“Brother Six” tells how he smuggled more than 100 protesters to safety after the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989
5:30AM BST 18 May 2014
It is almost 25 years since the crackdown on a pro-democracy movement around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 led to a bloody massacre.
How a Triad gangster saved Tiananmen Square demonstrators已关闭评论
Posted in Headlines, June 4th Commemoration
by Harrison Lee on Monday, May 12, 2014
Japanese manga/anime covers, in a Sina Weibo post reporting that Chinese video site licensing of Japanese anime has come to a halt following recent Chinese government policy.
Chinese Video Websites Halt Buying of Japanese Anime已关闭评论
Posted in Headlines
Tagged Internet Freedom, Video Websites
While code language emerges online as a response to government-blocked words, censorship regulators are increasingly finding ways to decode that language. Future SIPA courses hope to explore digital media surveillance in today’s world
Digital Activism: Blocked on Weibo, Encouraged at SIPA已关闭评论
Posted in Headlines
Tagged Internet Freedom, Weibo
By China Change, published: May 18, 2014
TANG JINGLING (唐荆陵)
In Guangzhou, renowned rights lawyer Tang Jingling (唐荆陵) was criminally detained on May 16, for “provoking disturbance,” according to weiquanwang, a primary website reporting on China’s rights defense events.
Two More Rights Lawyers Criminally Detained, Another’s Home Searched已关闭评论
Posted in Headlines
Tagged Human Rights Lawyer, Jiang Tianyong, June 4th, Liu Shihui, Tang Jingling, Tiananmen
JUNE 4, 2011 · 9:50 AM
In memoriam of those who perished on 4 June 1989 on Tiananmen Square. An accidental cross-examination with the Chinese exile author Ma Jian, who dares to remember China’s past in his novel Beijing Coma.
by Julie O’Yang © 2011
The first time when I met Ma Jian, it was two years ago on a wintry day in Brussels. We were both at Europalia, Festival biennal des Arts et de la Culture hosted by the European capital. It sounds better than it is. While a cold wind blew outside the large windows of Royal Museum of Fine Art, the vibes inside reminded me somewhat of Commissaire Maigret coloured haphazardly with a child’s felt pen set. Two days before my publisher had phoned to ask me if I could help a Chinese author named Ma Jian, who was on
the Continent to be interviewed by Dutch/Flemish media. “He needs an interpreter. You get paid for the job,” my publisher had said. Certainly, I had answered. The same afternoon I set out to do my research.
I knew Ma Jian from my high school years in China. His short story collection about Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, caused quite a stir at the time. “Stick out your tongue” is what a doctor says when you go to a hospital in China as part of forming a diagnosis. In his stories, the author portrayed a Tibet and Tibetan Culture in a harsh, unpretty but honest way, contrary to the popular, romantic version a la Heinrich Harrer. I don’t remember if I particularly liked the book, but back then I read China’s literary avant-gardists with gusto and devoured every letter that came my way. The fact that language became an enjoyable game, and the outcome excited me and brought me sensational shocks. Six months after the military crash on Tiananmen Square, I went abroad to study. Consequently, I lost track of the literary
scene from my motherland as I myself was left to the hand of fate. I needed to fill some serious gaps, that’s for sure.
By AMY QIN JANUARY 6, 2014, 4:02 AM 17 Comments
Associated Press
For decades, one of Mark Twain’s satires of American politics was required reading in Chinese schools.
There are few authors regarded as quintessentially American as Mark Twain. With his preternatural gift for capturing vernacular expression and his roguish wit, Twain is still widely seen as the founder of the American voice. More than a century after his death, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain’s most celebrated work, remains a mainstay of middle school and high school English classes. Ernest Hemingway famously declared it the book from which “all modern American literature comes.”
Twain’s writings have won him literary fame in China as well. Although “Huckleberry Finn,” with more than 90 different translations in Chinese, is a favorite, a large portion of Twain’s popularity in China derives in fact from another, much more obscure work: a short story called “Running for Governor.”
A humorous account of Twain’s fictional candidacy in the 1870 New York gubernatorial election, “Running for Governor” was taught alongside the writings by Mao Zedong and other prominent Chinese thinkers and literary figures in middle schools across China for more than 40 years. In this time, it was read by several generations and millions of Chinese, making Mark Twain one of the best-known foreign writers in China and “Running for Governor” one of his best-known works.
“Just about anyone who has had a middle-school education in China knows Mark Twain and ‘Running for Governor,’ ” Su Wenjing, a comparative literature professor at Fuzhou University, said in a telephone interview. “And everyone remembers the specific cultural moment and social critique represented in the story, this is certain.”
Published in the literary magazine Galaxy just after the New York gubernatorial election in 1870, “Running for Governor” is a satire that takes aim at what Twain saw as the hypocrisy of the American electoral process and the dog-eat-dog nature of party politics. In the brief yet imaginative sketch, Twain finds himself nominated to run for New York governor on an independent ticket, only to be overwhelmed by a slew of false ad hominem attacks from several unnamed accusers.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2013
by CARLA NAPPI on MAY 15, 2014
Xiaojue Wang
View on Amazon
1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature have written 1949 as a radical break, Xiaojue Wang’s new book takes a different approach. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) offers a new perspective on mid-twentieth century Chinese literature by situating it within the international context of the Cold War. After introducing the cultural and political policies of the 1940s and 1950s as espoused by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kaishek, and the New Confucianists, Wang guides readers through a series of chapters that each explore the work of an author who was busily imagining a modern nation while writing from mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. These case studies introduce a collection of fascinating writer-characters that include a historian who had a job writing labels for museum collections, a born-again revolutionary whose feminist writing had material consequences that followed her (and her corpse) after death, a translator of Rilke and Goethe, a compulsive re-writer who created a Nightmare in the Red Chamber, and many more. In the culmination of the study, Wang suggests a “de-Cold War criticism” as a way of thinking beyond the typical boundaries of literary history. Enjoy!
XIAOJUE WANG：Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide已关闭评论
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged China, Cold War, XIAOJUE WANG
More Zhejiang demolitions; overseas Christian books banned from Amazon-like site
ICC Note:
The article discusses the ongoing church demolition in Zhejiang province, China, and the government’s action in limiting the online selling of overseas Christian books. Last month, the government also stopped the Amity Foundation, the largest printer for Bibles.
05/15/2014 China (ChinaAid)- Two more churches were demolished in China’s coastal Zhejiang province last week in a continuation of the province’s campaign to demolish “illegal structures,” and persecution has spread to the web.
Less than two weeks after Sanjiang Church, a large Protestant church, was demolished in Yongjia County, Wenzhou, and less than one week after numerous other demolitions in Zhejiang, authorities tore down Shangwan Church and Hebin Churcn in Longwan District, Wenzhou (see http://www.chinaaid.org/2014/04/zhejiang-christians-fear-sanjiang.html and http://www.chinaaid.org/2014/05/more-zhejiang-churches-report-threats.html).
On May 8, authorities arrived at Hebin Church and claimed the church building was an “illegal structure.” Believers said that construction workers completely razed and cleared the site in just two hours. Then, Shangwan Church, which was built in 1868, was demolished on May 9 in drizzling rain.
Chinese Government Limits Online Selling of Christian Books已关闭评论
Posted in Headlines
Tagged Christian, Religious Freedom
