Reviews

Republic of Letters

Eleanor Goodman

Eleanor Goodman reviews A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-Wei Wang

One evening this summer as I was waiting for a table at a restaurant, I overheard a well-dressed woman describing a bike trip she was planning to take to Japan. “I’m so excited about it,” she told her companion, “that I just picked up Memoirs of a Geisha.” That literature is a window onto a culture – a point of access that can be utilized even from afar, a safe mental space in which one’s own attitudes, prejudices, preconceptions, and expectations can be challenged and even altered – is an idea that is not only true but important. In an era in which globalism is a simple fact and travel to previously remote places is easy and ordinary, while simultaneously xenophobia and racial fear-mongering are on the rise, there is an increasing need for exposure to other cultures in many forms. Then again, reading a book written by a white man about sex workers in the 1930s and 40s does not necessarily offer the most accurate picture of Japan as it exists today.

Little Red Podcast

Muzzling the Academy

Louisa Lim

Censorship emboldened, at home and abroad – by Louisa Lim

For University of Melbourne doctoral candidate Dayton Lekner, it was supposed to be his last day of fieldwork interviewing elderly survivors of the Anti-Rightist movement. Instead, he found himself in a Shanghai police station undergoing a three-hour interrogation about his research. His experience in February 2017 illustrates the challenges faced by Western academics researching China, who are encountering increasing levels of intimidation both of themselves and their sources. Though recent headlines have focused on the controversy surrounding Beijing’s demands that at least two Cambridge University Press journals censor their archives inside China, it is clear that attempts to shut down academic inquiry go far deeper.

Essays

Russia and China’s Diplomatic Dance

Eveline Chao

The Russian ballet that offended Mao and harbingered the Sino-Soviet Split – by Eveline Chao

On June 30, China’s state-owned paper People’s Daily declared “China-Russia ties better than ever in history”. A few days later, Xi Jinping reiterated the sentiment during a state visit to Russia. While rhetoric never quite reflects truth, it’s certainly a major leap forward from 1969, when the two nations spent seven months in undeclared military conflict over their shared border, during the height of the Sino-Soviet split.

Unsurprisingly for two enormous and ambitious countries, relations between the two have always been touchy. One the one hand, they have been brought together by common concerns: fighting in the Korean War, countering the United States, and, more recently, keeping North Korea in check. On the other hand, they are also rivals: they have fought often for control of Mongolia and Manchuria, and each nurtures a vision of former glory that, if restored by one, could put the other at a disadvantage. Each country’s fate impacts the other’s.

Chinese Corner

The Incision Point

Liz Carter

The first of our weekly language column, ‘Chinese Corner’ – by Liz Carter

Most of us are acquainted with Mandarin, and by that I mean the predominant form of Chinese. We often use the labels “Chinese” and “Mandarin” interchangeably, but in fact there are at least seven major varieties of Chinese, depending on whom you ask. For now, let’s start with Mandarin, what you would learn in school.

There are a lot of reasons to learn Mandarin: it’s beautiful, useful in all sorts of business endeavors, and would enable you to communicate with an additional billion people on this planet. The main problem most people have with Mandarin isn’t deciding whether or not they’d like to study it: it’s deciding where to start.

Reviews

A Tale of Two Schools

Sarabeth Berman

Sarabeth Berman reviews Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu

For millions of children in China today, the experience of school is much like a scene I encountered one afternoon in the fall of 2010, in a village in southwest China. Working for a Chinese non-profit education organization, I boarded a plane in Beijing one morning, flew three-and-half hours to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, then took another short flight to Lincang, a city near the Burmese border. From there, we rode six hours through lush but impoverished mountains, famous for their tea plantations, to the village of Shao Jie (population 3,000). Finally we reached our destination, the local school, just as its students were breaking for dinner. It stood at the top of a hill, nestled in Yunnan’s famous clouds.