New on the site, four rousing essays on the subject of education.

Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng offer a withering condemnation of Beida’s 2014 plans to launch the English-language only Yenching Academy, in “The Cultural Positioning and Self-Betrayal of Peking University”

Tsinghua Political Scientist Liu Yu denounces China’s “educational arms race” in “My Daughter is Inexorably Becoming an Ordinary Person”

Social Anthropologist Xiang Biao talks about his experiences as a student at Beida in the early 1990s in excerpts from his book Self as Method.

The Taiwanese Sociologist Zhao Gang discusses “radicalism and violence” among youth in Taiwan and Hong Kong in “Why is this Generation of Young People so Easily Tricked?”  N. B.  I did not choose this text because I agree with it.

I might mention that I was a recent guest on the Chinese Whispers Podcast, hosted by The Spectator in the U.K.  Even if you have heard enough of me, I highly recommend the podcast.  Cindy Yu, the journalist who runs it, asks excellent questions and gives her guests the chance to answer them.

New additions to the site this time :
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“Historical Nihilism,” a nasty little bit of propaganda aimed at establishment intellectuals, which we may be hearing more about in the run-up to the celebration of the CCP’s 100-year birthday in July.
 
For our Youth Concerns project, a nice journalistic essay on young people and…mutual funds.
 
For our Women’s Voices project, Zuo Fengrong, Professor at the Central Party School, on “The Thucydides Trap and a New Type of Great Power Relationship.”
 
And finally, Shi Zhan, historian and foreign relations expert on his new book, Breaking through the Cocoon, which I would really like to read if anyone could get their hands on a copy.

Click here for tips on getting the most out of the site. ​

A rich harvest of texts added to the site today.

First, for those who are following Sino-American relations, we translate Yuan Peng's reflections on the eve of the Anchorage Summit in mid-March.

Second, we offer two different perspectives  on the experience of China's sent-down youth during and after the Cultural Revolution:  Qin Hui reflects on his nine years in the countryside, and Xiang Biao discusses the impact of the Zhiqing generation of Chinese social science.

Finally, Selena Orly and I are launching a project on "Women's Voices" in which we grapple with the fact such voices are suprisingly few among Chinese establishment intellectuals.  This week's addition to the list:  New Left activist Wen Jiajun on China's climate crisis.

Click here for tips on getting the most out of the site. ​

New on the site this fortnite: 

Lai Youxuan, "Chinese Delivery Drivers, Stuck in the System," (part of the Chinese Youth Concerns series of translations), a really good read;

A recent interview​ with Peking Univeristy political scientist Yu Keping on governance issues;

A recent piece by Xie Tao on “2020:  Sino-American Relations and U.S. Politics in the Time of the Pandemic”

​Click here for tips on getting the most out of the site.

New on the site, "What Has Xi Jinping Wrought?", a follow-up to the last update's piece on "Am I Being Played?", in which I once again use Ren Jiantao's writings, this time from 2020, to try to measure the impact Xi Jinping's reimposition of ideological discipline has had on the world of China's establishment intellectuals.
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In addition, one final essay by Ren Jiantao, this one on the theme of artificial intelligence:  "An Ounce of Prevention:  Technological Revolution and Great Changes to State Governance." 

Click here for tips on getting the most out of the site. ​

Something a little different on the site this week: an essay, “Am I Being Played?​” that I composed over the past two weeks, inspired by a question that arose as I was working on Ren Jiantao’s text for last time.  The question has to do with the extent to which Chinese establishment intellectuals mean what they say when they publish in mainland Chinese venues.

In addition, the translation of another text by Ren Jiantao, “The Periodization of Reform,” that grew out of research for the above-mentioned essay.

Also an addition to our Spanish-language translations:  Yuan Peng, “La pandemia de Coronavirus: Un cambio que solo sucede una vez por siglo.”  Thanks to Ugo Armanini, my former student at the Université de Montréal, now at the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid, for revising the Spanish-language text.

A recording of a talk I gave at the Hoover Institution on February 10 is available here.  For those just discovering the site, the short talk (30 minutes followed by discussion and questions) might serve as a good introduction to what the project is about.
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Finally, for French-speaking readers, I am pleased to announce the recent publication on Gallimard of Penser en Chine, a collection of essays under the direction of Anne Cheng, with the collaboration of Éric Vigne, to which I contributed a modest translation of an essay by Qin Hui.

New on the site this fortnight, three texts that, paradoxically, remind us of the role of the market in the lives of contemporary Chinese public intellectuals.  Legal scholar Liang Zhiping flogs two new books he published last year on the relationship between law and China's tradition in an excellent interview in The Shanghai Review of Books (the equivalent of NYRB); sociologist Sun Liping talks to fund managers about what to expect in 2021; and political scientist Ren Jiantao talks to a think tank about the crisis in Chinese values.
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One housekeeping note.  At the request of the author, I removed from the site my translation of Li Tuo's piece on "The Pandemic and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism" because he had already made separate translation plans.  The text is available here.  

New on the site this fortnight, two texts where Mainland New Left intellectuals explain to Hong Kong Chinese the rationale for the National Security Law, imposed on Hong Kong by China's National People's Congress in May, 2020:

Chen Duanhong, “2020 National Constitution Day Symposium Keynote Speech: National Security and the Constitution”

Jiang Shigong, “Probing the ‘Imaginary World’ and the ‘Real World’ to Understand the Internal Legal Logic of Hong Kong's National Security Law”.

Also, three short texts on the US election:

Qin Hui, “On the ‘Mainstream Media:’  Replies to a Guest’s Objections Concerning the U.S. Election”

Shi Zhan, “How Many Tweets Would a Trump Thumb Tweet if a Trump Thumb Could Tweet Tweets?!”

Zhou Lian, “Thoughts about Political Philosophy Inspired by the Total Blocking of Trump from Social Media”

Enjoy!

New on the site this fortnight, an interview with the activist and legal scholar He Weifang, “The Return of the True Scholar:  A Reflection on the University”.  He has largely dropped out of sight in the past few years due to official pressure, and it is interesting to read him again, even if the subject is Republican-period universities.

For our second installment on youth issues, Freya Ge and I are happy to offer the young literary scholar Liu Xinting’s bracing essay on “Why are Contemporary Youth Increasingly ‘Unhappy?’  Focus on the Living Conditions of China’s Youth,” a theory-rich discussion of the meme-play engaged in by young Chinese today.

And finally, we add to our growing Spanish-language body of texts with Xu Jilin, "¿Qué clase de civilización?  China en una encrucijada," thanks to Cristina Reigadas.

​Happy New Year, and enjoy!

New on the site this fortnight.  First, a blast from the past, Cui Weiping’s brilliant “Why Does the Spring Breeze Not Warm the Earth?  The 1980s Debate on Humanism in China,” originally published in Taiwan in 2007, in which Cui revisits Wang Ruoshui and the debate over “alienation,” insisting that the debate remains relevant in reform-era China.  I was delighted to work with my colleague Selena Orly, Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the preparation of this translation.

Second, a very recent (Nov. 26) discussion of where the U.S. is heading with the election of Joe Biden by four well-known Shanghai professors.

Many of you may be interested by the journalist Ian Johnson’s recent post, “What is China Thinking?” which is a thoughtful review of the Reading the China Dream website.  For those who have recently discovered the site, Johnson does an excellent job of explaining what it is we are doing.
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Finally, the publication of Johnson’s post provoked an unexpected flurry of criticism of me and the website (on Johnson’s Facebook page, which I cannot helpfully link to).  Those interested in my response to this criticism can read my “Guerrilla Translation in a Borderless World.”