Self-Promotion Saturday: Upcoming Events

A few reminders about upcoming events involving China Beat contributors.

Shanghai
Jeff Wasserstrom will be speaking about his new book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, at the Shanghai International Literary Festival tomorrow, March 15 at 4 p.m. City Weekend has been "live blogging" from the festival, so even those who don't attend can read transcripts from readings. Some highlights for Sinophiles: Stella Dong and James Fallows and Graham Earnshaw.

Hong Kong

Wasserstrom will also be presenting at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival on Tuesday, March 17 at 4 p.m. (at University of Hong Kong).

Charlottesville, VA
Susan Brownell and Kate Merkel-Hess will be on a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on Friday, March 20 at 10 a.m. Brownell will be speaking about her recent book, Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. Merkel-Hess will be speaking about the soon-to-be-released (on March 16) China in 2008 (to which Brownell also contributed).

Quiz Winners and a New Quiz

We received many correct answers to last week’s Frivolous Friday quiz. For the prize of a copy of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, Jeff Wasserstrom asked readers to guess which two people he had in mind to answer this question: “If you could bring back to life, for a day, two people you've written about who are now dead, and ask them questions about what Shanghai was like then, who would they be and what would you ask them?”

The clues were:

1) Both people were cosmopolitan women who spent time in both China and the United States.

2) Though only one was an American, each went to college in the U.S., attending in each case schools that had "W"s at the start of one part of the institution's name.

3) One had a husband who studied in Hong Kong and then was later detained in London, while the other had a husband who was imprisoned in Hong Kong and then later taught in London.

4) One was played on screen by Maggie Cheung.

5) One had a husband whose name began with the letters "Cha," while the other had a father whose name began with those same letters.

The correct answers were Emily Hahn and Song Qingling. We thought we might get more than one correct answer, so as a tie-breaker, Jeff added these subjective questions:

1) What's a question that it would be particularly interesting to have these two people discuss (if they were brought back to life)?

2) Can you think of a pair of people you think would be more interesting to quiz about Shanghai's past than the two Jeff had in mind?

3) Which actress should play the member of the pair Jeff is thinking of who, as far as we know, has not yet had a movie made of her life (but probably should have one made of it someday)?

The judging was incredibly tough, as all respondents had interesting answers to these questions. We have selected this response as our winner:

1. I would be interested in hearing Hahn and Song discuss Hahn's portrayal of Song in her book The Soong Sisters. As a secondary topic, it would be great if both women discussed Sterling Seagrave's book The Soong Dynasty.

2. The two people I would love to ask about Shanghai's history would be Du Yuesheng and Sterling Fessenden.

3. The historical actress who could best portray Hahn's combination of wit, feminism, and glamour would be Myrna Loy—I could just imagine Loy with Mr. Mills on her arm at some swank gathering. If I had to choose a living actress to play Hahn, although Loy would be my first choice, it would probably be Jennifer Jason Leigh (think Hudsucker Proxy).

The winning answer was submitted by Lane J. Harris, and he will be receiving his award in the mail shortly.

Evan Osnos sent us a note (though he excluded himself from the competition due to “unfair interest in the subject”) nominating his choice for actress in a movie of Emily Hahn’s life: “Hahn must be played by Naomi Watts, because Watts starred in the remake of King Kong, so she has experience working alongside monkeys, as did Hahn, e.g. gibbons.” (For instance, see Hahn’s book Eve and the Apes.)

Other proposals for the actress nominated to play Hahn included Meryl Streep (Out of Africa, redux? She received three nominations), Katharine Hepburn, Cate Blanchett, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

We also wanted to share a few “honorable mentions” from respondents with you.

“Most Substantive Question” for Song and Hahn:
How real where the newfound freedoms for women in China at the time? (Submitted by Nick Wang.)

“Most Original Pairing of Those to Bring Back to Life” (with bonus points for one being fictional!):
Kyo Gisors, Malraux's invented organizer of the 1927 rising against Chiang Kaishek in Man's Fate, and Eugene Chen, the Trinidad-born journalist and secretary of Sun Yat-sen. (Submitted by Donald Sutton.)

“Most Touchingly Uxorious” (and describing the person who Jeff would certainly also see get the role in real life if the film were to be made—Myrna Loy, alas, being dead, and Naomi Watts having gotten to make her Shanghai film already):
(To #3): My wife. (Submitted by Robert Bickers.)

“For Giving Jeff Second Thoughts” about the pair he would choose to bring back to life (as seeing what Emily Hahn and the cosmopolitan Communist activist Pan Hannian made of one another is a fascinating notion):
Pan Hannian / H. Shippe (Moses Grzyb /Asiaticus) (Submitted by Thomas Kampen)

Because we (and you too, based on your answers), had such fun with this, we thought we’d do it again. Please send your answers to China Beat Editor Kate Merkel-Hess at kate@uci.edu. The winner of this quiz will receive a copy of the forthcoming China in 2008, signed by as many of the book’s contributors as make it to the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago, as well as Kate Merkel-Hess and Ken Pomeranz (who won’t be making the trip).

Please send answers to these questions:

1. The Prettiest (photo of China you can find on the web—send link or the photo itself, but please include link to where you found it so we can credit appropriately)

2. The Wittiest (title of a China book, article or blog post)

3. And the Grittiest (your choice for best muckraking journalist who worked the China beat, past or present)

No one is exempt (meaning, we encourage those who have submitted before to do so again!) We’ll announce the winner next week.

Can China Go High-Tech When Exports Slump?

By Yu Zhou

As the financial Tsunami batter China’s exporting hubs, everyone is wondering how well China can weather the storm in the next couple of years, but a more important question is how China’s economy will emerge after the crisis. As a result of extensive research, I argue that there have been sustained forces pushing China’s industry to more innovative fields with a stronger orientation to the domestic market. The crisis will only strengthen the shift in a more dramatic manner.

This conclusion is based on my research in Beijing’s Zhongguancun, a region dedicated to innovative industry and domestic market. I started to do research in Beijing’s Zhongguancun in 2000, at a time when few foreigners had ever heard of the place. But most Chinese had, due to the hype from the official media that Zhongguancun was going to become China’s Silicon Valley. Yet, knowledgeable Chinese knew that Silicon Valley had grown up around such technology giants as Intel, HP, or Google. Zhongguancun, in contrast, seemed to be a collection of gigantic electronic markets and untold numbers of venders parading pirated CDs. They are very skeptical of this government claim.

Undaunted, I continued to collect information and interview all sorts of companies in Zhongguancun, private, foreign-owned, state-owned, returnees owned, and I found that there indeed was more to Zhongguancun than meets the eyes. I had grown up in this region in the 1980s and witnessed its first transformation from a quiet suburb of universities and research institutes to a bustling high-tech commercial center. By 2000, it was gathering energy again with the internet boom. My fascination and research in this region lasted for six years and resulted in a book: The Inside Story of China’s High-Tech Industry: Making Silicon Valley in Beijing. Today, Zhongguancun is still far from Silicon Valley, but it has put its name on the international map. A number of companies started there have gained international attention, such as Lenovo and Baidu, and venture capitalists from California flood into China’s most promising land for innovative business today.

In my book, I challenge the prevailing view that foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) and export are the driving forces for technological progress in China. I argue that indigenous companies are likely to be the future technological leaders in China. The most successful of them have taken advantage of their understanding of the Chinese market with their access to competitive, reliable, and high-quality component suppliers—the same suppliers for MNCs in exports. The synergy between China’s massive export facilities and rapid growing domestic market allowed Chinese companies to make special designs, pricing and marketing methods that worked best within China to beat foreign brands competition. This is the common story of Lenovo, Huawei and many other successful Chinese high-tech companies.

More significantly, the growth of Zhongguancun is not marked by the emergence of a few strong firms, but by succeeding generations of them. The first wave was the spin-offs from universities and research institutes in the mid 1980s. These were primitive commercial companies with extremely limited international contact. But they managed to take over the lead of China’s high-tech commercial development from state-owned sectors, and firmly set China in the global technological mainstream. The second generation was computer hardware manufacturing firms such as Lenovo, which was able to establish its domestic leadership amid strong foreign competition in the mid 1990s. These were followed by internet startups in the late 1990s to 2000s, which to this day dominate China’s internet market in every category.

The current wave is much more diverse, including multimedia firms, chip design, software export and other more technically sophisticated companies, often started up by overseas returnees with overseas venture capital. Each generation has gained more technical, management and capital competence, and each followed more closely the tidal waves of the Chinese market and global technological trends. Zhongguancun’s development is a fascinating story, with many colorful characters and successions of generations over a brief period and, though my book is academic in nature, I have attempted to capture this lively story with ethnographic details that heighten the book’s readability.

For those who would like to learn more, I summarize below some of the conclusions from my book:

1. Foreign multinational firms (MNCs) have limits in bringing technological transformation in China. Chinese firms have a competitive edge in their home market.
We often assume that if a large multinational company, say HP or Google, are successful in America and elsewhere, then they should also be successful in China. If they are not, we blame the Chinese government for creating an unlevel playing field between Chinese and foreign firms. But the reality is that China is a vast, regionally fragmented, rapidly evolving and largely low-income market. It is challenging for MNCs to reach beyond China’s affluent core. In contrast, Chinese domestic firms understand their home court better and have greater commitment and flexibility. They are also learning fast from MNCs in China. While they certainly are not on the cutting-edge, they have been extraordinarily effective in bringing new technology to the Chinese market at an affordable price. Their learning ability should not be underestimated.

2. The key constraint for Chinese companies to produce cutting-edge innovation is the Chinese market, but this will change.
Many believe that the lack of innovation by Chinese companies has to do with their low R&D capacity. This is only partly true. It is worthwhile to remember that almost all Chinese technological companies were built after the mid 1980s—which is when China’s technological industry began. Most have emerged only in the 1990s. The short history set them apart from existing business powerhouses in Japan, South Korea, and even India.

But beyond the inexperience and capital and technical gap, the key constraint for Chinese companies to innovate is the Chinese market. Michael Porter in his book The Competitiveness Advantage of Nations argues that it is the quality of the domestic market that is critical for national competitiveness. A technologically sophisticated market pushes innovation by forcing companies to constantly upgrade their products. Yet Chinese consumers value low-price and lack experiences with many products. This means that most have yet to attach the same importance to the quality, design, and newness of products that consumers in advanced economies do. This provides little incentive and reward for cutting-edge innovation by domestic companies.

It is not surprising, indeed it should be expected, that most Chinese companies concentrate on following the MNCs’ lead in making products cheaper and better suited to Chinese customers rather than blazing their own paths. But as the market evolves with sustained higher income and more sophisticated consumer tastes, one can bet that Chinese companies will evolve with it by offering more innovative products.

3. The competition between Chinese indigenous firms and MNCs is not a zero sum game.
Observers inside and outside China tend to view the competition between MNCs and domestic firms as one side trying to eat the other’s lunch. But the prevailing pattern is actually a relationship of collaboration. Virtually no Chinese products are made without MNCs’ components. This is true for hardware and software. China’s most popular enterprise management software by UFIDA, a domestic company, has an Oracle database in it. As domestic companies cultivate and expand the market, MNCs have an enlarged consumer base for their products.

MNCs also learned from local firms’ marketing expertise to enhance their market performance. For example, when Nokia and Motorola suffered setbacks from Chinese cell phone manufactures in 2002-04, they managed to regain the high-end of the market by adjusting marketing strategies in part modeled after local competitors. Overall, the increasing involvement of MNCs in China in the past twenty years has been accompanied by, and indeed dependent upon the growing competence of Chinese local companies.

Some Chinese critics lament the lack of innovation in China and they imagine that if only Chinese scientists put their minds to innovation with ample state funding, innovation would take place. The truth is that given globalization and the lagging state of China, domestic companies cannot generate new technology unless they work with MNCs. Only MNCs can demonstrate how technology, marketing, and human resources are managed in the modern world. They provide Chinese companies with the knowledge of rules and skills the Chinese market has yet to provide. The technological dynamics displayed by returnee-founded enterprises nowadays exemplify how indispensible the international linkages are for cutting-edge innovation in China.

4. The critical role of the Chinese state is not to lead technological change, but to be an honest and responsible collaborating partner with other technological agents.
Analysts tracking Chinese technological changes often regard the Chinese state as the decisive actor. Outside China, China’s success in economic development is frequently credited to the Chinese state policies, and Chinese failure in creating frontier technology breakthroughs is also blamed on its authoritarian system. Within China, some Chinese scholars believe that China has become too dependent on Western technology and China’s private sector is incapable of moving into long-term R&D, so they advocate a more direct role for the state. It is not uncommon to hear Chinese officials referring to China’s success in producing nuclear bombs and a satellite in the 1960s as a model for technological breakthroughs. Unfortunately, this argument shows little understanding of the difference between military and civilian technology, or of the reality of the global marketplace in which Chinese companies must operate. A nuclear bomb does not have to stand the test of open global competition; a computer chip does. China’s state-directed satellite and technology research prior to the mid-1980s had a very poor record in responding to market needs. Given the intensity of globalization today, a state-centered approach to R & D would be counterproductive, if not simply unfeasible.

This is not to deny that the role of the state is instrumental. In China, as in other developing countries, the question is never whether the state should play a role in technological development, but how. Zhongguancun’s experience shows us the state’s crucial roles are not in being leaders, but in collaborating effectively with other technological agents and learning to reform regional institutions under changed circumstances. The accomplishments of China’s Silicon Valley thus far cannot be attributed primarily to the Chinese government.

Domestic companies and MNCs alike have spent considerable energy pushing the state to change its resource allocation, ease its restrictions, and alter its regulations. Over the years, the Chinese state has largely been responsive and tolerant of the various experiments in the region, setbacks notwithstanding. But the state has not gone far enough. In the long run, genuine innovation can only come from freedom of thought, experimentation, collective effort, and frequent exchanges with advanced technological parties and marketplaces. All that will require the Chinese government to continue to collaborate with—rather than supervise or direct—other parties. Only then can a fairer and more open institutional structure for fostering innovation can be built.

China’s path into high-tech will not be easy, but one should never underestimate the capacity of Chinese enterprises in learning and competing in their domestic market, which will eventually move them toward a more innovative trajectory.

Yu Zhou teaches geography at Vassar College.

Mo Yan, Inaugural Newman Laureate, Honored in Oklahoma

By Haiyan Lee

On Thursday, March 5, the acclaimed Chinese novelist Mo Yan received the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature at a ceremony held on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Over a hundred invited guests attended the event, including the Chinese consul from Houston, the Oklahoma secretary of state, OU’s deans of arts and sciences, OU faculty, high school teachers, students, alumni, visitors, and donors.

The Newman Prize was created in 2008 in OU’s Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the initiative of its director Peter H. Gries, Professor of political science and author of China’s New Nationalism, who sought my collaboration as consultant and jury coordinator. Our vision was to award the prize biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry by a living author writing in Chinese. Last summer, we assembled a jury of seven distinguished literary experts who nominated seven candidates, read their representative works, and selected the winner in a transparent voting process (details are available here).

As the inaugural laureate, Mo Yan received a commemorative medallion, a certificate, and $10,000. The prize is the first major American award for Chinese literature. Speaking at the award ceremony, Peter Gries retold the story Lu Xun’s conversion to literature that he first encountered at Middlebury College in the “Preface to Nahan/Call to Arms” and called the prize his “call-to-arms”: “It is my hope that the prize will contribute to increased American awareness of the tremendous diversity and humanist spirit of contemporary Chinese literature, and help generate goodwill in U.S.-China relations.”

Mo Yan was nominated by the prominent translator Howard Goldblatt, who also translated his latest and winning novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. “Of all the facets of Mo Yan’s oeuvre that have made him one of China’s foremost novelists and an internationally renowned figure—from diverse writing styles to his remarkable imagery and brilliant use of language—for me it is his historical imagination, an ability to create an alternative human history, that sets him apart from his peers. Artistry and humanity blend seamlessly in novels and stories that will be read and enjoyed well into the future,” said Howard Goldblatt last September. The novel was fondly reviewed by Jonathan Spence for the New York Times Book Review in May 2008, who considered it “wildly visionary and creative.”

In addition to attending the award ceremony and giving a moving acceptance speech, Mo Yan also visited several high schools in Norman, Oklahoma City, Moore, and Tulsa. Prior to the visits, the students had read a short story by Mo Yan entitled “Soaring” about a young woman literally taking flight in order to escape an arranged marriage. An essay contest was held and an exchange student from Kosovo emerged as the first winner of the Newman Young Writers Award. In front of his eager youthful audiences, Mo Yan read from his story (with Howard Goldblatt reading the translation) and engaged in a spirited Q&A with me as interpreter. The discussions ranged from the symbolism of dog’s blood to the meaning of life.

A symposium was also held on March 5 featuring presentations by Howard Goldblatt, Alexander Huang (Pennsylvania State University), Liu Hongtao, and myself. Together we discussed Mo Yan’s creative career and his contributions to modern Chinese literature. In place of a keynote speech, Mo Yan opted for a more casual style, regaling the audience with witty remarks and juicy anecdotes about writing, censorship, Hollywood movies, and his friend Zhang Yimou. He revealed that he had offered a proposal to Zhang for the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Zhang adopted its gist without, however, giving him due credit. “If the Olympics were to come to China again,” bragged Mo Yan, “I’d become a director myself.”

The inaugural jury consisted of seven jurors based in the U.S., Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They were: Kirk Denton (Ohio State University), Howard Goldblatt (University of Notre Dame), Liu Hongtao (Beijing Normal University), Peng Hsiao-yen (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Xu Zidong (Lingnan University, Hong Kong), Zhang Yiwu (Beijing University), and Zhao Yiheng (Sichuan University). They nominated the following seven writers and representative works: Yan Lianke’s Dreams of Ding Village (2006), Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron (1969-1972), Zhu Tianxin’s Old Capital (1997), Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2000), Wang Meng’s The Transformer (1985), and Ning Ken’s The City of Masks (2001).

The nominees included well-established maestros as well as rising stars based in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The genres and themes were wide-ranging: from magical realist renditions of the Chinese countryside caught up in the turmoil of land reforms and market reforms, a historical panorama that both crowns and radically revises the martial-arts novel tradition, a postcolonial exploration of city and memory, an epic portrayal of modern Shanghai as condensed in the life of a former Miss Shanghai turned petty urbanite, and a satire about the predicament of the semi-colonial intellectual, to Internet-installment fiction about drifters and seekers. The diversity and strength of the nominations posed a great challenge for the jury. Yet Mo Yan emerged as the consensus winner after four rounds of positive elimination voting.

The Newman Prize honors Harold J. and Ruth Newman, whose generous endowment of a chair at the University of Oklahoma enabled the creation of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues. OU is also home to World Literature Today, a leading journal of world literature, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which served as our model. A special section of the July issue of WLT, guest-edited by myself, will be dedicated to Mo Yan; it will feature his acceptance speech, newly translated short fiction, and the symposium essays. In 2010, a new jury will be assembled to select a poet as the next Newman laureate.

Stay tuned.

Chinese Intellectuals and the Problem of Xinjiang

Review of Wang Lixiong: Wo de Xiyu, ni de Dongtu, Taipei, Dakuai wenhua (Locus Publishing), 2007, 472 pp.

By Sebastian Veg

It is a common assumption that Chinese intellectuals, however critical of their government, its institutions, and its policies, are unreceptive to calls for greater self-government, much less independence, in China’s autonomous regions, most notably Tibet and Xinjiang. It is therefore worth taking note of Wang Lixiong’s book on Xinjiang, published in 2007 in Taiwan, the title of which can be rendered as My Far West, Your East Turkistan.

Wang Lixiong is no newcomer to the question, having devoted the past two decades to researching and reflecting on the place of “ethnic minorities” in China’s political system, in particular in view of its possible democratization. Born in 1953, Wang took part in the Democracy Wall movement in 1978 and, in the aftermath of 1989, published the “political fantasy” novel Huang Huo (Yellow Peril or Yellow Disaster) under the name Baomi (1991; an English translation was published as China Tidal Wave, translated by Matthew Dillon, Hawaii UP, 2007). In the 1990s, he began researching and writing a book-length study of Tibet, published in 1998 under the title Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet (Tianzang: Xizang de mingyun), and resigned from the Writers’ Association in 2001. In a follow-up to the book, he met the Dalai Lama (in the United States) for a series of talks, published in 2002 under the title Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Yu Dalai Lama duihua).

Wang Lixiong and the Dalai Lama
Wang Lixiong first began to study Xinjiang in 1999, when he travelled there to prepare research for a book along the lines of Sky Burial. He was arrested for photocopying an internal publication, stamped as “secret,” on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (the notorious bingtuan), and attempted suicide in a high-security prison in Miquan before recanting and promising to collaborate in order to obtain his release. He recorded the incident in a short essay entitled Memories of Xinjiang (Xinjiang zhuiji), published in 2001 and reprinted as an introduction to the present volume. In prison, he shared a cell with a Han prisoner accused of economic crimes (“Uncle Chen”), and a Uyghur prisoner arrested in Beijing for organizing a demonstration protesting discrimination (Mokhtar), with whom he entered into a long and ongoing discussion on Xinjiang that forms the backbone of the book.

In the form of memories of prison conversations with Mokhtar, Wang Lixiong sketches out a preliminary analysis of the “Xinjiang problem,” which he believes has entered a phase of “Palestinization.” He begins with some anecdotal examples of what he calls the Han “colonial attitude,” citing the resistance to “Urumchi time”[1] among local Hans, and their worship of Wang Zhen (1908-1993), Party secretary of Xinjiang from 1949 to 1955.[2]

While in Mao’s times all “nationalities” were submitted to equal oppression, Wang concludes that since the 1990s, which he isolates as a turning point, Uyghurs feel they have not benefited from the same treatment as the Han. After 1989, the Center adopted a “nip all destabilizing elements in the bud” policy (Ba yiqie bu wending de yinsu xiaomie zai mengya zhuangtai, p. 66), and increasingly resorted to pan-Chinese nationalism, strengthening the sympathies of Xinjiang’s Han population, but increasingly alienating Uyghurs. Wang writes:

I have always been surprised at the government’s wishful thinking in believing it could merge China’s 56 nationalities into one under the artificial concept of “the Chinese nation” [Zhonghua minzu], and make them face the outside world with an identical outlook. (…) On the contrary, each nationality can also use nationalism for its own goals, strengthen its internal cohesion through nationalism, and justify separatism and independence in its name.” (p. 59-60)

Wang shares the view of a nationalist or at least cultural-nationalist revival in Chinese political discourse, initiated by Deng Xiaoping and reinforced after 1989. One may note that the main themes of this discourse (five thousand years of history, the “humiliation” of the Opium War and imperialism, anti-Japanese feelings) are not particularly conducive to appropriation by other ethnic groups, and indeed are sometimes downright detrimental (e.g., the emphasis on the Qing empire and the civilisation it purportedly brought to frontier regions such as Xinjiang).

In this sense, Wang believes that the “Xinjiang problem” is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 61) in which an important role was played by the famous yet still mysterious “Document No. 7” issued in March 1996, the first to conflate separatism with “illegal religious activity.” In this situation of mutual distrust, all efforts to stimulate the economy, no matter how profitable, were inevitably seen as colonialism. And in fact, Wang concludes that Han inhabitants of Xinjiang were able to reap an overwhelming share of the benefits. New Han farmers took over the land from Uyghur farmers, effectively colonizing Xinjiang’s agriculture. From 1990 to 2000, according to official statistics, the Han population in Xinjiang increased by 1.8 million people, or over 30 percent.

This introduction is followed by three other substantial sections. The first is a travelogue of Wang’s four subsequent trips to Xinjiang between 2003 and 2006. It is followed by another long dialogue between Wang and Mokhtar. The final part is comprised of three “Letters to Mokhtar,” which conclude the conversation and sum up Wang’s main points regarding the difficulties of Xinjiang independence.

Wang Lixiong does not write as an academic, nor does he give much background, even of a journalistic nature, but draws only on his conversations with various people in Xinjiang. Although somewhat problematic, this no doubt makes his findings more accessible to ordinary readers, and more plausible to Chinese readers who are not knowledgeable on the subject.

He thus reports with considerable first-hand detail on deepening urban segregation and growing nepotism and corruption, highlighting the monopoly on mineral water held by Party Secretary Wang Lequan’s[3] son-in-law. He then goes on to highlight three main aspects of Xinjiang’s socio-political system: the colonial economy and control of resources by Han officials (in particular within the bingtuan system), the education system, and more generally the politics of cultural uniformization, concluding that government policy on Xinjiang requires urgent revision.

Part 1 of 2.

The full text of this review essay is published in China Perspectives, 2008.4.

[1] In 1980, the Xinjiang People’s Congress decided to switch to “Urumchi time,” two hours behind Beijing time, but abandoned the idea in the face of resistance by local Hans.
[2] When Wang Zhen, State Vice-President and one of the “Eight Immortals” (influential in the 1989 crackdown) died, his ashes were scattered in the Tianshan mountains in accordance with his wishes. Uyghurs manifested their outrage by refusing to drink water from the Tianshan, which they believed had been sullied.
[3] Politburo member Wang Lequan became deputy Party secretary for Xinjiang in 1992 and acting secretary in 1994, and has served as full Secretary since 1995, in violation of the official policy to rotate provincial secretaries at least every ten years.

Readings for International Women's Day

In honor of International Women’s Day, China Beat posts two reading lists, one of contemporary (recent and by no means exhaustive) visions of Chinese women and another of historical visions of Chinese women.

Contemporary:

1) Xinhua reports on the increasing services for victims of domestic violence in China, following new regulations on police response to domestic violence calls implemented today:

Yu Xiuli, a victim of domestic violence, can turn to police for help if her husband continues to beat her thanks to a regulation which came into effect on Sunday.

The 40-year-old woman in eastern Shandong Province has been bearing the cursing and beating of her husband for years, but has never thought of asking police for help.

"I believed it was not the business of police to stop domestic violence so I has never thought of alerting police," said Yu.

But from Sunday women like Yu could alert police if they fall victim to domestic violence according to a regulation of the province that came into effect Sunday.

Many provinces in China have set up police centers to handle household violence after a national regulation that was issued in September last year requiring police to be dispatched whenever they receive a 110 emergency call regarding household violence.

2) That controversial symbol of femininity, the Barbie Doll, has acquired a new residence in Shanghai, the House of Barbie, where shoppers can not only purchase Barbie merchandise but also sip Barbie cocktails (at NPR, by Louisa Lim):

The lure of the China market was one reason that Mattel chose Shanghai for its first House of Barbie. It's aggressively pursuing developing markets, such as Eastern Europe, Russia and India, which aren't already Barbie-saturated. But when deciding where to place the House of Barbie, Shanghai beat other contenders — including London, Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles — because of its strong cross-generation reaction to the doll and the brand.

"There was an amazing connection to Barbie's values," Dickson said. "Barbie in this culture represented a world of possibilities for girls and for women. She's had amazing careers, she has the cars, she has the plane, she has the boyfriend — and she looks fantastic doing it."

Tibetan barbies have also taken up posts at the Lhasa airport, reports Shanghaiist: “The plastic princesses are part of a line of special edition ‘ethnic’ dolls meant to represent the minority groups of China.”

3) As part of a month-long look at women in China, China Crossroads includes the translation of an interview with Professor Zhao Jun on the plight of China’s Xiaojies (hat tip Shanghaiist):

12年从警经历，中国人民大学社会学博士后、潘绥铭弟子的身份，让赵军选定了“女性性工作者被害问题”作为研究课题。Having 12 years experience as a policeman, the People’s University sociology postdoctoral, Zhao Jun selected “the murder of female sex workers” as his subject for study.

尽管“小姐被杀”的新闻频频出现，但在中国，目前鲜有学者关注这一领域。即使在公安机关，也未专门设立这一类别的案例分析系统。Although the murder of female sex workers (in Chinese, xiaojie is the euphemism for female sex workers) appears in the news frequently, little concern has been given to this problem at present. Even in the public security organs, they do not have a special case category involving female sex workers.

近10年来，赵军是以“入圈式”调查方法来收集案例的。在餐厅、在洗脚屋、在KTV，以及在足球场里，这位38岁的学者以“朋友聊天式的非正规访谈”找到了知情者。于是，那些内幕以及现象背后的社会逻辑，就在觥筹交错和足球的起落中浮出水面。During the past 10 years, Zhao Jun engaged himself in collecting related cases. The 38-year-old scholar was able to find insiders by chitchatting with the workers in a friendly way either in restaurants, foot massage parlors, KTV or football fields. Thus, he gained first hand knowledge about a social issue that has been ignored for a long time.

赵军选择的调查样本，主要来源于一个中等规模的地级市和一个发展开发程度较高的沿海城市，结论则是“‘小姐’被害案共性大于个性”。“‘小姐’群体的权利在事实上已被严重边缘化，虽然她们的合法权利在形式上也应得到法律的保护。”赵军说。Zhao Jun’s selected case samples are mainly from medium-sized cities and coastal cities with a relatively higher degree of development. The conclusion of his study is that the murder of xiaojies is a problem threatening the whole group rather than a single problem among a few individuals.” In fact, Xiaojies’ rights have been severely marginalized and their legal rights should also be protected.” Zhao said.

4) Sexy Beijing on Valentine's Day celebrations in China:



5) With all the attention to Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls, this review reminded us of the first major scholarly work on women workers in the Chinese "miracle," an award-winning book by C.K. Lee (who has just relocated to UCLA), Gender and the South China Miracle (1998):

Ching Kwan Lee makes a major theoretical and methodological contribution in her ethnographic study of two shop floors in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This study highlights both the differences and the similarities between the worlds of labor and challenges theories of labor process, state, feminism and gender and work.

The author shows two worlds of factory women. Localism and familialism are invoked by both workers and mangers to interpret events and social relations in the factory. “Localistic despotism” and “familial hegemony”, respectively, characterize the conditions of dependence of migrant daughters in Shenzhen and veteran working mothers in Hong Kong. In these two factories, localism and familialism generate consent, but also provide opportunities for tactics and resistance. This study shows how management and women workers cooperate and contest, how gender and class relations intermesh in social and cultural processes on the shop floors, and how a politics of identity is constitutive of and constituted by production politics.

Lee argues very convincingly that management's interests, like those of workers, cannot be assumed, but are constituted in specific conditions. Gender is not just inscribed in the organizational hierarchy, but is an integral part of the power process and is also found in accepted notions about who women workers are and what they need. Gender is a cultural construction and is a recurrent reference by which labor-management relations are conceived, legitimized and criticized. They have material roots in shop-floor organization and are shaped by a set of social institutions outside the shop-floors in the labor market, the family, kin networks and even the state.

Historical visions

1) A collection of Agnes Smedley photos, including this one:



2) The online full text article by Harriet Evans on the terms for women's
liberation:

Critiques of the Party's failure to live up to its promise to women have largely started out from socio-economic and political analyses of empirical data-for example, of discriminatory employment and remuneration practices, unequal access to education at different levels of the educational system, unequal representation in political bodies, and gender discrimination in the formulation and implementation of population control policy. Many of these analyses have also drawn attention to the inadequacies of Marxist theories of women's emancipation. Recent analyses of dominant discourses of sexuality in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have broadened the debate to argue that a hierarchical biological essentialism has been a persistent constraint on the conceptualisation and implementation of gender policies since 1949. This paper adopts another approach through focusing on the term and concept of 'liberation' [jiefang] as a central component of the Communist Party's discourse on women. On the basis of analysis of CCP and related documents produced between the early 1920s and 1950s, I argue that the texts written about and often for women produced fixed and hierarchically arranged meanings of jiefang, which consistently denied identification of women as agents of gender transformation, and which insisted on the absolute privileging of class over gender in analyses of gender inequalities. The effect of this was not only to subordinate the 'women's movement' to the goals of social and national revolution as a whole. It established the only language in which gender issues could be publicly discussed. funü jiefang thus became a discursive and ideological tool of Communist Party authority, always and necessarily indicative of pre-ordained approaches to women as social agents. The word produced and reinforced many of the hierarchies that its integration into the rhetoric of revolution ostensibly sought to challenge.

3) A review in English of a Japanese book about nushu (women's writing, which is central to Lisa See's popular novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan):

This volume by Endo Orie is a welcome addition to the growing body of works in the extraordinary script known as Women's Script or nüshu which is used by peasant women in remote villages in Jiangyong county, Hunan province in China. Women's script, as it is known to its practitioners, is a phonetic script quite distinct from Chinese character script. It comprises about seven hundred graphs representing the sounds of Jiangyong dialect (also known as Xiangnan tuhua). Women's script came to international attention only in the early 1990s, after its (re) discovery by Chinese ethnographers in the 1980s. Very few practitioners remain. Endo expresses deep concern that Women's Script will vanish from active use before the phenomenon has been thoroughly investigated…

Endo is not a sinologist and is apparently unaware of western scholarship such as the substantial studies by anthropologists William Chiang and Cathy Silber. Her book is written in a clear and accessible style for the general public in Japan, where it deserves a wide readership, not least for its poignant renditions of Women's Script material exposing the suffering of Jiangyong women under Japanese occupation. But Chūgoku no onnamoji has much to interest anyone with an interest in women's oral and material culture and is of relevance to those interested women's studies generally, linguistics, Chinese history and anthropology.

4) A review of Some of Us (a book of memoirs of growing up female under Mao that counters the Wild Swans version) at Frog in a Well:

I recently came across a book called Some of Us, recommended to me by one of the contributing authors, Dr. Jiang Jin. The book is a collection of memoirs and stories put together by 9 women who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution and subsequently got their Ph.D.s and now are teaching (or in Jiang Jin’s case, was teaching) in the states. What brought them together was a discussion among 3 of them about such Memoirs as Wild Swans and Red Azalea, and the subsequent discovery that these memoirs do not accurately represent their feelings and experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, what these memoirs had done was create a specific image of Maoist era people in the West, almost an Orientalizing process, if you will. Everyone was either a victim or a victimizer, and everyone’s families had either been killed, torn apart, or driven to insanity during the Cultural Revolution.

5) A review of Charlotte Furth’s important study, A Flourshing Yin:

A Flourishing Yin opens a new and important chapter in the history of medicine and gender in China between the Song and the Ming dynasties. Charlotte Furth's account traces the shifts in medical and gender discourses from the 'androgynous' medical narratives and the yin-yang harmony of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the late imperial literature on health and medicine circulating among medical practitioners and the literary public. Based on analysis of medical texts, popular handbooks, recorded teachings of doctors and case histories, it gives particular attention to the development of fuke (medicine for women) as learned discourse between the Song and the Ming. It shows how the changing language of the body between social and medical discourses appears as a rich source for reflecting on the cultural construction of gender. In doing this, it also gives a sophisticated critique of the 'orientalising' view of a single holistic body informing the principles of Chinese medicine.

Self-Promotion Saturday: Conferencing in Shanghai

China Beatniks Jeff Wasserstrom and James Farrer and friend of the blog Andrew Field will be presenting this week at a March 12-14 conference at NYU in Shanghai (on the ECNU campus), called "Urban Representations." The conference is sponsored by NYU, Northwestern University, Sophia University, and ECNU. Click through for a schedule and paper titles.

Free Book up for Grabs

China Beat's First (and Maybe Last) Quiz with a Prize for the Winner

Jeff Wasserstrom recently mentioned in an interview with City Weekend magazine that he's hoping someone at the audience for his March 15 PRC book launch of Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 will ask him this question: “If you could bring back to life, for a day, two people you've written about who are now dead, and ask them questions about what Shanghai was like then, who would they be and what would you ask them?” Well, he wouldn't tell the magazine who he was thinking of, but he's now told us and offered to let us give us a copy of his 2007 book, China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, to the winner of an online contest related to this mystery. Here's how it works:

See if you can figure out from the following clues the identities of the two people he had in mind, one of whom gets a lot of attention in China's Brave New World, the other of whom gets quoted at some length in Global Shanghai.  Please send your answers as well as the supplementary material described below to Kate Merkel-Hess, the Editor of China Beat, at thechinabeat@gmail.com:

THE CLUES:

1) Both people were cosmopolitan women who spent time in both China and the United States.

2) Though only one was an American, each went to college in the U.S., attending in each case schools that had "W"s at the start of one part of the institution's name.

3) One had a husband who studied in Hong Kong and then was later detained in London, while the other had a husband who was imprisoned in Hong Kong and then later taught in London.

4) One was played on screen by Maggie Cheung.

5) One had a husband whose name began with the letters "Cha," while the other had a father whose name began with those same letters,*

*There are important ties between the two women, especially a connection established by a book, but these clues focus on other things, including the men in their lives, since mentioning that publication would give the game away too easily.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

To make this as fair as possible (so that it doesn't privilege people living in particularly time zones), we'd like some additional information to use to break a tie if multiple correct answers to the main question come in within the same 24 hour period.  So please answer the following questions (keeping in mind that we'll be judging these on cleverness):

1) What's a question that it would be particularly interesting to have these two people discuss (if they were brought back to life)?

2) Can you think of a pair of people you think would be more interesting to quiz about Shanghai's past than the two Jeff had in mind?

3) Which actress should play the member of the pair Jeff is thinking of who, as far as we know, has not yet had a movie made of her life (but probably should have one made of it someday)?

[We'll probably publish these comments on the blog when we announce the winner.]

Year of the Gorilla

This is a selection from Jonathan Tel's forthcoming collection of short stories, The Beijing of Possibilities, to be published this summer by Other Press. Tel is the author of Freud's Alphabet and the story collection Arafat's Elephant. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Granta. Drawn to "writing fiction set in places whose inhabitants believe themselves to be at the center of the world," Tel first visted China in 1988 and has particular affinity for Beijing. 

By Jonathan Tel

It's been a while since the Monkey King set out on his Journey to the West. With his Fiery-Gazing Golden-Eyes he infallibly recognized Evil, and vowed to combat it in every form. He changed shape at will and leaped from cloud to cloud. It was in the spring of 2008 that the Gorillagram appeared in mainland China. (One of those fads, we believe, that sneaked in from America or Europe.) A Taiwanese-owned company introduced the concept; they were in the business of couriering documents around Beijing, and they diversified, or call it a promotional gimmick. The way it works is that a man in a gorilla suit arrives in your building. He steps out of the elevator and jogs right up to the reception desk, banging his chest. He's directed to the appropriate cubicle, where he sings, 'Happy Birthday to You!' to the lucky and amazed recipient, or 'Congratulations on your Promotion! Ten thousand Congratulations!' He accepts his tip, and off he goes.

So who is he, this fellow in the furry disguise? His true name is unknown; no doubt he's a migrant worker, not legally resident in the capital. The salary is pitiful, and the costume hot and itchy; he must be from the South. He's not as tall as he looks: his real eyes are at the level of the Gorilla's snout, and he speaks through a veil around its throat. Six days a week, he cycles around Beijing, going wherever he's told; sometimes he's in a hell of a rush, pedaling like crazy, scarcely time to pant his song before he dashes to the next appointment; but there's downtime too - he un-Velcros his head and puffs a cigarette. There are worse ways to make a living.

Now one afternoon in June he'd just finished a job singing the Retirement Song at a graphic design company on Qianmen Dajie, and he was about to mount his Forever bicycle which he'd parked in a nearby alley - not really a rough area, though you have to watch out for pickpockets. A businesswoman walked by, a red handbag swinging from her shoulder. Suddenly he heard a roar and a Honda moped was accelerating past, two men on it. The passenger grabbed the handbag! The businesswoman screamed; she clung to her strap. For what can't have been more than a few seconds the man and the woman struggled. She would not let go. Then the Honda sped down to the end of the alley and made a sharp left. The Gorilla was shocked - he'd heard about such things, he'd been warned by his boss to be careful, and whenever he left his bicycle he always locked it to a railing - but he'd never witnessed such a blatant attempt. So the big city is as dangerous as they say.

While he was thinking these thoughts, the familiar and ominous roar recurred. Once again the thieves were in the alley! They'd circled around, and were swooping in for another go! This time both crooks reached out to seize the prize; the driver kept one hand on his machine while with the other he pawed the woman's strap, and his accomplice punched her on the breasts. As for the Gorilla - a timid man, normally - he couldn't bear to see a woman treated like this. He let go of his Forever and bounded along the alley, beating his fists against the front of his costume and uttering a deep 'Hoo-hoo!' The thieves had already taken possession of the handbag and were about to drive off. The Gorilla pounced. With one hairy arm he practically choked the driver, with the other he twisted the handlebars, knocking the moped over, while his knee connected with the groin of the whimpering accomplice. He dusted off the handbag and returned it to the businesswoman. The thieves fled. The Gorilla made a little bow.

He returned to his bicycle and headed off to his next job.

*

That might have been the end of the matter, but it so happened that a student in a nearby teashop had heard the noise and stepped outside. He took photographs of the incident with his cell phone. He posted an account on his blog.

The blog was linked to other blogs - and soon the pictures, along with cut-and-pastings of the text and retellings of the story, appeared on several online forums. There was much speculation as to who the Gorilla might have been, along with approval of his actions, as well as more wide-ranging discussion of the growing problem of urban street crime. (Who is to blame? What should we do about it?) The story was picked up by a newspaper in Hebei Province, and from there it was copied by a news agency and printed in further papers and magazines. BRAVE GORILLA RESCUES CITIZEN - IN HER PLIGHT, AN "ANIMAL" HELPS HER - SUPERMONKEY TO THE RESCUE! Given that there was only one Gorillagram company in Beijing, it wasn't difficult for the media to locate the Gorilla. But the management turned down all requests for interviews on his behalf. It would draw attention away from their core business; the last thing they wanted was for the public to think they were in the business of crime-fighting, not to speak of the potential liability suit. They handed the Gorilla his fan mail - letters and postcards from all across the nation, including a proposal of marriage from a young lady in Shaanxi Province, addressed simply to Hero Gorilla, Beijing - and told him sternly to stick to his job in future. From the Gorilla's point of view, he was more embarrassed than anything; all he'd done was what you or I might under the circumstances. And it made his work harder. When he went into an office to do his act, likely as not the middle managers would want to chat and the secretaries would flirt, and he didn't get bigger tips either - on the contrary, people seemed to assume now he was a celebrity he didn't need the money. 'Excuse me,' he'd mumble in his Southern accent, 'it was over in a second, I don't remember much.' And if they still kept pestering him he'd deny his involvement: 'I guess you must be thinking of some other ape.'

Meanwhile the online discussion continued. The majority of netizens were supportive of his actions ('We need monkeys like that in Guangdong …' and 'The government ought to award the Gorilla a medal …' were typical responses; a woman who called herself Tingting23 said she'd been born in the Year of the Monkey herself and 'Monkeys are famous for their helpfulness and quick thinking'), but others were skeptical: 'How do we know the Gorilla was in fact a hero? All we can tell from the pictures is that two men were taking a woman's handbag and the Gorilla intervened. Maybe she wanted the men to have her bag?' The story was alluded to on a discussion board: 'It is a shame that stick-in-the-muds are opposing a market economy with Chinese characteristics. The last thing we need is to have a Gorilla barge in every time we shake hands on a deal!' Which led to further criticism, as well as some support of the Gorilla for 'preserving Maoist values'. An editorial in the July issue of the Bejing Financial Review referred somewhat obscurely to 'Gorillas and their ilk who shoot sparrows with a pearl' in the context of defending the opening up of the mining industry to foreign investment.

*

That summer, in advance of the Olympics, teams of police were going around the city checking IDs, arresting or deporting illegals. Those who made their living on the streets were especially in danger of being caught, and many jugglers and conjurors and balloon-folders were never seen again. The Gorilla felt fairly secure: with a get-up so striking, he didn't look like he had anything to hide. But one afternoon when he came back to the courier company, a police officer was waiting for him. 'We've had reports,' the officer said. The Gorilla said, 'What did I do?' The officer fastened handcuffs around his thick hairy wrists, and drove him to the station.

Now it seemed that every officer in Beijing was gathered around, eager to ogle the celebrity; the police were pointing and chattering among themselves like children at the zoo. They yelled questions at him. 'Where's your ID? Where's your temporary residence permit? Where's your employment permit?' The Gorilla shook his head. A middle-ranking officer scolded him, 'You're the worst kind. What we call a Three-No.'

There followed the business of taking fingerprints; it wasn't possible to bare his hand without taking off his entire costume, and in the end an officer just pressed the Gorilla's furry fingers on the ink pad. Next he was photographed, face-on and in profile, for the record. He asked, 'Do you want me to remove my head?' But he was pictured just as he was - nobody wanted to see the face of an ordinary human migrant worker; let's not break the spell.

'I didn't know I was doing anything bad,' the Gorilla pleaded. 'All I did was go around offices singing songs. I'll sing for you, if you like.'

That was the wrong thing to have said. One officer responded, 'What does he think this is? Karaoke night?' Another went, 'Sing? You think we can't sing for ourselves, better than any monkey?' A third declared, 'Are you attempting to bribe a police officer in the course of his duties?' while making the 'shame on you' gesture with index finger against cheek. And meanwhile the first officer was repeating his witticism, laughing at the punchline - 'Karaoke night!' - louder every time.

A senior officer, Detective Wang, held out his hands for silence. He took charge of the interrogation. 'Listen. Gorilla, Mister Monkey, whoever you are. According to our records, you were involved in the theft of a handbag.'

'The handbag wasn't actually stolen. What happened was -'

'Aha! You're admitting it was a case of attempted theft!'

The Gorilla tried to explain, but his Mandarin was far from fluent, and it was difficult to raise his voice above the background noise. An older officer was warbling 'My Motherland' in a resonant tenor - 'When friends visit we treat them well; when enemies visit we are ready for them with a hunting musket …' - and a younger officer was marveling, 'We've never had a monkey in here before.' Detective Wang glared at the audience, 'Shush! I'm trying to conduct an interrogation here!'

The Gorilla mumbled his excuses.

Detective Wang wiped his brow with the back of his hand. This was really too much. He couldn't be expected to arrest every beggar, busker, and queerly costumed oddball in the city. He scrolled down the Gorilla's file - pages of barely relevant stuff trawled up by a search engine. 'So, Gorilla, is it true that you're opposed to the development of capitalist enterprise in China?'

'Yes. I mean, no. Er, what is the correct answer?'

The station had never been so crowded. Still more police were coming in to gawk, and civilian employees too. One officer had texted his girlfriend, who'd come running over in high heels from the fashion boutique where she was employed; another officer had brought his aged mother, who jabbed her fingers in the Gorilla's direction and stifled her laughter with a hand over her toothless mouth.

Wang turned to an underling, Detective Zhao. 'Oh, get him to confess something, then we'll get rid of him.'

Wang sat down at a desk with his back to the fray, and busied himself with paperwork. Meanwhile Zhao typed the confession on the Gorilla's behalf. 'Actions liable to cause public disorder … Obstruction of the highway … Failure to show Identity Document when requested…'

'I don't know how to read all these fancy words,' the Gorilla said. 'And besides, I'm innocent.'

'Yes, yes,' said Zhao, and pressed the Gorilla's thumbprint on the dotted line.

The Gorilla was in the midst of the mob. Some wit kept offering him a banana, another taunted him, 'Where's your demon-exposing mirror, Monkey King?' and people climbed on chairs and on the radiator, the better to peek and jabber at the suspect, and all the while he slumped there, surrounded by his enemies and admirers, saying nothing at all.

Then somebody made a dunce's cap out of cardboard and put it on the Gorilla's head, and a placard was strung around his neck, 'I Opposed The Will Of The People', and he was made to stand with arms twisted back in 'airplane position' for a full hour, his secret eyes weeping behind the simian snout, while the police drank tea and had their photos taken with the captive beast.

Eventually, 'You can go now,' Detective Wang said. And a young officer patted his fur and murmured, 'Soft.'

*

The Gorilla went back to the courier company. He did some more jobs for them, cycling to offices and singing congratulations, but his heart wasn't in it. A couple of weeks later, soon after the closing ceremony for the Olympics, he failed to arrive at work. The gorilla suit remained empty, sagging on the hook. The company considered hiring a replacement, but the fad had had its day, and really it was more trouble than it was worth. As for the man who had acted the part, we can only guess his fate. Is he still in Beijing, in a different guise, working in some other line? Or did he return to the village he grew up in? At any rate the Hero Gorilla has never been seen again.

China to Me

We've added a new blog to our daily reading--Evan Osnos's dispatches at The New Yorker. Currently blogging from Vietnam, Osnos posted a few thoughts on Friday about Vietnam's lengthy relationship with China ("Long After We Left") and a few days earlier the delightfully-titled "From Karenina to Cyrus," which in one short vignette traces the intellectual influences from West to East over the past few generations.

In his first post to the blog, Osnos mentioned a favorite China watcher here at China Beat, Emily Hahn. Osnos writes, "I like to imagine what she would have made of this blog. Upon arriving in China in 1935, she penned a letter to her family, which began, 'The thing that daunts me about writing letters is the effort involved in getting them mailed. The prices of stamps changes every few hours and there are never any mailboxes anyway.'"

Last year, we kicked off a (very) occasional feature called "Our Women in China" which draws attention to the outstanding female raconteurs of China, and we've been meaning to do a post on Emily Hahn ever since. In lieu of a reflection on her importance to China studies and China watching (we promise to come back to it sometime in the future), here is a short list to whet your appetite:

1. A list of her many publications can be found here.

2. Far East Economic Review remembers Hahn's understated indictment of red light district reforms in Hong Kong.

3. The Writer's Almanac writes about Hahn on the anniversary of her birthday this year (January 14).

4. The New York Times' obituary (February 19, 1997).

5. Jeff Wasserstrom draws connections between Missouri and China, of which Hahn is one.

Chatting with Wen

One of the topics we raised in China in 2008 was the changing relationship between the Chinese leadership and regular people over the past years. Last week China Digital Times pointed to another example of this changing relationship--Wen Jiabao answering netizens' questions online.

We've run a few related pieces at the site before, such as Nicolai Volland's "Boss Hu and the Press" and Richard Kraus's "Preserving the Premier's Calligraphy at Beichuan Middle School."

Wolf Totem revisited (yet again)

I know that this site has run more than its fair share of commentaries on Wolf Totem already, including both a negative review and a piece defending the novel. I've even done one piece about it already myself, which took the form of a wrap-up look at the widely varied responses it generated in different quarters. It might seem that enough is enough, but I can't resist slipping in one more short post, due to a new award that this work is up for that some people who thought it shouldn't have gotten earlier prizes might be rooting for it to win: the 2009 Delete Key Award for Bad Writing.

I learned about this nomination from a comment that Janice Harayda--the one-time book editor for the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer who now runs the entertaining and informative site, "One-Minute Book Reviews," that's sponsoring the prize in question--posted recently at China Beat. (This just goes to show that many of us at the blog do pay attention to those comments, even if we aren't always quick on the keyboard in terms of responding to those about our own pieces--I know I can be slow to do this.) Harayda offers a wonderfully concise rationale for Wolf Totem's inclusion on her short list, and also offers up for this book (as for many others) a "Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide" to it. Definitely worth checking both of these out, but a word of warning: the site, which I've just discovered, seems like the type that offers the sort of serious fun for the intellectually curious that could easily become addictive.

p.s. I find it particularly appropriate to use a posting about Wolf Totem to draw attention to a site many of our readers might not know about (after all, it only very occasionally focuses on any sort of Chinese theme), since Jiang Rong's novel was the focus back when the New York Times' "Paper Cuts: A Blog about Books" ran its first piece telling readers about China Beat (a site that runs many posts that aren't about books). So, there's a nice working of Karma here, which, whatever else one has to say about Wolf Totem, is definitely a point in its favor.

p.p.s. I was going to vow that I would never again mention the book on this site, but I might not be able to resist the temptation of doing so, if only to update our readers on whether it "wins" this latest prize.