pan-nutritional fluid of Western literary theories, have made me think more than ever about what “comparison” precisely is, how comparability is important to it, and why it is a particularly difficult issue in Chinese Studies done in Western academia.
The production, transportation and consumption of tea—Pu'er tea in this case—is itself a tangible item which has generated over time a series of associated social and cultural practices that unites the disparate peoples of Yunnan. Thus, the tea road and tea fit comfortably into the marketing vision of Yunnan as a 'cultural whole' and feature in all the counties, towns and cities that are touched on by them as a key element of provincial 'branding'.
[Platt] has written the next great history of the Taiping rebels. And his argument—which is fresh and important—is that this idea that China was unchangeable and not a significant factor in the world’s history in the 19th century is just plain wrong. Aided by the patently clear fact that China matters now, Platt has marshaled a powerful case that the rebellion—and China—mattered then.
China’s apparent immunity to the 2008 financial crisis led many talking heads and columnists to argue that the Chinese growth model – a cocktail of authoritarian political control and so-called “state capitalism” – represented a new way forward for economies everywhere.
