Blotted Copybooks: A Surprisingly "Face-Losing Cultural Event" in China

By Xujun Eberlein on June 19, 2012

Late last month, a "cultural event" involving 100 prominent Chinese writers quietly made the news: each of them had hand-copied a passage of Mao Zedong's 1942 "Yan'an Talks on Literature and Arts" for a publication celebrating the 70th anniversary of the speeches. The writers felt they had done nothing out of the ordinary—"no different from the numerous commemorative activities held every day", as one of them, the popular novelist Chi Li, put it.

Inside-Out China

on June 19, 2012

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Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a Ph.D. from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up algorithms  for writing. She has since won a bunch of literary awards. Her stories and personal essays have been published in the United States, Canada, England, Kenya, and Hong Kong, in magazines such as AGNI, Walrus, PRISM International, StoryQuarterly, Stand and Kwani. Her debut story collection Apologies Forthcoming won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award and was published in June 2008.  She is the recipient of a 2008 artist fellowship in fiction/creative nonfiction from theMassachusetts Cultural Council. 

China: Witnessing the Birth of a Superpower

By Jonathan Watts on June 19, 2012

When I moved to Beijing in August 2003, I believed I had the best job in the world: working for my favourite newspaper in the biggest nation at arguably the most dramatic phase of transformation in its history. In the past decade, it has given me a front-row seat to watch 200-odd years of industrial development playing at fast forward on a continent-wide screen with a cast of more than a billion.

The Gray Zone: How Chinese Writers Elude Censors

By Louisa Lim and Jeffrey Wasserstrom on June 19, 2012

Two months ago at the London Book Fair, where China was this year’s “guest of honor,” Ma Jian, the exiled author of the Tiananmen-era novel “Beijing Coma,” inked a red X across his face in an emotional protest against Chinese censorship. It may be a sign of the times that while drawing attention from the Western press, the move went almost unnoticed by other Chinese authors present, many of whom still live in China and find ways to circumvent the authorities.

Rat World (Photographs)

By Sim Chi Yin on June 18, 2012

Picture Beijing, and a skyline of fancy steel architecture and clouds of smog likely come to mind. But the most fitting metaphor for the city's growing pains may lie beneath its streets: In the past two decades, underground storage basements, parking lots, and air-raid shelters have found new life as apartments, partitioned into untold thousands of cramped, windowless rooms. It's here that many thousands of Beijing's estimated 7 million migrant laborers make their homes, lured underground by low rents ($100 or less a month) and a better -- if unconventional -- life in the capital. Over the past two years, photojournalist Sim Chi Yin has documented this subterranean world known in the Chinese media as home of the "rat tribe," recording the odd mix of quaint domesticity that has managed to flourish within the drafty, moldy cells. Beijingers from every line of work populate these hidden spaces; they are the waiters and hairdressers, fruit-sellers and manicurists of the gilded new capital taking shape above them.

Urban Life
Rat tribe, Urban Planning, Beijing, Basements

Recurring Dreams for the Rule of Law

on June 18, 2012

On the Beijing campus of the China University of Political Science and Law stands a dramatic monument inscribed with the words of legal expert and former university president Jiang Ping: “Rule of Law for Everyone.”

Jiang’s words carry special weight, even from retirement, because for decades he stood up to—and survived—ideological opposition that nearly crushed his quest for individual rights, academic independence, and free speech in modern China.

How Chinese Writers Elude Censors

By Louisa Lim and Jeffrey Wasserstrom on June 18, 2012

Two months ago at the London Book Fair, where China was this year’s “guest of honor,” Ma Jian, the exiled author of the Tiananmen-era novel “Beijing Coma,” inked a red X across his face in an emotional protest against Chinese censorship. It may be a sign of the times that while drawing attention from the Western press, the move went almost unnoticed by other Chinese authors present, many of whom still live in China and find ways to circumvent the authorities.

Arts, Politics, Society
Censorship, The Great Firewall, Ma Jian, Murong Xuecun