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.
​
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!