Join our translation fund drive by donating on Patreon
Since our launch in fall 2017, the China Channel has published over 400 articles, from book reviews to essays to narrative dispatches. We’ve also featured dozens of translations of the best contemporary non-fiction, fiction and poetry, bringing new work from Chinese into English. In doing so, we have worked in partnership with Read Paper Republic, One-Way Street and The Initium, co-publishing original pieces to help make them available in English for the first time.
Our translations are funded in part by readers like you on Patreon. Your support allows us to commission Chinese authors as well as translators, so that Chinese writing that would otherwise remain inaccessible can be read by you. We are grateful to all our sponsors for making this happen, in especial Bill Bishop of Sinocism, and to Stephen O. Lesser, who has supported the Diaspora column. To date, 17 readers are currently donating a total of $161 per month. We thank all of these patrons for their continued support.
As we approach our third year, we are again calling on you to help us continue to fund original translations and meet our other commissioning costs. This July, we’re looking to hit our funding goal of $300 per month in contributions via Patreon. That extra $140 is will allow us to commission more translations from both emerging and established authors. If just two dozen of you committed $5 or $10 a month – as more than that did already in our recent reader survey – then we will hit that goal easily.
In the media industry, it’s tough to make ends meet – we cannot rely on grants funding, and are dropping to three posts a week from July. Now we are turning to you, our readers, to chip in to ensure our continued survival. Join the drive today!
Here are some of our favorite translations that you helped make happen:
Four Fates in a Changing China – Yu Hua, trans. Allan H. Barr
“In China a lot transpires under cover of dark, and we can see only the things that happen in daylight”
Three Sketches of Peter Hessler – Wu Qi, trans. Luisetta Mudie
“Hessler writes about China, and Chinese journalists keep writing about him, in unstoppable waves: an endless love-in”
A Tale of Two Migrants – Zhang Zizhu, trans. Sam Hall
“You don’t have a mistress and you dare to show your face, how embarrassing is that?”
Gone But Not Forgotten – Lü Pin, trans. Kate Costello
“We could have preserved our commitment to feminism in name only… But for us, there was never any choice”
The Storytelling Robot – Fei Dao, trans. Alec Ash
“Your Majesty, this story can have two endings, but I haven’t yet calculated which is the most marvelous”
The Beseiged Rainbow – Xiaoyu Lu (trans. the author)
“In the bridgeable gap between establishment and activists, room for progress and regression existed hand-in-hand”
In the Rain – Liu Xiaobo, trans. Ming Di
“What I long for is to fall apart / in the rain, my thin body disappearing / before the sun rises”
Check out our full archive of translations here.
