Essays, Translation

Gone But Not Forgotten

Lü Pin

Why Feminist Voices will never die in China – Lü Pin

Read the original Chinese text of this article here: 女权不死

From the evening of March 8 until March 9, the public Weibo and Wechat accounts of [the Chinese women’s rights media platform] Feminist Voices were successively deleted for “violating regulations” and “spreading sensitive content,” without specifying what regulations were violated and what sensitive content was included.

Such vague and incontestable claims have been used as grounds for deleting tens of thousands of accounts from the Chinese internet. In comparison, the deletion of Feminist Voices, an account with only 250,000 followers, is too inconsiderable to mention. But this action sent an important message to the Chinese feminist community. Feminist Voices was the first public platform to use the word “feminism” in its name on Chinese social media, and moreover, it has played a leading role in feminist communities since 2011. Its disappearance suggests that feminism has become an unwelcome presence for Chinese internet censors, another set of banned characters marked in red.

Fiction

A Hero is Born

Jin Yong

An excerpt from Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born by Jin Yong, translated by Anna Holmwood

Also read our review of the book

China: 1200 A.D.

The Song Empire has been invaded by its warlike Jurchen neighbours from the north. Half its territory and its historic capital lie in enemy hands; the peasants toil under the burden of the annual tribute demanded by the victors. Meanwhile, on the Mongolian steppe, a disparate nation of great warriors is about to be united by a warlord whose name will endure for eternity: Genghis Khan.

Guo Jing (Skyfury Guo), son of a murdered Song patriot, grew up with Genghis Khan's army. He is humble, loyal, perhaps not altogether wise, and is fated from birth to one day confront an opponent who is the opposite of him in every way: privileged, cunning and flawlessly trained in the martial arts. Guided by his faithful shifus, The Seven Heroes of the South, Guo Jing must return to China - to the Garden of the Drunken Immortals in Jiaxing - to fulfil his destiny. But in a divided land riven by war and betrayal, his courage and his loyalties will be tested at every turn.

Little Red Podcast

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Louisa Lim

Inside China’s secretive United Front – Louisa Lim

The Communist Party's shadowy United Front Work department has emerged stronger than ever after the most recent government reshuffle. This body, which President Xi Jinping referred to in 2014 as a “magic weapon” for achieving the “rejuvenation of the Chinese race,” has now taken over responsibility for all work related to ethnic minority groups, religious management and contact with overseas Chinese, along with its main task of winning hearts and minds overseas.

“It makes clear what was generally the case all along: the United Front Work Department was the arbiter behind the government departments carrying out this work,” says Dr Gerry Groot of the University of Adelaide, who specialises in the United Front Work Department (UFWD), over email. “Though many people researching areas like religion and ethnic affairs knew that the UFWD was the real power or at least important, it is remarkable how rarely this was acknowledged in published work,” he continued. “That pretence of a separation between Party, government and civil society is now over.”

Chinese Corner

An Egg Tart by Any Other Name

Rosalyn Shih

Delicious loanwords in Cantonese – Rosalyn Shih

Cantonese has quite a few loanwords borrowed from English that have slipped into everyday usage. The best example is probably dik1 si2 的士 for “taxi,” hence people saying daa2 dik1 打的 for “hail a cab” as far north as Beijing, where it’s Mandarinzed as dǎ dī 打的. Chinglish is also pretty standard, especially among trendy teenagers and work colleagues, who might say “send go3 email bei1 ngo5 laa1” (send個email卑我啦) for “send me an email.”

But the biggest number of loanwords has to be for imported foods. The Cantonese-speaking region of southern China – Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and Macau – is stereotyped for its fondness of eating everything from snake to civet cat, but we’ve embraced Western food too. Many of our names for those foods are also imported, and it’s safe to assume that many of those words originated during Britain’s rule of Hong Kong, before making their way to the mainland.

Reviews

Slick Moves

Aaron Fox-Lerner

Aaron Fox-Lerner reviews Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born

It says a lot about China's top-selling novelist that nobody in the West seems to know how to describe him. Anna Holmwood's translation of Jin Yong's 1957 novel Legend of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born marks the first commercial release of his work in English, and the first new translation since The Book and the Sword, translated by Graham Earnshaw, and Olivia Mok's translation of Fox Volant of Snowy Mountain. The going line on Jin – the pen name of the Hong Kong writer and newspaper publisher Louis Cha – is that he's the Chinese Tolkien. Publications from the Guardian to Quartz have compared the book to Lord of the Rings as a handy reference to Jin's longstanding popularity and influence on Chinese pop culture.

If anything, the comparison may be underselling Jin. Legend of the Condor Heroes alone has spawned a slew of TV series, multiple video games and at least four movie adaptations of varying fidelity, including Wong Kar-Wai's elliptical Ashes of Time. That might not seem to rival the footprint left by Tolkien until you consider how prolific Jin was as a novelist, penning 14 major works, many of which have spawned their own long list of TV shows, movies, comics, video games and parodies. Estimates of total books sold vary – especially when piracy is taken into account – but many put the figure at 300 million or more.