Author: Tanner Greer

Tanner Greer is a writer and analyst whose work has been published in Foreign Policy, The Weekly Standard and The American Conservative. He is currently based out of Taipei.
Reviews

What Xi Thinks

Tanner Greer

Tanner Greer reviews Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping by François Bougon

General Secretary Xi Jinping is a Chinese renaissance man. Self-assured, self-possessed and utterly unflappable, Xi appears equally at home on the hearths of struggling farmers and in the greeting halls of foreign capitals. State media likes to juxtapose the years he spent in the caves of Shanxi with the months he spent governing Shanghai's glittering towers. Here is a man as men should be: a leader who can grasp both the plow and the bond market.

Though Xi majored in chemical engineering, he presents himself as a litterateur. When in Russia, he peppers his speeches with the words of Dostoevsky and Golgol; when in France, of Molière and Maupassant. To better understand the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea, Xi traveled to Hemingway's favorite bar in Havana. Xi has a hankering for historical sites like these, especially those associated with famous scenes from the stories of Chinese antiquity. He cultivates a reputation for taking history seriously; his speeches are filled with allusions to obscure sages and statesmen from China's past.

Dispatches

China’s Anime and Cosplay Obsession

Tanner Greer

How the rise of “2D culture” helps Chinese teenagers escape pressure and find purpose – Tanner Greer

“Most people have no idea I do this,” said Wu Na, beaming, as costumed conference-goers stopped to take her picture. The 14-year-old was wearing a thin cotton cloak over a knee-length tunic. As I talked to her, a boy walked into the convention hall sporting spiked hair, a neon-purple trench coat, and a bare chest. Like the hundreds of other cosplaying teenagers in the convention hall, he was not going to allow Beijing’s frigid January temperatures to cramp his style. “I have trouble connecting with most other people at school,” Wu reflected. “But in the two-dimensional world there is a sense of community I can’t find anywhere else. My second-dimension friends mean so much more to me than my third-dimension friends do.”

Wu is just one of the hundreds of millions wrapped up in what young Chinese call the “second dimension” (二次元). The closest English parallel is the ACG, or animation-comic-gaming sector, the market’s favorite acronym for a certain class of Japanese pop culture exports: anime, manga, and the merchandise inspired by them. The two-dimensional world Chinese teenagers such as Wu Na live in includes all of these elements, but their self-styled “second dimension” extends further – and is not limited to Japanese ACG, also factoring in anime-styled cartoons drawn in Korea, China and the United States.