Cybercrime unchained
Nick J. Freeman
Cybercrime is a big business, and some of its leading perpetrators are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in Southeast Asia.
Category: China
Silencing
Paul French
For English language readers outside China, these translations of The Running Flame and Soft Burial help to reframe Fang Fang as a writer of more than Wuhan Diary.
Lying flat in Qing China
Sebastien Smith
As an attempt to preserve what is gone, Shen Fu’s writing endures as a reminder to treasure what we still have and what we will someday mourn.
A party man
Martin Laflamme
Despite enduring humiliation, punishment, and incarceration, Xi Zhongxun’s loyalty to the Party—and even his “emotional attachment” to Mao Zedong—never wavered.
Clerical politics
Michel Chambon
With both humanist insight and historical precision, Paul P. Mariani shows how Bishop Louis Jin Luxian was, above all, a Jesuit of his time.
A world that no longer exists
Victoria Audu
If history is written by the victors, then literature is the rebellion of the defeated.
Star power
Mathieu Berbiguier
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.
Foreign influence
David Frazier
While the voices and expressions in Chinese rock have come from Chinese musicians, outsiders have consistently injected know-how and resources into the country’s marginalised underground musical movements.
Real men eat tofu
Nick J. Freeman
Despite tofu’s lack of structural integrity, Russell Thomas notes that its versatility has given it the resilience to “stand up in a range of figurative and real-life settings”.
Preserving Cantonese
Chong Ja Ian
Simin Li’s book is a reminder that continuing assertions about the singularity of Chinese culture and politics belie the pluralism and diversity of the Sinophone tradition.
Claiming home
Carolyn Nash
Ava Chin’s memoir is a story of roots dismissed and homes denied.
When Gilbert & George went to China
Paul French
Among a post-Tiananmen flurry of activity, Gilbert & George, the British duo who’d been a dominant force in the UK’s 1980s art scene, made a trail to China and inspired many looking to break free of their constraints.
The hardliner
James Crabtree
Matt Pottinger doesn’t much like the term “China hawk”. Even so, he’s become one of the most prominent voices in the United States pushing for a tougher line against Beijing.
Compromise(d)
Martin Laflamme
Zhou Enlai might have attempted to temper some of Mao Zedong’s worst excesses, but he did not have the courage to defy Mao when it counted the most.
Family duty
Kang-Chun Cheng
Creating Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir, was the only way Tessa Hulls could think of to repair her relationship with her mother and make sense of the responsibilities borne by each generation.
Jade, Pine, Orchid, Kidney
Robert Wood
Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.
Memory as resistance
Sophie Beach
The Uyghurs: Kashgar Before the Catastrophe and Under the Mulberry Tree: A Contemporary Uyghur Anthology are testament to the power of memory as resistance against crackdown and erasure.
Illusions
Ilaria Maria Sala
Anne Stevenson-Yang recounts the heady giddiness of Chinese economic growth, but concludes that what had once seemed to last forever has turned out to be little more than an illusion.
Shades of amnesia
Johanna M. Costigan
In their respective books, Ian Johnson and Louisa Lim look at China’s underground historians of one kind or another.
The psyche of ancient China
Brandon C. Yen
Throughout ancient China, mortuary cultures had been evolving for thousands of years before the Qin dynasty, even long before the date of the oldest extant form of systematic Chinese writing.
A tale of two homes
Emma Pei Yin
The China-Australian Migration Corridor delves deep into historical foundations, contemporary trends and policy considerations related to movement between China and Australia.
Complexity in Yunnan
Wong Chee Meng
The Panthay Rebellion is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a central government is absorbed in its own priorities, leading to ethnic stereotyping and distrust between communities.
Assignment: China
David Frazier
An interview with Mike Chinoy about covering China for almost half a century, and his new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.
Intentional forgetting
Paul French
What a country doesn’t collectively talk about can often be more important than what it does. Tania Branigan’s book reveals the complexities of remembering the Cultural Revolution.
Fill in the blank
Johanna Costigan and Hannah Sage Kay
Since participating in a protest in China puts one’s safety in jeopardy, using a blank sign serves as a form of plausible deniability. It’s also consistent with the complex reality of memory and historical events in China.
Transformations
Alex Li
Shanghai has undergone three transformations in three years. First, it turned itself into a bubble, then it clamped down hard, monitoring every resident’s movements. Finally, it bounced back to normalcy, almost as if the previous years had been a fever dream.
Mekong apocalypse
Michael Buckley
A sordid saga of greed, corruption, desperate despots and out-of-control dam-building corporations—propelling the rapid demise of the Mekong River.
Heartbreak in Southeast Asia
Anthony Tao
A poem by Anthony Tao
Dictatorial power
Martin Laflamme
Chiang Kai-shek might have put in place measures that eventually led to Taiwan’s economic miracle, but political freedom for the Taiwanese was the last thing on his mind.
No fragile flowers, these
Christina Cook
Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s novel Dear Chrysanthemums offers a provocative look at the defining events of the past half-century of Chinese history.
Unforgettable blood
Muyesser Abdul’ehed
Unable to write openly about repression, Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun resorted to symbolism, invoking visceral descriptions in his novel The Backstreets to convey a sense of disconnect and despair.
The Bamboo Rat Farmer
Katrina Yu
A short story by Katrina Yu.
Ghosts of a red Ferrari
Yangyang Cheng
More than a conventional detective story, The Soul of Beijing unfolds into a vivid portrayal of the bustling metropolis, filled with colourful characters from all walks of life.
Life’s choices
Kevin Yam
Murong Xuecun fled China after writing his book Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, COVID’s Ground Zero. Today, he’s living in exile in Australia. It was never obvious that his life would go on such a trajectory. Kevin Yam chats to him about his writing and his choices.
China’s sharp power
Richard Heydarian
While his predecessors chose to downplay China’s power, Xi Jinping has led an overhaul of China’s domestic political landscape and foreign policy. A review of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World by Joshua Kurlantzick.
Engineering away dissent
Nicholas Yong
What can a government achieve when given maximum access to public data? Josh Chin and Liza Lin of the Wall Street Journal do a deep dive into the impact of China’s panopticon in Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.
Reworking narratives
Jonathan Chatwin
The repressive era of Xi Jinping is often contrasted with the 1980s, when the question of what China could become seemed remarkably open. But it is during the fourteen years between 1978 and 1992, delineated in Julian Gewirtz’s Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s, that the foundations for Xi’s rule were laid.
The reluctant activist
Minh Bui Jones
An Australian activist takes on China
After Mao
Robert Templer
The Chinese Communist Party consolidates it’s power
China calling
Paul French
The spy novel in the ‘Chinese century’