Essays

Contentious Friendship

Geremie Barmé

Geremie R. Barmé on Kevin Rudd and a decade of zhengyou

It’s ten years since I suggested that Kevin Rudd use the expression zhengyou in a speech he gave at Peking University in April 2008. Zhengyou means a friend or an adviser who dares give voice to unpleasant truths, one who offers uncomfortable opinions and counsels caution. It’s an ancient term in Chinese; in the glib journalese of today it might be rendered as “speaking truth to power.”

Rudd was Australia’s newly elected prime minister and the speech at Peking University was on the itinerary of his first overseas trip in the office, one that included courtesy calls on political leaders in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, as well as those in Beijing. The China leg of the trip was particularly fraught because of controversies surrounding the international leg of the Olympic Torch Relay and the recent uprising in “Tibetan China,” what the Beijing media dubbed the “3.14 Riots.” These were mostly peaceful protests against Chinese rule that had broken out in March not just in the official autonomous region of Tibet, but in areas with sizable numbers of Tibetans. The official media blackout imposed on foreign journalists coupled with the draconian repression of protesters had caused consternation around the world, in particular among Western political leaders who were anxious that China’s vaunted “coming out" party at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing that August go off without a hitch. Hopeful international politicians, academics, media commentators and China watchers speculated that China’s further integration into the international community as symbolized by the Olympics might be matched by a greater openness and relaxation within the People’s Republic itself.

Hidden History

Skeletons in the Golf Course

Jeremiah Jenne

Jeremiah Jenne unearths the history lying beneath a Beijing park

Qingnianhu is a typical Beijing park. Older women dance in ragged unison. The husbands chase after their grandchildren. A few folks are playing chess or cards. An artificial lake – covered in white fuzz every spring, the detritus of the city’s annual explosion of poplar and willow spores – is surrounded by a fitness path. A water park, complete with slides and wading pools, awaits warmer summer months.

“A bucket of balls is 150,” intones the bored looking teenager at the front desk of the Qingnianhu Park Golf and Fitness Club. I scan the payment QR code on my phone and trudge out to the driving range, which is enmeshed by steel pylons holding up a net. Somewhere out there, buried under golf balls and landfill, are bodies.

Essays

What Do Xi and the Pope Have in Common?

Jeff Wasserstrom

One's a powerful leader for life. The other's Xi Jinping – Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Five years ago, when Xi Jinping became President and Francis became Pope in the same month, I wrote a playful piece suggesting that the question in my title could be answered in the affirmative. One inspiration for this was finding, as I toggled between broadcasts on CNN and other networks, that the ascensions of Xi and Francis were being described in very similar ways. There was talk, in each case, of a small group of men using a secretive process to decide which of them should be the next leader of about one-and-a-half billion people. There was speculation over whether the new leader would be a bold reformer or a stay-the-course type. There was also some musing on whether the new leader’s predecessor, who had just stepped down, would fade away or try to exert influence from behind the scenes.

Chinese Corner

Forget-Me-Not

Alec Ash

Invented Chinese characters, old and new – Alec Ash

Growing up in England, one of my favorite books was The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and John Lloyd (creator of the British comedy show QI). Described as a “dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet,” Adams and Lloyd took place names – often those funny-sounding Welsh ones – and reassigned to them meanings for concepts that should have words but don’t. For example, “Ahenny: The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves;” “Flimby: The safe place you put something and then forget where it was;” or “Goole: The expression on the face of someone who has clearly forgotten your name.”

Chinese is like that too: full of ideas for which there should be a character, but isn’t. Only when it comes to inventing those characters, we can have even more fun with an ideographic writing system by mushing together two existing characters in novel ways.

Reviews

Imperial Stars

Jonathan Chatwin

Jonathan Chatwin reviews Heavenly Numbers by Christopher Cullen

High on a solitary outcrop of crenellated city wall in Beijing – an anomaly among the towering glass and concrete – sits China’s Imperial Observatory: a collection of the astronomical instruments with which the officials of the Qing dynasty tracked the movement of the heavenly bodies.

It is a relic of an age that can often seem confoundingly distant in modern China. The small stretch of city wall is one of the only sections of that fortification remaining, the rest having been demolished in the two decades after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. That absence finds an ironic echo in the name of the adjacent subway stop and traffic intersection: Jianguomen, the “Gate of National Construction.” This was one of the gates punched through the old city wall by the Japanese, during their occupation of the city in the late 1930s. It met its end, along with much along this axis of the city, in the 1960s as the government began constructing a subway system.