Essays

A Madman’s End

Liu Xiaobo

Geremie Barmé and Liu Xiaobo remember Li Ao

It is impossible to describe the exhilaration I felt upon reading Li Ao’s A Monologue on Tradition (獨白下的傳統) when it first appeared in 1979. At the time, I was working for The Seventies Monthly (七十年代月刊), a prominent Chinese-language magazine edited by the noted Hong Kong journalist Lee Yee (李怡). After years studying in late-Maoist China immersed in the works of the Great Helmsman #1 and stilted Party prose, the initial shock of Hong Kong’s cultural richness was immense. The British Crown Colony was the entrepôt of the Chinese multiverse, one where traditions from before 1949 and the world of that ‘Other China’ Taiwan were as freely accessible as the cloaked realm of the People’s Republic of China.

And then there was Li Ao, whose prose, and his ideas, were liberating, scintillating and, after my time on the Mainland, bracingly scandalous. I was soon surreptitiously ferrying copies of A Monologue on Tradition, a collection of essays on history and the Chinese national character, to friends in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Around that time I launched my own writing career as a Chinese essayist (one which lasted from the late 1970s until the early 1990s); Li Ao, among others writers, was both a challenge and an inspiration. Li Ao died on 18 March this year, but for many of his past admirers Li’s real end came in 2004. His passing gives us pause to consider his plangent fate.

Essays

Storyteller-in-Chief

David Bandurski

Vanity publishing with Chinese characteristics – David Bandurski

To Xi Jinping’s growing list of titles as Chairman of Everything for Life, add one more: Storyteller-in-Chief. In the five years since he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, Xi has authored no less than four books, including The Governance of China (the two-volume tome on his ruling vision that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made such a show of placing on his desk), Up and Out of Poverty (a collection of his writings through the 1990s), The Chinese Dream and the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation (which helps readers “come to understand the true nature of the Chinese Dream”), and the tenderly titled Knowing Deeply: Loving Keenly (a book of his writings from the early 1980s).

Poetry

After Occupy

Karen Cheung

In poetry, Karen Cheung connects with Hong Kong’s protests

 

my screen erupted into a grey mist

but my eyes did not water

eight hours and 9562 kilometres away

 

“pepper sprayed is no credential” the poet wrote,

two years later, same city different protest

i made sure the world knows i was pepper sprayed,

            (for i did not hear the people sing.)

 

Chinese Corner

Don’t You Call Me That

Eveline Chao

How an ancient name for China became a modern epithet – Eveline Chao

For a few years of my life, the bane of my existence was having to liaise with the government censor at the Chinese-registered, English-language business magazine I edited in Beijing. However, it must be said that, aside from the minor detail that her very existence was a primary source of all frustration in my life and a potential affront to everything I believed in, my censor was pretty chill. I was always questioning the changes she made to our work, and though she didn't have to, she went to great lengths to explain them. (Though of course, it was in her best interest to bring me round to her view on things.) And the side bonus was that through her explanations, I always learned something fascinating about China.

 

Reviews

Against the Grain

Mike Cormack

Mike Cormack reviews Cracking The China Conundrum by Yukon Huang

The opening of the Chinese financial and service sectors – or at least, the Chinese government’s pledge to do so – and the sometimes cynical, sometimes overeager response to it serves as a reminder of the fallibility of Western economic analysis. Never in the history of prognostication have so many people been so wrong about so much so regularly as with the modern Chinese economy. But this is understandable. The Chinese economy presents a huge number of difficulties for analysts.

For one, the scale and length of its growth is unparalleled, leaving those who predict downturns looking ill-informed if not ideologically driven. Its closed capital account means it can withstand external shocks that would knock most countries for six. It is run by an authoritarian government which nonetheless leaves most sectors mostly free to make profits. Its state-owned enterprises are lumbering behemoths, inefficient but largely profitable, albeit able to access capital with velvet ease. The banking industry is huge, if largely cosseted from competition, and run for the good of the state, rather than for financial imperatives. And the whole system is underpinned by a Leninist party structure which moves state executives from position to position for political concerns rather than managerial or business motives.