New on the site this time:
Gan Ye, a young journalist working with Singapore-based Initium to produce a poignant piece on how ordinary Chinese people deal with the grief and anger produced by the many, many deaths that followed the end of China’s zero-covid policy in December 2022.  The topic is taboo in China, but Gan explored it to great effect by visiting the bereavement groups people join on WeChat and interviewing members who wanted to talk.
We are of course living in tumultuous times, as President Donald Trump seems determined to overturn the geopolitical and economic order built up since WWII.  This of course has produced a great deal of commentary in China, which may well stand to benefit if Trump’s moves do not produce the desired results.  I may or may not devote my post-retirement attention to this; I am still deciding.  But there are many more open source blogs and Substacks than when I started Reading the China Dream in 2018.  I’ll try to work up a complete list of them for a future post, but if you are hungry for such material, I can suggest:
Thomas Des Garets Geddis’s Substack, Sinification, as well as Zhang Qianfan’s on Trump and America’s Cultural Revolution, translated and posted on Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage site.
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New on the site this time:
Three new texts, all on China’s mood as 2025 dawns.  All are bleak.

Sun Liping. “The Two Things People Are Most Worried About, Which Can Also Count as a Belated New Year's Wish” notes that everyone in China is stressed out, because the educational system has become an endless competition that dumps graduates into a rat race of a job world.  People just want a normal life, he argues, and China surely has enough wealth to make that possible.

Lao Dongyan, “My 2024, in which I Learned to Start Over” tells the story of Lao’s recovery from burnout and depression.  Lao, a law professor at Tsinghua, has been outspoken in the past few years, only to be criticized because “her values are no longer in tune with the times.”  She spent a sabbatical year in Canada and got her motivation back.

Youthology, “China’s Vulnerable Generation” paints a bleak picture of everyone under 30.  China’s higher education system democratized just as China’s growth rate stalled, flooding the job market with frustrated young people.  The China Dream has stalled, and no one knows what to do about it.
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Enjoy!

New on the site this time:

Only one piece, unsurprisingly on Trump's re-election:

Xiao Gongqin, "As Trump Assumes Power, How Will China Respond to the Challenge?"

Personally, Trump's victory has me flirting with a vow of silence, so I will stop there.

Enjoy!
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New on the site this time:

​Two pieces on the Chinese economy, both sparked by the massive intervention of China’s central bank into the Chinese stock market on September 24, the effects of which are being followed by China-watchers everywhere. 
 
I was in China for the month of September, and my broad impression is that people in general were less tense than last year, when many were still reeling from the effects of the sudden end of China’s zero-covid policy at the end of 2022.  At the same time, many Chinese seem definitively convinced that the boom is over and hard times are coming. 
 
Sun Liping’s blog post, “Rethinking Some of My Ideas in the Light of the Current Situation,” reflects this pessimism.  He seems resigned to the possibility that China may go through something like Japan’s “30 lost years,” during which China can solve its overcapacity problem and rethink what kind of economy it wants.  By contrast, Zhao Yanjing (“With the Huge Turmoil in the Stock Market, China’s Economy Reaches its Most Perilous Moment”) remains confident that if the central bank holds firm, government intervention can shock China’s economy out of the moribund state in which is currently finds itself. 
 
Enjoy!

New on the site this time:

Only one of my translations - Xu Jilin’s brief comments on the American election. In “What is the Meaning of Taylor Swift's 100 Million Dollar Ragdoll Cat?”  Xu argues that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris will swing the election in Harris’s favor.  The piece is not meant to be deep – Xu wrote it in his spare time while traveling in Turkey – but illustrates nonetheless the degree to which Chinese intellectuals are following the US election.  The link to censorship is that Xu took it down shortly after posting it.

The other translation – into Chinese this time - is of a piece I published recently in China Books Review on China’s New Left, in which I criticized New Left intellectuals for having embraced the state. I was flipping through my WeChat subscriptions a few days after arriving in China in early September, and to my surprise found it translated and available online in China. 

Turnabout is fair play, I guess; I don’t ask my Chinese authors for their permission before I translate their work, and this translator did not talk to me or the China Books Review.  The translation appears on the WeChat forum of someone who claims to be a former railroad worker who was fired for his activism.  In other words, a genuine leftist who appreciated my takedown of the phony New Left in China.  It appears that former railway workers read widely.

I was a bit taken aback, because while the piece is hardly scathing, I did not write it to be read in China – and there I was.  Foreigners have been detained and harangued for hours for less.  I mentioned this to a Chinese friend, who wisely remarked that “if anyone notices it, the censors will take it down.”  Well, here we are three weeks later and not only is the piece still available in China, but it has also been read almost 40,000 times.  Of course, this is a drop in the bucket in China, but surely a personal best for me.

A couple of notes for readers planning trips to China. 

For phone service, I used eSim (you have to have a fairly recent, top-end phone) and Airalo (a company that provides eSim services) and my phone was perfect throughout (you don’t have a Chinese phone number, or any phone number, but you have WeChat and WhatsApp and can phone through them if necessary).  I use Astrill VPN, but did not turn it on for my phone, because what eSim and Airalo do is connect you to Internet service providers in China, so of course I did not want to block that.  I don’t know why, but Google services worked like a charm on my phone from start to finish; I could even listen to Spotify on the Beijing subway.  The only downside was that a Chinese phone number remains necessary for certain apps, and you don’t have one, but there are sometimes workarounds if you are persistent.  I turned the Astrill VPN on for my laptop, otherwise no Google, so for me, no life.  Everything worked like a charm most of the time.

In order to promote tourism, the Chinese government now allows foreigners to pay via WeChat (Weixin) and Alipay (here’s a Youtube video that I did not watch on how to do this).  All you have to do is enter your credit card number and you’re ready to go.  You may have to do things twice, and there are a couple of bugs here and there (you can order cars and cabs through the Alipay service, but not Weixin, because Weixin requires a Chinese phone number, which a friend might loan you), but in my case it was worked 99% of the time, a very welcome change from last year.
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Enjoy!
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New on the site this time, a Chinese feminist reflection on the late Alice Munro's fall from grace, following revelations that Munro learned that her second husband had sexually abused her daughter from a previous marriage a decade or so after the fact, but remained with her second husband and kept silent about the abuse throughout the rest of her life.  There is nothing distinctively Chinese about the text I chose to translate, but that is precisely the point:  Alice Munro has readers in China who think about her much as everyone else does.
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I'm off to China on Friday for a month.  I'll be in Shanghai August 31 and September 1, 26, and 27; in Nanjing between September 2 and 6; in Beijing between September 7 and 13; then in Shandong, Sichuan, and Qinghai for the rest of the month (because I haven't visited anywhere except Beijing and Shanghai for the past 15 years, or so it seems).  Send me an email if you want to meet up!

New on the site this time:

A continuing collaboration with GreatFire on Reading and Writing under Censorship in China.  GreatFire is an anonymous and award-winning China-based organization that works to bring transparency to online censorship and to help Chinese people freely access information.  One thing that they do is to rescue posts that have been suppressed on various platforms in China, making them newly available to anyone with access to their sites.  Over the summer, I will translate several such texts in an effort to understand how intellectuals and editors deal with what looks to be a fairly random system where pretty much everyone gets taken down at some point. This time we have texts by Liu Yu on illiberal democracy in Russia, Zhao Tingyang on logic and illogic in China, and Hsu Cho-Yun on China’s spiritual crises.

​Enjoy!

New on the site this time, “Xiang Biao Talks about the Worldwide Student Movement, the Crisis of the Liberal Order, the Nearby and ‘Global Grassroots,’” an example of how one Chinese scholar – who works in Germany – has experienced and understood the student demonstrations against the war in Gaza. 

The text is in fact in interview that Xiang gave to Wu Qi, the same journalist with whom he worked to put together his book Self as Method.  Xiang and Wu were both in Germany when the demonstrations – and the vigorous and conservative reactions to the demonstrations – occurred, and were shocked by the illiberal reactions of the universities, which should be core institutions of the liberal order.  His argument, in a nutshell, is that the backlash against the demonstrations is a product of a larger failure of the postwar liberal global order.  But his interview is more a reflection on what engaged, or “grassroots” scholars and activists should do in the face of an order that seems to be crumbling before our eyes.  At present, the piece has been read 36,000 times in China.
 
Enjoy the interview and your summer!

​New on the site this time:
 
A collaboration with GreatFire on Reading and Writing under Censorship in China.  GreatFire is an anonymous and award-winning China-based organization that works to bring transparency to online censorship and to help Chinese people freely access information.  One thing that they do is to rescue posts that have been suppressed on various platforms in China, making them newly available to anyone with access to their sites.  Over the summer, I will translate several such texts in an effort to understand how intellectuals and editors deal with what looks to be a fairly random system where pretty much everyone gets taken down at some point.  I start with translations of texts by Liu Qing and Yao Yang.
 
I might mention as well that I published a piece a couple of weeks ago on “How China’s New Left Embraced the State” in China Books Review, a new journal edited by Alec Ash that everyone should be reading!

​New on the site this time, an interview with Yang Ping, editor of the Beijing Cultural Review, arguably contemporary China’s most important intellectual review – Yang himself has compared his journal to The Atlantic.  The interview is a fascinating illustration of what is possible in contemporary China’s intellectual world, but also of the compromises that are required.
 
I’m home in Switzerland now after a lovely month-long tour of Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Peru).  I’ll be giving a series of talks in Germany in a couple of weeks, and between April 14 and 26 will be in Halle, Würzburg, Göttingen, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Stuttgart, mostly as part of the project “Worldmaking from a Global Perspective:  A Dialogue with China,” sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.  The cover title for my talks is:  “A China we can talk to?”
 
For those interested in attending one of my talks, here is the schedule:
 
April 17, 6:00 p.m., Universität Würzburg, Zentrales Hörsaal- und Seminargebäude, Z6, Hörsaal 0.001, Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg
 
April 18, 4:00 p.m.  Universität Göttingen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum 0.602, Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen
 
April 22, 4:00 p.m.  Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Koserstr. 20, Raum 336, 14195 Berlin
 
April 24, 6:15 p.m. Universität Heidelberg, Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS), Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg, Seminar Building, R. 010.01.05
 
If anyone wants to meet up for a chat somewhere, just send me an email and we’ll see what we can do.