Essays

Pax Sinica?

Jacob Dreyer

The double-edged sword of Chinese investment abroad – by Jacob Dreyer

During the 19th Party Congress last week, Xi Jinping announced a new era of Chinese power. “Our country is approaching the center of the world stage,” he said in his opening remarks on Wednesday 18th, “and making continuous contributions to humankind.” Even those of us who feel qualms about this coming to pass can understand the material reasons why peoples all around the world, from European dockworkers to Zambian miners, are daring to hope for a benign Chinese hegemony. From the Hinkley Point power plant to the new Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, from high-speed rail in Ethiopia to a new hospital in Minsk, Chinese investment around the world holds out the possibility for improved health, electricity networks, transportation and stable employment for people all around the world.

Chinese Corner

Move It or Lose It

Eveline Chao

The link between physical gesture and language – by Eveline Chao

Once, some Chinese guy lounging on a freight trike asked me if I was a hooker.

He whispered the question as I walked past in a Beijing alley. It was the middle of the day, and I was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers – not the most standard gear for advertising sex work.  

When I recounted the incident to friends later (secretly trying to feel out whether I had missed some sort of memo about gray New Balance sneakers becoming the internationally recognized symbol for a woman of the night), one offered an interesting theory. “You know,” he said, “I can usually tell Chinese-Americans from Chinese on the street. Something about the way they walk and carry themselves. Maybe he picked up that there was something ‘off’ about you, but misread what it was.”

Reviews

The Problem with “Feminism”

Barclay Bram

Translating Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists – by Barclay Bram

We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx-talk-turned-book, has been translated into Chinese. Released by the People’s Cultural Publishing House in June, the 84-page book closely follows the original’s format aside from one glaring change: the word “feminist” has been dropped from the title.

The book’s pale blue cover has in large text the English title We Should All Be Feminists, but the Chinese has been translated down to the more innocuous The Rights of Women. Why the inconsistency?

Feminism is an increasingly problematic term in China. While the Chinese Communist Party is proud of its record for overturning many of the patriarchal structures that had oppressed Chinese women for centuries – proclaiming that “women can hold up half the sky” – in recent years there have been high-profile crackdowns on feminist activists and feminist websites. In 2015 five feminists were detained just before International Women’s Day for trying to put together a campaign against sexual harassment. Earlier this year the Feminist Voices Weibo account, an influential microblog for the women’s movement in China, was forced offline for 30 days for posting content that was anti-Trump and that implored women to join in an international women’s strike.

Essays

Exhibition as Theater

Denise Y. Ho

Denise Y. Ho on Art and China After 1989 at the Guggenheim

The first time I saw Ai Weiwei’s art, I was appalled. Almost twenty years ago, long before he became an internationally-known contemporary artist, one of my Chinese-language classmates at Qinghua University brought me to Ai’s studio on the outskirts of Beijing. What I saw that afternoon remains imprinted in my mind’s eye: photographs of him giving the middle finger to monumental buildings, rows of ancient pottery casually whitewashed, and elegant Ming dynasty tables sawed in half and reattached at bizarre angles. It was not irreverence to power that bothered me; it was those last two artworks. Never having taken an art history course, and never having heard of the “readymade”, I was horrified that someone could take antiquities and destroy them.  Years later, as a graduate student in Chinese history, I researched and wrote about the idea of “cultural relics”. To this day, my seminar students at Yale take one session to debate the question of who owns art and artifacts.

Essays

The Party is Just Getting Started

Jude Blanchette

Notes on the Nineteenth Party Congress – by Jude Blanchette

In August 1980, Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader until his death in 1997, addressed an enlarged session of the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee. Having just emerged from the wreckage of the ten-year Cultural Revolution in 1976, China was plagued with what the Party’s aging Marxist revolutionaries liked to call “contradictions.”

For Deng, four such challenges confronted the Party and the political system it dominated: