Perry Link: Rhymes Against the State
Perry Link, a co-editor of “The Tiananmen Papers,” teaches at the University of California-Riverside. He wrote this piece in the Washington Post: In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes...
Sep 13, 2008
Perry Link, a co-editor of “The Tiananmen Papers,” teaches at the University of California-Riverside. He wrote this piece in the Washington Post: In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes...
Feb 27, 2008
According to scholars, the oral tradition of satiric “shunkouliu” or “slippery jingles”, which are often political in nature, can be traced back all the way to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). While state-controlled media is still...
Jan 25, 2008
Political jingles are not new in China. Even in Mao’s time, powerless people at the bottom of society used jingles to express themselves (often in the form of veiled criticism, sarcasm or anger, in reaction to the...
Mar 17, 2007
The folk tradition of making up shunkouliu, doggerel satire known among Sinologists as “slippery jingles”, thrives today in the Chinese vernacular – mostly in the form of politically tinged gripes about social...