Asian Studies Commons^™

5/22/89: The Hunger Of Provincials, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On the evening of May 22, BBC asked me to take one of the crews to the Square for a closer look at the protest, which was thought to be on the wane now that martial law was coming into force. We did the usual look-see, I conducted a few spot interviews and the talented camera crew captured ironic and iconic visuals. Then we took a break in front of the History Museum, parking the hotel van near the camp of the provincial students.

The protesters around us didn’t seem to mind our presence, until we decided to crack out …

Better City, Better Life, Part Ii, Gina Anne Russo

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In my first post on the “Better City, Better Life” Expo promotion campaign, I focused on the centrality within it of visions of Shanghai as a special sort of distinctively modern and distinctively international Chinese metropolis, but here I’ll emphasize the second half of the slogan, which draws attention to the quality of urban existence. Expo public advertisements don’t just glorify Shanghai’s place in the modern world, they also strive to present Shanghai as a place where good behavior is on display. For example, on the subway one day I ran across a person dressed up as Haibao, and he …

Should China Copy The West On Academic Integrity?, Susan D. Blum

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In recent years, articles have appeared from time to time in the Western press that deal with cases of plagiarism in China and speculated on what these incidents may reveal about how academic life and the educational system in the PRC work. When we learned that anthropologist Susan Blum, one of the contributors toChina Beyond the Headlines, a book that was co-edited by a contributor to China Beat (Timothy Weston) and in a sense was trying to do in print form some of the things that this blog now tries to do online, has been combining writing about various aspects …

Better City, Better Life, Gina Anne Russo

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This month began with the countdown clocks ticking away the time until the start of the 2010 Shanghai Expo hitting the one-year-to-go point, and the weeks that have followed have seen the international press pay a good deal of attention to this upcoming event, which had gotten relatively little media coverage in the Western media. There have been a flurry of op-eds (including this one by China Beat‘s Jeff Wasserstrom), reports on the question of whether the U.S. will have a national pavilion (such as this one by Shanghai Scrap‘s Adam Minter), and feature stories on the city of Shanghai …

Gordon Cc Liao Interview, Elise Osenbaugh

Asian American Art Oral History Project

2009 interview with poet Gordon CC Liao

A Few Readings Around The Web

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. China Digital Times is on our RSS feed, and, hopefully, on yours too—it is one of the essential places where English-language readers can find easily accessible updates of what is happening in China and in the Chinese media and blogosphere.CNReviews has posted an interview with CDT’s Sophie Beach that gives further details about the site’s management and goals.

2. In the interview, Beach also mentions her own website (好妈妈) on raising bilingual children, chockfull of information and references for those who are interested. At Hao Mama, Beach references Anna Greenspan’s website, Waking Giants, on Greenspan’s experiences sending her son …

5/18/89: Working Class Heroes, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

New, creative links were being made, reflected in the flags and slogans draped on industrial strength trucks with factory logos packed to the brim with red-sashed workers.

WORKERS SUPPORT BRIGADE!

WORKERS UNITED WITH STUDENTS IN SUPPORT!

But the really eye-catching, breath-stopping slogans took aim at the most powerful man in China.

XIAOPING GAODE RENREN FENFEN BU PING

“Wow! You see that Lotus?

It says Xiaoping is ruining it for all of us!” Quite a few posters and political cartoons were openly critical of Deng, representing a logical but politically dangerous turn of heart. But the most novel element today was …

Marx And The Taipings, Daniel Little

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With all the May anniversary dates to mark, we missed the May 5th birthday of Karl Marx (a man to whose thought the Chinese Communist Party still pays homage, even if you wouldn’t know it from their economic policies). Had we been on our toes, we might have found a China-specific way to mark that date, like looking back to how Marx, in his journalist mode, wrote about the Taiping Uprising, an event that the CCP would later treat as a precedent for their own revolutionary struggle. Well, in the spirit of better late than never, here’s what one of …

Rss Feeds

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Several regular readers have mentioned in conversations recently that they don’t know what an “RSS feed” is. Many of our readers are already using the service—at this writing, more than 1200 of them access the site’s content this way.

What is an RSS feed? “RSS” stands for “really simple syndication” or maybe “rich site summary” (depending on who you ask). An RSS reader is a service that will automatically download content from websites of your choosing. Rather than spending time each day checking in at each of the websites you regularly read, your reader will download all the new content …

5/16/89: To Serve The People, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The term “democracy” was gaining a certain purchase on the popular imagination, though it was not without its slippery side. Given the predictable confusion about what the students were really up to, given the abstraction and ambiguity inherent in political term minzhu, particularly within the confines of a communist society which fancied itself to be democratic in a roundabout sort of way, “democracy” meant very different things to different people. It had such a bafflingly wide range of meaning, it was so easily co-opted and distorted, that one could better appreciate the efficacy of a banal but concrete cry.

Thus …

Zhao’S Memoirs: 5 Places To Turn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The biggest publishing news just now related to Tiananmen’s 20th anniversary is the release of Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, a book that was apparently already being offered for sale in Hong Kong even before its official publication date and has been reviewed, excerpted, and discussed in various newspapers and magazines. We may at some point do an “In Case You Missed It” review of Prisoner of the State(or deal with it extensively in another fashion), but we weren’t able to do a “Coming Distractions” piece about it for a simple reason: we weren’t sent an advance copy.*

What we can do …

In Case You Missed It: Death By A Thousand Cuts, David Porter

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In the months leading up to the Beijing games, as Tibet protests flared and t-shirts derided the “Genocide Olympics,” Jill Savitt, the Executive Director of the human rights group Dream for Darfur deployed a striking phrase in a New York Times interview about her group’s plans to pressure Beijing to take action on Sudan. Promising a broad-based campaign that would be far more sophisticated than a mere “ham-fisted boycott,” she explained, “From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts.”

In a coincidence tinged with historical irony, an important book published in the …

5/15/89: Looking For Gorbachev, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Setting up a shot in a methodical manner–tripods incrementally adjusted, white balance achieved, illumination enhanced–allowed for the recording of clean, well-lit images worthy of prime time TV, but much of it came at the price of spontaneity. That which we sought to observe was constantly reacting to us and regrouping due to our presence. Cameramen know all about this of course, and a long lens can, with some foreshortening, capture unadulterated spontaneity, but more than once we simply scrapped the shot when members of the crowd seized up or returned our curiosity in an obvious way.

Which brought us back …

The Chinese Typewriter, Thomas S. Mullaney

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Tom Mullaney, who will be familiar to regular followers of this site thanks to the podcasts he’s done for us (such as this one on the 1989 protests and this one onLast Days of Old Beijing), recently mentioned that he is currently writing a history of the Chinese typewriter, as actual and imagined object.

He sent this piece introducing the subject, which moves between popular culture and the history of technology (how often are rapper MC Hammer, IBM engineers, diplomats from China, and Homer Simpson alluded to in a single story?), while illuminating some of the directions that thinking about …

Journal Of Asian Studies 68.2

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In the brand new May 2009 issue, just up on the Cambridge University Press website, readers will find, free for now at least, two relatively short (four to six-thousand words) pieces in the Journal of Asian Studies‘ new “Asia Beyond the Headlines” series–one by Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan is on China-India comparisons, while the other is a take by USC political scientist Stanley Rosen(who took part in the Brookings Institution panel that was the subject of a recent post by Teresa Wright) on youth and politics in China.

The third piece is a full-length one (with illustrations) on Confucian temples …

Understanding China’S “Angry Youth”, Teresa Wright

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Two things that China Beat has been tracking since we began are Chinese nationalism and youth attitudes in the PRC today (those interested in these issues might check out Alec Ash’s recent posting that addresses youth nationalism in regard to the 5/8 anniversary). It’s no surprise, then, that we were interested in learning more about an event at the Brookings Institution that brought these topics together (Evan Osnosmentioned his participation at his blog).

So we turned to Teresa Wright, one of the people who shared the stage with Osnos at the panel, to fill us in on the discussion that …

The Hunger Strike Begins, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The idea that the campus was under student control struck me as a dangerous illusion. Bright and others said campus life had changed for the better, and in the aftermath of May 4, I could see evidence of the soaring change in spirit. But what if the whiff of freedom turned into a mockery of the same, a transient window of openness that served to make people implicate themselves? It had happened before in the 1950s, when Mao urged “a hundred schools of thought to contend,” only to punish those who expressed themselves too freely.

To date, the campus strike …

One Year Ago

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A year ago, we were glued to our televisions and computers, like so many others in China and around the world, watching a tragedy unfold in Sichuan. The news we saw from the earthquake zone was bleak and heartbreaking.

Several news sites have run memorials, one-year on, and we’ve selected a few of those in the reader below. We also point you to some of the coverage we ran atChina Beat in the days that followed.

1.One of the things Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley stressed in a piece for China Beat last May was that Chinese volunteerism was not a brand-new phenomenon, …

May 10, 1989: Demonstration Of Ten Thousand Bicycles, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For a few days there it seemed that the successful student march of May 4 would be the last of the big demos and soon everyone would be back on campus attending classes again. Railing against this rather pleasant and natural inclination, strident wall posters at Shida and Beida called for continuing the student strike. One of the more florid campus wall posters that I managed to snap a photo of was a florid eulogy to the Great Hall of the People as a symbol of representative rule. The dark message, written on May 5, 1989 was at odds with …

Creating Memory: J.G. Ballard And Shanghai, Robert Bickers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

When news of Shanghai-born J.G. Ballard’s death reached China Beat, we asked friend-of-the-blog Robert Bickers, author of Britain in China and Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai, to share his thoughts about the writer with us. He was kind enough to oblige, passing on these thoughts on Ballard’s most famous novel, Empire of the Sun (subject, of course, of a Spielberg film), and also another work of fiction that uses Shanghai as a backdrop.

They own him and disown him. “My brother was in his class at school,” one might tell you. “Why did he tell those lies …

Academic Journal Report: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies By Nicole Barnes

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I have in my hot little hand the December 2008 issue (Volume 9, Number 4) of a hot little journal from Routledge Press, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung and Tsing Hua Universities, this journal has a truly international editorial collective hailing from Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, the PRC (including Hong Kong), Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, India, and the U.S. To further demonstrate its comprehensive Pacific Rim approach, the journal accepts publications in Asian languages as well as in English.

Although this is an academic journal, it …

1989: A Lively Dinner In A Quiet Week

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

May 7, 1989

The Yang’s spare living room was transformed into a vibrant cultural salon, with Gladys and Xianyi taking their habitual places in twin armchairs, bringing to mind a kindly old king and queen holding court. The rest of us, lined up on a long couch against the opposite wall behaved like loyal subjects, beaming with respect and admiration.

The Yangs had been through unimaginably hard times, including solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution, but remained true to one another through thick and thin, emerging with a rare degree of contentment, humility and self-knowledge. They did their best to …

Some Interviews (And Answering A Question I Wasn’T Asked)

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I’ve recently been lucky enough to be asked to do a couple of radio interviews to promote Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments, and also to get an opportunity to explain what I was trying to do in the book to various journalists working for Chinese and English language publications. This is a very nice development because I wrote the book with general readers as well as academics in mind, and because I hoped that my ideas about Shanghai would start to make their way into Chinese as well as English language discussions of the city’s past, present, and …

More Web-Based Resources For Learning And Reading Chinese

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In two earlier posts (from last May and August 2008), we offered some of our top picks among language and literature websites for students of Chinese. Here are five more recommendations for anyone who is learning the language or who struggles occasionally (!) with reading Chinese texts. All these resources are free unless otherwise noted.

1. Based on a popular tool for reading Japanese websites, Chinese Perapera-kun is an easy-to-use pop-up translator that can be installed as an add-on to the Firefox web browser. Once the tool is enabled, positioning the mouse cursor over any Chinese character on a website …

The Big March Of April 27, 1989

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Wang Chaohua is an independent scholar who received her doctorate from UCLA last year, has written political commentaries for periodicals such as the New Left Review, and is the editor of One China, Many Paths. A leader of the Tiananmen protests of 1989, she wrote the following essay reflecting on the events of twenty years ago for Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper, which will run the original Chinese language version soon. Dr. Wang has been good enough to provide us with an English language translation to publish here.

We all know that the large scale, student-led pro-democracy movement that took …

Readings On 1999’S "May 8th Tragedy"

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The events that began with the May 4th protests and the struggle that took place seventy years later during the lead-up to the June 4th Massacre loom largest in the history of Chinese youth activism in years ending with the numeral 9. But there were also protests involving university students in other years ending with that number, including 1999. These took place soon after the 80th anniversary of the may 4th Movement was marked, and they were triggered by NATO missiles hitting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three PRC nationals. The Embassy was hit on May 7 European time, …

Rambling Notes: Tracing “Old Shanghai” At The Futuristic Heart Of “New China”, Niv Horesh

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Shanghai is in many ways the face of the new People’s Republic. Even as the city has been remade in recent decades, efforts are underway to selectively salvage what remains of its pre-war architectural heritage (1842-1937) and many of its archival records are becoming accessible to foreign researchers. Touted as Asia’s biggest and most cosmopolitan urban centre in the pre-war era, Shanghai has (re)emerged over the last two decades as “a harbinger of China’s future and a testing ground for the world at large.”

It is therefore worth reprising Shanghai’s distant treaty-port past not just as tourist-trivia pursuit: the past …

Yasufumi Nakamori Interview About Ysuhiro Ishimoto, Katherine Cloutier

Asian American Art Oral History Project

2009 interview with Yasufumi Nakamori, friend of photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Follow-Up Interview With Lijia Zhang, Author Of Socialism Is Great!

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last June, Nicole Barnes of the China Beat interviewed Lijia Zhang, author of the acclaimed book Socialism is Great!, whose paperback edition has just been released by RandomHouse. Here is a follow-up interview with Ms. Zhang about her recent (and ongoing) book tour, her upcoming book, and women’s issues in Asia:

Nicole Barnes: You recently completed your book tour for Socialism is Great!Where did you speak about your book?

Lijia Zhang: I have not completed my book tour yet. My French publisher has promised to invite me for a promotional tour this autumn when the French version comes out. I’ll …

They Chose China Now At Youtube

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last year, China Beat ran a review of Shuibo Wang’s fascinating documentary,They Chose China. The documentary traces the stories of American POWs who chose to stay in China after the 1953 Korean War armistice.

At the time that we ran that review, we noted that the video was hard to come by. Now, however, the entire documentary has been posted on YouTube, in five parts. We’ve posted all five parts below (and here are direct links to YouTube for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V). Those interested in learning more might also be interested in …