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China May Ban Dog Meat from Menus
Al Jazeera reports on the proposed ban on eating dog meat:
The Chinese government is considering taking meat from pet animals off menus across the country, raising concerns among dog farmers who have relied on the industry for generations.
The draft proposal to ban dog and cat meat has drawn an angry outcry from regions where the dish is popular.
Opponents say the ban would destroy local culinary traditions.
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- February 8, 2010 10:30 PM
Slideshow: I Speak China
Photographer Adrian Fisk traveled across China and documented the thoughts and dreams of young Chinese he met. The results are posted as a slideshow on here. From the introduction:
Inspired by the ebb and flow of cultures between East and West, Fisk travelled 12,500km across China, trying to answer questions of identity and belief in an evolving society. His approach to the task was simple: he left it up to the people. He gave each of his subjects, aged between 16 and 30, a blank piece of paper and a pen and asked each of them to write whatever they wanted. In doing so, he gave the young people of China a chance to speak their minds.
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- February 7, 2010 12:10 AM
Han Han’s Speech At Xiamen University: “The So-called Grand Cultural Nation”
Author, race-car driver and blogger Han Han’s most recent speech at Xiamen University, translated on the EastSouthWestNorth blog:
This is my second time in Xiamen. The weather here is great. No wonder people like to go outside and stroll. Hmmm … I just heard Teacher Deng spoke about certain issues on nationalism. I was reminded of a couple of sayings which I came across them previously. They are other people’s words, not mine. The first saying is, “Nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” The second saying is, “True patriotism is to protect this country so that it will not suffer any harm.”
For today’s talk, I have brought along a written speech in order to constrain myself. Mainly, I don’t want you to suffer any harm because I may stray all over the place. Let me begin.
Dear leaders, dear teachers, dear students, how are you doing?
Do you know why China cannot become a grand cultural nation? It is because most of the time when we speak, we say “Dear leaders” first and those leaders are uncultured. Not only that, for they are also afraid of culture, they censor culture and they control culture. So how can such a nation become a grand cultural nation? Dear leaders, what do you say?
Actually, China has tremendous potential of becoming a grand cultural nation. Let me tell you a story. I am the chief editor of a magazine which has yet to publish. The Constitution states that every citizen has the freedom to publish, but the law also says that the leaders has the freedom not to let you publish. This magazine has run into some problems during the review process. There is a cartoon drawing. In it, there is a man without clothes — of course, this is unacceptable because the law says that we cannot exhibit the private parts in a publicly available magazine. I agree with that and I don’t have a problem with it. Therefore, I intentionally created an extra-large magazine logo that was placed over the illegal spot of the cartoon. But unexpectedly, the publisher and the censor told us that this was unacceptable too — when you cover up the middle part of a person, you are referring to the “Party Central” (note: “party” is a homonym for “block/shield” and “central” is “middle”). My reaction was like yours — I was awed and shocked. I thought to myself, “Buddy, it would be so wonderful if you could put your awe-inspiring imagination into literary creation instead of literary censorship!”

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- February 4, 2010 12:58 PM
Q & A: China Under Glass
On his blog, Evan Osnos interviews Miriam Clifford, Cathy Giangrande, and Antony White, authors of China: Museums, about the unusual and sometimes little known museums they visited:
Of the two hundred and fifteen sites that you and your co-authors visited, which did you find the most surprisingly satisfying?
Many of the museums were surprising—sometimes for their subject matter—such as the Tap Water Museum or the Tank Museum, but more often because our first impression of a museum was sometimes that it was run down and of little interest—but by the time we walked out the door, we were highly enthused and felt we had learned so much more about whatever that museum was about and also about what makes China tick. Many of these small museums have funding problems and still have Chinese signage only so that is a stumbling block for tourists. We usually had curators guiding us through and that made all the difference to the experience. We are trying to duplicate that with our book—by giving the reader the background knowledge they need to understand why a particular museum is important and then to guide them through the museum itself. The most successful museum experience is one where you come out having learned something you didn’t know before—and so many of China’s smaller museums are a real glimpse into China’s preoccupations.
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- February 4, 2010 10:14 AM
China Censors Oscar Nominations
The Chinese government is censoring news about the upcoming Oscars after China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, an HBO documentary about the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, was nominated (Watch the movie below). From The Telegraph:
The documentary follows several groups of parents as their grief turned into protest.
“It was tofu construction,” said one interviewee, while another held up a brick to show how easy it was to brush off the “mortar” on one side.
The 40-minute film shows how the parents are stonewalled and ignored by Communist party officials.
It was blocked from being aired in China, and the words “unnatural disaster” have been censored from the Chinese internet.
When the film garnered its Oscar nomination, Chinese media outlets either removed the film from their reports, or omitted the entire category.
China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province:

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- February 4, 2010 12:29 AM
Why I Write: Peter Hessler
Urbanatomy interviews Peter Hessler about the writing life and his new book Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory:
Favorite Chinese writer?
I’m not really qualified to answer this, in the deep cultural sense, in terms of bringing some real historical perspective to it. I wish I read Chinese well enough to appreciate the ancient poetry, which I sense is the strongest part of the literary tradition. And I never studied Chinese culture, language, or literature in college or grad school, so my reading has been sporadic. I admire what Ha Jin has done – he’s created a strong, distinct voice, making art out of some troubled times. I’ve read Li Yiyun’s first story collection and I liked that.
I have of course spent a lot of time in contemporary China, as well as in Chinese schools, and I think it’s a very difficult culture for a writer. It’s hard for Chinese to write about what’s happening nowadays, especially in fiction. Many of the best fiction writers are exiles, and they’ve had that status for a while, so they can’t write about the past decade with much accuracy. And the writers who are currently working in China are limited in many ways. There is of course the political issue, censorship of various forms, and this issue tends to get the most attention. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the main problem. There are a lot of cultural elements that also make it hard for Chinese writers. For one thing, educated Chinese traditionally look down on the farmers and the working class, and they don’t have much interest in that world. They tend to be engaged much more by ideas than they are by individuals and stories. I think this is one reason why we see so many allegories in Chinese contemporary fiction, and it often makes for very heavy and boring reading. Why aren’t the Chinese novelists spending time with migrants, with factory workers, with entrepreneurs, and bringing their stories to life? That’s where the energy is nowadays in Chinese society. You would expect that today’s climate would result in a kind of naturalism, the type of writing that developed in the West during the 19th century. But it hasn’t happened, and I think one factor is the gap between educated Chinese and the rest of society.
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- February 2, 2010 10:34 PM
Howard French: In Case You Missed Them: Books by Martin Jacques and Yasheng Huang
On China Beat, Howard French writes about two new books about China from Huang Yasheng and Martin Jacques:
It’s an open secret that many in the publishing industry see book subtitles as vehicles for shameless hype, pushing their claims to the limit in order to juice reader interest. During the week of Obama’s East Asian sojourn, though, the subtitle of Martin Jacques’ new offering, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New World Order, may have suddenly seemed like it wasn’t such a stretch. At the very least, the appearance of a book like this from a major publisher like Penguin Press is a telling measure of a profound and ongoing shift in perceptions about the staying power of American — and, more broadly, Western — might and vigor, in the face of the challenge of a fast-rising China.
On this subject, a recent Pew survey highlighted the gap between perception and reality, showing that 44% of the American public already believes that China is the world’s leading economic power. Just 27% named the United States.
This, then, surely is a great time for a book to take a hard look at the relative decline of American power along with the stirring rise of China, followed by a host of other emerging global actors, and come to some informed and well-reasoned conclusions. Most see this story as fundamentally based in economic history, but on this subject, and indeed on economics in general, Jacques has little of interest to say.
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- February 1, 2010 2:28 PM
Moving with the Times
The China Daily reports on the evictions of foreign artists from artists’ villages in Beijing:
In December 2009 a huge number of artists living and working in Beijing’s Chaoyang district were told to step aside in favor of a government project of humongous scales. After the artists of 008 Art Zone and Zhengyang Creative Art Zone lost their studio spaces and were left out in the cold in what has turned out to be Beijing’s harshest winter in 40 years, hundreds of others working in 13 other art zones realized that the threat of demolition is probably a real one… Still stunned by the impact of the realtors’ mafia descending on his studio, (Satoshi Iwama) cannot visualize yet where he is going to land up when his studio is razed completely to the ground. But he is certain it’s not going to be too far away from Beijing in the next five years. “This demolition has increased social contact between the artists,” he says, grateful at the renewed bonding, thinking perhaps the situation will inspire his art sometime in the near future.
…Japanese photographer Inri came to China following in the footsteps of her Chinese beau, the photo and video installation artist Rong Rong. They moved to Caochangdi in 2004, a chic and expansive artists’ hub, dotted with futuristic buildings designed by the maverick artist Ai Weiwei – a quieter, more reserved and elegant cousin of the bustling 798 art district about 1 km away. Three Shadows, arguably Beijing’s most lavishly-equipped center for the practice of photography and video installation, was built in 2007.
If Three Shadows – its spectacular structures, hi-tech galleries and incredibly huge collection of archival material – also has to make way for the bulldozers of development, would Inri consider going back to Tokyo?
“A creative artist’s life goes on,” she says. “Everything we do here, including connecting to people across the globe, is part of our creative process. Physical displacement will make a breach in the chain of work we do, but surely won’t have a lasting effect on our lives or work.”
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- January 31, 2010 12:36 PM
Chat with Chinese Author Xiao Jiansheng
Paul Denlinger interviews Xiao Jiansheng, author of Chinese History Revisited, which was banned from distribution in the mainland but was published by New Century Media in Hong Kong:
How did you come to your thesis about Chinese history? And how did you decide to write a book about it?
I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, so I missed university. In the eighties, I began to question the concept of class struggle, and the Marxist division of society into capitalists and the proletariat. So I decided to start reading as much as I could on the subject. Since I did not go to university, I was free to read whatever I wanted, and I focused on the push for constitutional government in the early 20th century, especially during the Republican period. I wanted to understand why these multiple efforts at reform failed. I did this study in my free time, and since I was poor, like many Chinese at the time, I would go to bookstores, and hand-copy what many of the books’ authors wrote in my own notes.
In most Chinese histories, China is portrayed as being torn apart and weak when it is divided into competing states, and only strong when it was unified under one emperor, such as Qin Shihuang, the first emperor to unify China. As much as I could, I went to primary sources so that I could understand the true original conditions at the time. Gradually, a new picture emerged: the period when China was divided into competing states such as the Spring and Autumn period, the Warring States period, and the Southern and Northern Dynasties period were all periods of unprecedented growth in the arts, history, culture and commerce for the Chinese. There were many competing religions and philosophies which vied for influence in the court and throughout the country. Some emperors were intellectuals, historians, artists and even monks. When it came to the rights of Chinese as individuals, they enjoyed more prosperity and rights during these periods. In contrast, when China was unified under one dynasty, as first happened under the emperor Qin Shihuang of the Qin dynasty, the power of the emperor and dynasty knew virtually no limits, and the rights of the people suffered. This was because unlike in the west, there was no true feudalism in China, where the power of the kings was checked by the landed gentry and the church. All power and property was directly held by the emperor, and his influence was exercised throughout China by the bureaucracy.
As I learned more, I decided to write a book about my views starting in the eighties. It would be fair to say that this book was twenty years in the making. My questions about the official views of history deepened, and I wanted to understand why China, and Chinese society, developed the way it did. I questioned the division of the world’s ideologies into capitalism and socialsm; since capital is money, why should there be an -ism to it?
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- January 30, 2010 9:22 PM
China’s Zeal For ‘Avatar’ Crowds Out ‘Confucius’
Due to popular demand, Avatar is now back in Chinese cinemas, after plans to pull the film to make way for a state-sanctioned bio-epic on Confucius, the New York Times reports:
Confronted with a clamor of ticket-buyers for “Avatar” and sparse audiences for the domestic film “Confucius,” Chinese authorities appeared to have backpedaled this week on a decision to pull “Avatar” from the nation’s 2-D movie screens in favor of “Confucius.”
Zhang Hongsen, the vice director of the film bureau of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said last week that Avatar would be limited to 3-D and Imax screens after “Confucius” opened on Jan. 22 on 2-D screens, according to the news agency Xinhua. But 2-D showings of “Avatar” have continued at some theaters outside Beijing this week, theater employees and officials said.
In Shanghai, an official with the biggest local cinema chain told fans not to worry that they would miss “Avatar” because of state-imposed restrictions. Wu Hehu, a senior manager for the chain, Shanghai United Circuit, told a Shanghai daily newspaper that its theaters would continue to show “Avatar” on both 3-D and 2-D screens.
China tries to nurture its domestic film industry by severely restricting the number of foreign movies allowed into theaters and the lengths of their runs. But the decision to limit “Avatar,” the highest-grossing film of all time, has stirred up criticism of the state’s interference with market preferences.
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- January 29, 2010 6:58 PM
Enough of the Big Picture
In Time, Jeffrey Wasserstrom critiques the spate of recent China books whose authors have two things in common: “a conviction that they know what will happen next (even though the P.R.C. has been defying the best guesses of pundits and academic specialists alike for decades) and an ability to provide easy-to-summarize answers to Big Questions.” He continues:
The most successful and widely reviewed tend to have theses spelled out in provocative titles that fit into ongoing point-counterpoint debates or give rise to new ones. When China Rules the World is a case in point. Its appearance immediately triggered an expected rebuttal from Hutton, and inspired Big China Articles (yes, there are lots of those too) for and against.
Big China Books vary greatly in quality, but even the best leave me cold due to their bird’s-eye view of the P.R.C. Adopting an Olympian perspective, their authors tend to use broad strokes to portray things that actually require a fine-grained touch. For example, most treat China’s population as an undifferentiated mass, or one that can be bisected along just one axis: be it the 90% Han and 10% non-Han ethnic divide, the clear ideological fault line between loyalists and dissidents, and so on. And they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth of “thousands of years of continuous civilization,” which suggests that China’s borders have remained fairly constant over time and that the “Confucian tradition” has been remarkably enduring. When in the company of even the most astute Big China Book authors, like Jacques, I often find myself wondering if the place they are describing can really be the same one that I regularly visit and teach and write about for a living. For the China I know is one where complex regional divides fragment the population and the views of many people don’t fit into either the dissident or loyalist category. It’s a country with multistranded traditions, not just a single Confucian one. And it’s a country whose long history has been marked by many discontinuities, from the mix of traditions to dramatic shifts over time in just how big China itself is imagined to be.
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- January 28, 2010 4:55 PM
Ma Jian (马建): It Doesn’t Pay to Appease China
In Japan Times, author Ma Jian writes about the arrest of Liu Xiaobo, Google, and China’s growing economic clout:
History is said to repeat itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. And it is indeed farcical for China’s government to try to suppress the yearning for freedom in the same brutal ways that Soviet-era communists once did. For jailing Liu on the absurd charge of trying to overthrow the Chinese state is typical of the type of thinking found in the closed societies of 20th-century communism, where the state asserted its absolute right to judge every thought and every thinker.
In such a state, the only way to survive was for everyone to become his or her own thought police: self-censoring and never daring to question. But to judge and imprison one’s own mind, or any other mind, is to criminalize civilization.
In the Internet age, moreover, no prison or censorship can destroy an idea whose time has come. In its fight with Google, for example, China’s government appears to think that its technologists can provide the means to maintain the old thought control. But, thankfully, for anyone with persistence and a modicum of computer skill, the Internet leaks like a sieve.
The great economic progress China has made over the past 30 years is something all Chinese celebrate. But the jailing of Liu also demonstrates in the starkest terms that China’s neglect of human rights is flowing to the rest of world alongside the mass of Chinese goods. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that China opened its economy only to maintain the country’s over-mighty rulers in power, not to respect and enhance the lives of ordinary Chinese.
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- January 28, 2010 2:33 PM
Music Video: “The Whole World is Laughing at China Being Stupid” (全世界都在笑中国傻)
Increasingly, music videos in China are not only a form of entertainment but carry a political message – sometimes subtle, sometimes not – as well. See this CDT translation for an example. ChinaHush has also translated the lyrics of another pop song:
Recently this music video named “The whole world is laughing at China being stupid” (全世界都在笑中国傻) has been circulating on the Chinese internet. Initially this music video was “officially approved” by the Chinese government, however netizens strongly reacted to the bitter sarcasm of the lyrics which associated with China’s current situation. Soon after, Sina – the first website posted this video quickly removed the video content from its page. Subsequently, most of the major Chinese video sharing sites also have removed it.
The whole world is laughing at China being stupid
Selling rare earth minerals to foreigner at the same price as radishes
The whole world is laughing at China being stupid
The goods we deliver make the whole world praising us being so obedient
The whole world is laughing at China being stupid
The money we earn but store in someone else’s home
The whole world is laughing at China being stupid
The words we speak make the whole world praising us being so obedient
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- January 26, 2010 9:34 PM
Han Han: Watching Confucius
On chinaSMACK, Charles Custer translates Han Han’s review of the epic Confucius:
Forgetting about all the political factors and watching the movie just as a film, it is a losing film. What the film is preaching doesn’t leave any influence at all. When Confucius was on the screen talking about “rites” and “benevolence”, some guy to my side was having a ten-minute-long phone conversation. The war scenes in the film are like child’s play. The country of Lu cannot protect itself, but Confucius’s few disciples can drive back the enemy just by building a road block and firing arrows into the sky? Moreover, in the film, the dialogue between characters is not at all persuasive. It’s just like when you were small and your parents told you, “today’s work must be finished today”, but their words ultimately could not convince you. It is no longer an era where a “master” can say a few more lines and attract/trick people. From the movie, I found it very difficult to understand why Confucius’s team of workers continually followed him. In moments when the film was playing up the personalities of the characters, I had to endure ten minutes of the disciples continually yielding a bowl of horsemeat soup [to each other] to demonstrate their cohesiveness. [I had to endure] because I had already endured the story of Confucius’s disciple [of a later generation] Kong Rong giving up pears to his elders throughout my entire childhood.
… I want to say that the movie Confucius, whether it is from the perspective of cinematographic meaning, business profits, artistic merit, what it explores, its educational qualities, its historical accuracy, its entertainment value, its emotional resonance, etc., is completely unnecessary. It is a film that could be completely done without.
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- January 26, 2010 11:36 AM
Hung Huang: China’s Soft Power Army
On cnreviews, Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks translates a blog post by Hung Huang, in which she responds to an academic’s comments about China’s soft power that, “One Yao Ming, one Zhang Ziyi are more effective than ten thousand Confuciuses”:
First of all, as far as China is concerned, I think soft power and hard power are equally important. Secondly, we currently have hard power, but our soft power is very weak. In terms of manufacturing, we are a giant exporter, but in terms of culture, we are importers; we import 15 times more culture than we export. Third, we often talk about the great achievement of thousands-of-years-old Chinese culture, as if China today had no culture to speak of.
Put it this way, let’s look at the great “soft power armies” of other countries: France’s definitely wear Dior army uniforms, carry Louis Vuitton satchels, the army marches out with glittering Cartier emblems, and when they fire over a volley of red wine, China’s fashion industry definitely lines the streets to welcome them, as though they were looking upon excellent fashions. The most unwelcoming thing they might do is strip them and send the French home naked!
And if it’s America? There would be a column of Mickey Mouses, a column of Donald Ducks, and a column of Tom and Jerrys. There would be Transformers, Superman, Batman, and Spiderman; Chinese children under 16 would happily think it was a promotional activity for a toy store.
And then there’s the Chinese soft power army; if we go with what netizens want, then it’s a 2000-year-old rotten old man? If Confucius hadn’t once denounced the daughters of peasants, most Chinese wouldn’t know what “the Master” was talking about even if he spoke all day.
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- January 25, 2010 9:54 PM