Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer friend of Ai Weiwei, the artist and frequent critic of the Communist Party, has said in an online posting that Chinese officials have revoked the business license of Mr. Ai’s art production company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development.
The youngest son of Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party leader who is expected to be tried on a wide range of criminal charges, has released a statement defending his father as “upright in his beliefs and devoted to duty.”
The national identity has become so unfortunately bound up with demonstrations against Japan. So we turn from recent differences to subjects less timely. The horrors of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 have long stoked the imagination of Chinese artists. In just the past three years, two films have tackled the subject: Zhang Yimou’s “The Flowers of War” and “City of Life and Death” by Lu Chuan (on the film’s set, above). Neither director shies away from presenting the brutality of the Japanese army, who, on invading the city, murdered hundreds of thousands of people. But one difference proved crucial to the films’ longevity at the box office. The patriotic “Flowers” became the highest-grossing Chinese film of 2011. Mr Lu’s film, which cast a Japanese soldier in a nuanced light, fared well in terms of ticket sales initially but was pulled from screens prematurely, without having time for its natural run. The film-maker’s gesture of sympathy towards the Japanese side stirred too much controversy.
This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong.
The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction.
Mr. Qiu, whose best-known books are largely set in this old city, where his protagonist Inspector Chen walks around in investigations, is suited like few others to provide a lyrical accompanying text whose purpose is to celebrate the life, beauty and texture of this world before it has vanished altogether.
No photographer has pursued this subject with more dedication and persistence than Mr. French, whose photographs of Shanghai have been exhibited on four continents. Taken together, the work of these two contributors offers compelling esthetics and lasting historical value for lovers of Shanghai, past, present and future.
—Homa & Sekey Books
When looking for Chinese reactions to the anti-Japanese riots that took place in late September, it was probably not much of a surprise that the Western press turned to Han Han, the widely read Shanghai-based blogger. In characteristic form, Han gave a riff on the protests that obliquely criticized the government, while at the same time insulated himself from making a direct accusation: “As far as looting and destroying things, this must be punished by law, or else I might suspect that there was some official backing behind all this.”
