Chinese television may get more boring after the country's top broadcasting regulator issued six new guidelines banning remakes of foreign shows and demanding serials cut back on excessive family conflict and jokes in historical dramas.
This week and last, at the Lincoln Center Festival, Yeung Faï, born in the Fujian province of China and now living in France and Hong Kong, presented a show, “Hand Stories,” that was historical, political, deep, sad, and sometimes very funny. It was a puppet show. Yeung Faï is a fifth-generation puppeteer, and in a way that is characteristic, I am told, of the Chinese—in any case, it has long been typical of people in theatre arts, such as ballet and tap, that involve training from childhood—he honors his elders. At the opening of the show, we see, propped up in a row, glove puppets (which go from the fingertips to just past the wrist) representing Yeung’s grandfather, his father, and the father’s oldest son. The show’s secondary puppeteer, a big young Frenchman, Yoann Pencolé, identifies them for us. Then he points across the space to Yeung Faï and, with a bracing lack of sentimentality, tells us that Yeung Faï is the youngest son. We never find out what happened to the oldest son.
At a recent conference of Chinese political scientists and international relations scholars in Beijing, a western academic remarked that he was struck by how Chinese scholars often seemed keen to use their research to come up with advice for the Chinese state on how to advance its goals. He observed that, by contrast, western scholars were more likely to act as critics rather than aspiring advisers to their governments.
One can think of a number of explanations for the different dispositions of Chinese and western scholars. One important reason would be the Chinese system for generating “internal references” – internal reports written exclusively for high-ranking officials, and financial and other rewards for those whose reports make a good impression on those officials.
There is one clear advantage to living in mainland China: It’s always easy to separate theory and reality. We have some rights in theory, but in reality, they do not exist. Income has increased in theory, but once you get to the market, you’ll see that you can’t even afford to buy meat. In theory, some people have risen up, but actually, they’re still kneeling. In theory, you’ve moved a few mountains, but you’ve actually just fallen into a hole. In theory, you’re the master of your country, but in actuality, you live in chains.
Alison Klayman was just 24, and a China novice, when she wandered almost by accident into the tumultuous life of Ai Weiwei, China’s most outspoken artist-turned activist, in 2008. The American journalist, from a conservative Jewish upbringing in Philadelphia, spent the better part of the next three years following him around with a video camera, capturing the struggle between Mr. Ai and the one-party government he accuses of corruption and inhumanity.
When I ask Ou Ning how he would answer that perennial dinner party question, "What do you do?," he laughs. It’s not easy for one of China’s true polymaths, but he gives it a try. “I’m a cultural worker,” he offers modestly, before teasing out the twists and turns of a career that has taken him from underground poet to concert promoter to star designer to documentary film-maker to curator to biennial director to think-tank animator to literary editor and, finally, to where he finds himself presently, plotting how to revivify his country’s rural life, which has been denuded by 30 years of runaway economic reform.
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Before most readers in China learned of Romeo and Juliet, they were captivated by a love triangle between a boy and his two female cousins. It's the "single most famous love triangle in Chinese literary history," says author Pauline A. Chen, who's written the latest retelling of the tale of Jia Baoyu and his cousins Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai. The three characters form the central love story of the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng, often translated as Dream of the Red Chamber in English.
The composition of the new Politburo that will take power in late 2012, including generational attributes and individual idiosyncratic characteristics, group dynamics, and the factional balance of power, will have profound implications for China’s economic priorities, social stability, political trajectory, and foreign relations. To a great extent, these leaders’ political position and policy preferences are often shaped or constrained by their personal experience, leadership expertise, factional affiliation, and bureaucratic portfolio. It would be helpful for China-watchers overseas to grasp the biographical features of the top Chinese leaders who will likely govern the country for most of this decade and beyond. This series from China Leadership Monitor provides short biographies for the twenty-five to thirty possible members of the new Politburo.
From a procedural perspective, the removal of Bo Xilai from Chongqing and from the party Politburo resembles the 2006 purge of Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu and the 1995 takedown of Beijing City party chief Chen Xitong. Bo’s removal in that respect therefore does not indicate a departure from the “rules of the game” as played in the last two decades. From a political perspective, each of the three purges—of the two Chens and of Bo Xilai—removed an irritant to the top leadership at an important moment of transition. The Politburo leadership has, publicly at least, sustained its usual facade of unity throughout the Bo affair, and Bo’s removal likely strengthens rather than disrupts preparations for convocation of the 18th Party Congress this fall.
