“But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all.”
—CC contributor Evan Osnos, in his blog post “Apple, China, and the Truth,” which explores the meaning of Mike Daisey’s “This American Life” fabrications and the value of Rob Schmitz’s digging that exposed them.
March 2012
57 posts
Red Songs, Black Boxes and the Tale of Bo Xilai →
asiasociety.org
A Chinese Characters co-editor weighs in on the Bo Xilai Story.
“[T]he 2002 shift from party boss Jiang Zemin and his premier, Zhu Rongji, to Hu and Wen…was not easy—Jiang tried to hang on and stock the Politburo with his men, which took several years for Hu to reverse…Bo’s case shows that this transition will be at least as complicated as the one a decade ago…”
—CC contributor Ian Johnson on Bo Xilai’s downward trajectory and what is says about the looming leadership transition; from “China’s Falling Star,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books blog
Knight News Challenge: Filling Foreign News Gaps with Scholars: Asia Beat →
newschallenge.tumblr.com
Chinese Characters editors Angilee Shah and Jeff Wasserstrom have a proposal in the Knight Digital News Challenge. Reactions? Thoughts? Please leave some feedback.
1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]Fill gaps in foreign news by encouraging scholars on Asia to engage in social media and public discourse.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]Country-specific blogs exist, but no network spans Asia and…
“Sigh. Still the same thing,” wrote another microblogger. It’s just power, the blogger said, “changing from the left hand to the right hand.”
—A Chinese user of the Twitter-like weibo service on the blocking of “leftish” websites around the time of Bo Xilai’s fall; quoted in the Wall Street Journal piece: “Did Bo’s Ouster Knock Out China’s ‘Red’ Sites.”
The Liu Wen Express →
nytimes.com
Christina Larson, who profiles an environmentalist in Chinese Characters, shows her range with this New York Times Sunday Magazine profile of “China’s first bona fide supermodel.”
“But as everyone is pouncing on this story [of Bo Xilai’s fall] as an illustration of internal Party struggles over the future and the 18th Party Congress, let’s not forget that it is also about the past. Bo Xilai has symbolized nostalgia over the Maoist era, and many on China’s left have been supportive of this.”
—David Bandurski of China Media Project on Bo Xilai’s fall as covered in the Chinese press—and how the story related to arguments about historical issues (the same ones highlighted in Xujun Eberlein’s chapter in Chinese Characters)
India, China, and the Importance of Storytelling →
miller-mccune.com
Chinese Characters co-editor Angilee Shah discusses Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and why great stories are so important for Miller-McCune.
“China Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang has replaced Bo Xilai as the Communist Party chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.”
—Breaking news report by the Wall Street Journal, relevant to Xujun Eberlein’s chapter in Chinese Characters; changing of the guard in Chongqing.
The Slang Chinese Bloggers Use to Subvert Censorship →
theatlanticwire.com
The Atlantic offers a nice primer, drawn from the invaluable China Digital Times, which takes the uninitiated through some choice word play (typically involving homonyms) that is used in Internet cat and mouse games between PRC netizens and those trying to rein in the net.
“Mandarin is an artificial construct that developed over time so that people in various regions of China could communicate with each other… standard Mandarin is an artificial language which no one speaks as their native tongue.”
—From a good Browser Q & A with Chris Livacarri of the Asia Society about “Chinese characters” (and language in general) that emphasizes diversity within the country and interconnections between China and other parts of the world (past and present), with 5 suggested books all worth reading.
“Water in the twenty-first century could easily become what oil was to the twentieth century—a harbinger of both wealth and war.”
—Contributor Christina Larson writes of water politics in China (a theme of her chapter) and other parts of Asia in “Not a Drop to Drink,” an essay in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly.
“The short story is the ideal literary form for a country suffering so acutely from attention deficit disorder: long enough to capture a meaningful fragment of this confounding country; (usually) brief enough to prevent authors reaching for melodramatic plot hinges or slack description.”
—Julia Lovell, a gifted translator and prolific writer on Chinese culture, in her Prospect essay “The Key to China,” which tracks changes in literary life since Mao’s time and claims less can be more when it comes to current Chinese fiction.
“China’s troubled Railway Ministry on Monday lowered the top operating speed for its flagship Beijing-to-Shanghai bullet train, which is set to open later this month, scaling down what was supposed to be a pinnacle of a transformed rail system that has become one of the country’s proudest and most ambitious domestic initiatives.”
—From a New York Times report by Chinese Characters contributor Ian Johnson on the latest twists in the high-speed rail story—with comments at the end about a related “rare protest in tightly controlled central Beijing,” triggered by complaints about corruption in railway ministry hiring.
Kids, Your Great-Granddad Was 70% Right →
blogs.wsj.com
Chinese Characters deals in various chapters with the challenge of coming to terms with events of the past (including the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, the theme of Xujun Eberlein’s chapter); this Wall Street Journal blog post looks at the distinctive issue historical legacy present to the parents of Chairman Mao’s great-grand-children.
“A final then and now contrast has to do with U.S. views of China. In the late 1970s, many Americans fell into one of two basic camps. One group viewed China as a dangerous foe simply because it was run by “Reds”…A second group viewed China much more sympathetically, as a country with good people and finally a leader who was moving it in the right direction. With the pragmatic Deng in charge, they hoped, China would be able to recover from the Mao years…Americans in this group were rooting for Deng to achieve the “Four Modernizations,” as they worried about a China that was too weak to feed its massive population.
Flash forward to the present and we see a very different set of American attitudes toward China. The concern now is not that China is part of a some grand global anti-capitalist bloc centered in Moscow, but that it may have carved out a way of combining politically restrictive one-party rule with elements of anything-goes capitalism a la Singapore that other countries intent of developing fast will find appealing. And there is more fear of China becoming too strong than it being too weak.” —From text by Jeff Wasserstrom accompanying a series of photos of a changing China by Tom Carter.
Flash forward to the present and we see a very different set of American attitudes toward China. The concern now is not that China is part of a some grand global anti-capitalist bloc centered in Moscow, but that it may have carved out a way of combining politically restrictive one-party rule with elements of anything-goes capitalism a la Singapore that other countries intent of developing fast will find appealing. And there is more fear of China becoming too strong than it being too weak.” —From text by Jeff Wasserstrom accompanying a series of photos of a changing China by Tom Carter.
Fender To Bring More Clapton to China with IPO →
businessweek.com
What would Vic Trigger (whose efforts to teach young Chinese how to “shred” are discussed in James Millward’s chapter) say about this story of a famous rock-and-roll brand trying to get the most out of the China market?
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More reforms are needed to China’s judicial system to overcome lingering problems with transparency and corrupt judges, the country’s top judge said Sunday…in his annual report to the National People’s Congress…
In a separate report to the congress, top prosecutor Cao Jianming said prosecutors will focus on maintaining “social harmony and stability” by cracking down on “overthrowing, and infiltrating activities by foreign and domestic hostile forces.”
” —Concerns about China’s legal system (from the lack of judicial independence to concern about how much is done to limit civil liberties) loom large in Jeffrey Prescott’s chapter for Chinese Characters; mixed signals on the topic keeping coming out of the country; the Associated Press report from which these quotes are taken illustrates this.
This Friday: Chinese Characters Co-Editors' and Contributor Christina Larson on a Panel at the Association for Asian Studies Meetings →
asian-studies.org
(Though info on the web that needs updating suggests that Jeff, Angilee and Christina will all be on the Friday and Saturday panels, in fact the only one with all three will be the Friday morning one—the Saturday session will just feature Angilee and Christina…and a host of other smart and interesting people, of course!)
