It’s possible to identify another period that might surpass the 1980s as China’s most open: a 10-year stretch beginning around the turn of this century, when a rich debate erupted over what lay ahead. As in the past, many of those speaking out were establishment intellectuals who were careful not to challenge too directly the Communist Party’s right to rule but took advantage
Former Yale University English professor William Deresiewicz’s book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, created a firestorm in the United States when it was released in August 2014. “The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them,” Deresiewicz wrote of Ivy League students in an article in the New
He may be widely reviled in his home country, but oh, what a resume: The son of an author and screenwriter; a graduate of the prestigious China Foreign Affairs University; a Yale World Fellow; and state-run China Central Television (CCTV)’s best-known bilingual business anchorman. Notwithstanding all this, Rui Chenggang was hauled in for questioning by government authorities,
1.Addressing an audience at the Hong Kong YMCA in February 1927, the writer Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) warned that despite ten years of literary revolution and the promotion of a written vernacular language, Chinese people had still not found a voice. They were all living in what he called wushengde Zhongguo, “voiceless China.” “Youth must first transform
Translation: Wei Zhou on “Empathy for Authority”
Posted by Anne Henochowicz | Apr 5, 2021
Wei Zhou is a rare voice in the world of WeChat public accounts, keeping his critiques of contemporary Chinese society just vague enough to stave off censorship (most of the time), yet relevant enough to amass a steady following. This March 30 post, translated in full below, lands in the midst of a nationalist boycott of H&M and other international brands in protest of their pledge not to use cotton from Xinjiang. Several internet users responded to the boycott by calling on their compatriots to “not just support Xinjiang cotton, [but] support Xinjiang people too.” Without mentioning the protests, or even Xinjiang directly, Wei Zhou writes about Chinese society, “In this system, people pay attention to their own feelings and interests, and have a hard time understanding the suffering of others.” There is also a timelessness to Wei Zhou’s analysis, showing how the regime and its p