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 People's winter sports Long time China resident Michael Meyer spent the last few years living in a small hutong house near Dashalan'r, south of Tiananmen Square. He taught English at the local school, and became friends with many of the residents of one of the last and most interesting areas of old Beijing.
He has written an entertaining and informative book about his experiences and about the changes that have swept the capital in the reform era: titled Last Days of Old Beijing — Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.
Below is a chapter of the book. You can buy the whole thing on Amazon.com here.
Forbidden City ice hockey
by Michael Meyer
Beijing’s lakes froze in mid-December, the earliest that the ice had come in for a decade. The polar bear swimmers chopped their hole on the south shore of Front Lake, but skating was difficult due to northern gusts that dumped dust and sand on the surface. Clearing a rink required several hands on whisk brooms, and avoiding the revelers on pali, sleds with metal runners propelled with short stakes.
I used to skate on Front Lake because it provided a clear view of the Drum and Bell towers, Beijing’s former timekeepers. On its lakeshore, an old man who advertised himself as the Skate Sharpening King liked to boast that he had stayed open from 1937 through each of the eight winters that Japanese soldiers occupied the city. He was no match for developers, however. In the winter of 2005, his locale had been fenced off with panels of blue-painted tin shrouding the construction of an upscale restaurant. In a sense, the center of the Old City was reverting to its original form, when it was the playground of royalty and its acolytes.
Now the best skate sharpener worked across town at the rink inside Xidan’s mall. The Hand had rubbed out the area – the sidewalk vendors, cluttered storefronts, and crowds – and replaced it with straight lines. Here a bank, there an office tower, here an underground shopping mall, there a widened intersection, and nowhere shade. Beijing’s famous streets were ceasing to be destinations themselves, changing into viaducts between Point A and Mall B. Due to traffic, an errand such as skate sharpening that used to take a few minutes now took at least an hour.
Every season I played hockey with the same dozen Beijing natives. We only knew each other on the ice, for the month between Christmas and the Chinese New Year, whose beginning was determined by the lunar calendar. It was a different sort of Beijing camaraderie, free from the pressure to reciprocate favors.
After Front Lake began charging a higher fee to use its groomed rink – the ticket included a free coffee at the new Starbucks on the west shore – we moved our game to the Forbidden City’s moat. Plywood painted vermilion to match the neighboring palace towers surrounded the rink on three sides. The stones separating the moat from Zhongshan Park formed the fourth barrier. The park filled at dawn with elderly doing exercises. Women rubbed their backs against the gnarled cypress trees. Old men paced while violently crossing their arms against their chest, belting out opera or phlegm-filled groans that went Uhhh! The quieter the surrounding environment, the noisier Beijingers behaved.
The day’s rink conditions were chalked on a board: air temperature, wind direction, and ice thickness in the sun and shade. I laced up on a bench in the pavilion’s courtyard. A steep wooden ramp provided a running start to the ice. The only advertisement on the rink’s fence was a green banner whose white characters reminded Overpopulation is our nation’s most pressing problem.
Not on the ice. No one else was here. In winter, Beijing’s tourist crowds thinned, the skies were often clear and bright, and public spaces became personal ones. I liked to hike snow-covered paths at the Fragrant Hills and draw fortune sticks from the soothsayer at Tanzhe Temple, both of which emptied of people.
Once the elderly exercisers left, the only sounds on the Forbidden City moat were the scratches of my skates cutting into the ice. The sun rose over the palace walls, and at the top of every hour, the melody of “The East Is Red” chimed from the Ministry of Communication’s clock tower, a mile away. I hung my scarf in the center of a goal as a target, dropped the puck, and began taking shots. I savored the routine; it was the most time I spent alone each day. The men arrived, wearing hockey gloves, shin pads, and helmets. They set their tea-filled thermoses on the bench and lit cigarettes. Our games were speedy, loose, and fun. The men laughed out loud at their own mistakes. Unlike basketball, hockey is self-regulating; everyone has a stick, so hacking brings a reprisal. The only time we stopped play was when the puck flew over the boards, or one of the men wanted a smoke.
China invented many things, and the men claimed that hockey was one of them. Starting in the seventeenth century, when China was ruled by Manchu from the north, the imperial court held ice games on the central lakes every December. Soldiers from the Eight Banners -- military units that lived inside the Imperial City -- competed in a series of events on skates made by sliding a blade into a grooved shoe soul.
The emperor watched from the shore on a sable-lined divan. The games began with a cannon shot, meant to demonstrate the safety of the ice, followed by two hundred banner men skating past for review. Soldiers divided into teams wearing yellow or red silk robes. Events included chasing after a ball made of feathers (hence the hockey claim), and drawing a bow and firing at a suspended orb while whizzing past at full speed. Acrobats performed on skates as “dancing dragon missiles.” In the final event, soldiers donned pig-skin shoes and attempted to stay upright as they slid down an ice slope three to four stories high.
That may not be enough to convince a Canadian of hockey’s origin, but skating remained a popular Beijing pastime after the fall of the last emperor. “Skating on natural ice is an old recreation in North China and is much indulged in by children and grown-ups alike,” reported the narrator of The Adventures of Wu, a collection of newspaper columns from 1939 to 1940 that ran in the English-language Peking Chronicle. The book is a gazetteer of pre-Communist hutong life. In its index, I randomly flipped to the letter B, for Beijing. The listed topics included:
badger hunting;
balancers, flagpole;
bamboo, clappers;
banner men, Manchu;
bath, baby’s third-day;
bean curds, almond, stinky;
bear show;
Beating the Blind Tiger (game);
bed, brick-stove (k’ang); God and Goddess of;
beetle-cart man;
Beginning of Winter;
bell, dragon god of;
bill-collecting devil;
birds;
boat, service on city moats;
bread, steamed;
bricks, for Peking city wall;
bridge, for the dead; and dragon legend;
brotherhood, sworn;
brush, writing;
buckwheat, cakes; husk pillows;
Buddha;
burials;
butterflies.
Wu described the life, from cradle to wedlock, of a lower-middle-class hutong resident named Little Bald Head. Every year, he skated after the weather turned “so cold, even dogs and cats are frozen to death.” His skates were made by mounting blades to squares of wood, then lashing the block to his shoes with leather bands. Back then, speed – not hockey – created a skater’s reputation. Men would race along the city moat to where it met the Grand Canal in today’s suburb of Tongzhou, twenty-six miles away, dodging the holes cut by ice-block sellers and fishermen. A skater would purchase a souvenir to prove he had been there, then cover the distance back to Beijing in ninety minutes.
But even in 1939, the last days of old Beijing seemed near. The emperor had encouraged ice sports, wrote the narrator of The Adventures of Wu, though “skating and sledging are a fast vanishing sight from the frozen water-ways of Peking and the last of them will probably be seen shortly.”
While badger hunting, bear shows, the bill-collecting devil, and even the Skate Sharpening King have disappeared from Beijing, ice-skating is a tradition that lives on.
The public bathhouse survived, too. I biked back to Dazhalan, balancing the hockey stick before me like a lance until I was halted by the motorcade of black Audis that whooshed dignitaries past the Great Hall of the People and Tian’anmen Square.
The sweat froze to my clothes before I reached home. I grabbed a towel and shampoo and shivered on the walk down Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street, then up a narrow alley lined with painted propaganda scenes exhibiting civic virtue. A globe with a forest for hair held an ax and chased a wood house; a woman handed divorce papers to her cheating husband; another woman lectured, “Eat your medicine!” to a man who had, according to the caption, neglected the cleanliness of his penis.
Beijing had spas that looked imported from a Las Vegas hotel, but the Big Power Bathhouse was not one of them. The entrance ticket cost ten yuan ($1.33), but only eight yuan if you bought twenty in advance. The attendant inked an X in one of my prepaid card’s boxes, took my shoes and socks, and handed over a pair of plastic flip-flops. I locked my clothes in the changing room’s wooden cabinet.
The shower rooms were segregated by sex. Four spigots lined either side of the white-tiled wall. They were not partitioned, just as in the latrine. The same etiquette was expected: bring your own supplies; first come, first served; stay in your own space.
The water was scalding, but its pressure didn’t live up to Big Power’s name. For a few extra yuan, a wiry old man in baby blue Jockey shorts exfoliated my body with a coarse mitten washcloth. When I hopped off his padded table, wads of peeled-off skin outlined where I had lain. “You’re really dirty!” the man said. “I should charge you more, since you are taller than we Chinese!” I waited to enter the small sauna. An old man emerged, carrying an open twenty-ounce bottle of Yanjing beer. He padded to a spigot. As the cool water splashed through his white crew cut and down rolls of flesh, he chugged the bottle dry.
Big Power didn’t have a hair drier, so my head and towel often froze on the walk home. I stopped at the neighborhood internet café to hang my towel over its radiator and check e-mail. The “café” was an undivided room holding rows of one hundred computers. At a cost of two yuan ($.27) an hour, they were usually full.
The median age of a Big Power customer looked about sixty-five, but the café’s clientele was four decades younger. The female patrons were migrants who used a webcam and headset to chat with distant friends and relations. The men played online games such as World of Warcraft and Counterstrike. Cigarette smoke filled the café, along with the sounds of giggling girls, machine-gun blasts, a computerized voice proclaiming in English, “Terrorists win!” and the men’s defeated howl of Wo cao! -- *** me!
I typed the address of our district government’s public-forum Web site, where residents could submit a question or suggestion. In early 2006, the site’s index page showed 2,151 letters. I scrolled down; most of the subject lines included 拆. The letters asked, “Will we or won’t we be razed?” (Will); “Is No. 56 cultural heritage or not?” (Not); and “Am I being cheated?” (No).
In a letter titled “Excuse Me, When Will Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street Be Demolished?” a man who identified himself as Mr. Jiang wrote:
“At present there are many rumors, and nonetheless we know that the government cannot not look out for us poor people, but everyone also really wants to know exactly when is the destruction? Thank you! Please respond!”
The unsigned reply appeared three days later:
Jiang (Mr.): Hello! Your message to the district government has been received. Regarding the question of when Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street will be razed, Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street belongs to the Dazhalan Protected District. Presently, the scope of this district’s razing is centered on Coal Street. It’s estimated Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street will have to wait one or two years to be demolished.”
Coal Street – not to be confused with Coal Lane, where the elementary school was located – was one of the north-south streets that bookended the neighborhood. Due to the closure of Front Gate Avenue to traffic, Coal Street was being remade to triple its width to seventy-five feet. The project took place three hundred yards from our front door, but we didn’t hear the construction at our courtyard, nor had my neighbor the Widow ever seen it. Her daily shopping trip to Heavenly Peach market took her in the opposite direction.
My other neighbors -- Mr. Han and his wife -- crossed Coal Street every day to reach their shop, where they fixed cell phones and sold cigarettes. They passed the row of condemned homes and businesses, some of which displayed characters painted in protest by their evicted tenants, such as “The court has stepped aside on the issue of demolition and relocation. The demolition company has falsified agreements. It is difficult for the weak little people to survive.”
To my neighbors, the road-widening project was an inconvenience, not something that would change their lives.
One morning I walked out to the latrine to find people standing before a row of white notices that had been pasted overnight to our home’s exterior. “Destruction notice?” I asked.
Recycler Wang shook his head. “Fireworks.”
The text declared an end to Beijing’s twelve-year prohibition on lighting explosives inside the city during Spring Festival celebrations. In rescinding the ban, the government had agreed with petitioning residents that fireworks were cultural heritage. They were traditionally lit to ward off evil spirits and usher in the new year. The poster announced that they could legally be bought and sold, but it was forbidden to light fireworks at “intersections, historical buildings, bus stops, military areas, government buildings, hospitals, kindergartens, forests, and gas stations.”
Regardless, the city exploded on the eve of the Lunar New Year. A walk through the hutong became an exercise in dodging incoming fire. My students stood behind their fathers as they touched lit cigarettes to Happy Fat Twins, Diamond Flowers, Silver-Flowered Cherry Trees, and the Blizzard of Ten Thousand Flowers. Sparks showered down, Roman candles thumped upward, and the boom of M-80s called Pull Thunder’s Tail resonated off courtyard exterior walls. A Butterfly King spinner buzzed my ear. A Cow Demon bounced off my bike spokes. The students whooped and demanded more. For the first time in their lives, the first night of Spring Festival felt like a festival, not just an occasion to eat too many dumplings and watch the televised variety show.
I biked to visit Old Zhang. This would be the last Lunar New Year he would spend in his house. Fresh Fish Junction was dark, and the only sounds came from the distant explosives. Old Zhang’s gate was chained and padlocked from the inside. On the door he had chalked: Occupied. I will call the police if you attempt to enter. You assume all responsibility!
“That’s to keep the vultures away,” he said as he let me inside. “The recyclers pedal around on their flatbed bicycles, scanning for things with value.” Some of the homes in the neighborhood had been boarded up and fenced with a green iron gate. “Those are buildings that will be protected. Maybe they will be museums. Maybe they will be restored as courtyards for millionaires. Who can say?”
Inside, his son and daughter-in-law worked over a wok, sizzling on the propane-fueled burner. Old Zhang’s grandson, in Grade Three, ignored the televised pageant and frowned over a vocabulary workbook. No kids – nor anyone else – remained on the lane. In Chinese, he asked me, “How do I pronounce badminton racquet in English?”
Old Zhang’s living room held a bed, a sofa, a desk, and bureau, upon which he laid a flat, cloth sack. It was already toasty inside, due to the glowing coal honeycombs, and our faces flushed after we finished the first round of bamboo wine he had saved for the evening. The annual variety show paused from its singing and acrobatic performances to announce that China would send a pair of pandas to Taiwan as a gesture of friendship. The program’s five hundred million viewers could choose the panda’s names by selecting from a list and sending a text message via cell phone.
“Who says we can’t vote?” Old Zhang laughed.
The deadline for moving from the neighborhood had passed, and the demolition office said only 5 percent of residents remained. Old Zhang admitted that he was in the minority and could be criticized for stubbornness. “But what am I afraid of?” he asked. “I will be seventy-four years old. I am not an illegal element. I have no regrets. If I wanted money, I would have moved before. This is not about money, this is about justice. I just want to be able to live somewhere inside the Third Ring Road.”
He poured another shot of bamboo wine. “It will all be decided soon. Now it’s the New Year. Cheers, Little Plumblossom.”
Bowls of food filled the table. The television was shut off, leaving only the distant sound of popping fireworks. Old Zhang opened a cloth sack. He delicately withdrew a framed, black-and-white portrait of an old woman. He folded the bag carefully, and with two hands straightened the picture so it faced the steaming dishes. “This is my wife,” he said.
“She loved Spring Festival. She could stuff dumplings all day, really.” Old Zhang lit sticks of incense beside the picture. Before we began, he held an empty bowl that his son filled with food. “Get a big piece of tofu,” Old Zhang said. “She loves daughter-in-law’s braised tofu.” His son added blood sausage, pea pods, broccoli, and diced pork. “We’ll give her some dumplings later.”
Old Zhang placed the bowl before the picture. It showed an unsmiling, lined face with black, combed-back hair. He stood silent with his eyes closed, then sat down looking refreshed, as if the trance had been broken.
“She died last year,” he said. “After they announced the road project, she worried all the time. Our grandson goes to a very good elementary school near here, and he was living with us. She couldn’t stop worrying about what was going to happen to our house, to his education. She became neurotic.”
Old Zhang’s son waited a moment, then spoke to me. “You have to understand something very clearly. The problem isn’t that the city is developing. That’s a good thing. And the problem isn’t that the government is bad. The government is actually very good. We are all patriotic here. The problem is that the entire process isn’t transparent. The only ones with eyes are the district government and its development company.”
Old Zhang turned to his wife, staring mutely from the frame. “I just wanted her to have one more New Year here.”
Daughter-in-law and grandson stared into their bowls. “Eat more!” she suddenly urged. Old Zhang filled the shot glasses and handed his son and me a Panda cigarette. He ran his hand through his white crew cut, puffed in silence, wiped a drop that leaked from the eye with the cataract, then stood to add dumplings to his wife’s brimming bowl.
We ate and watched television until Unity and Wholeness were announced as the winners of the Name the Panda election. At midnight, Beijing erupted in fireworks to welcome the Year of the Dog.
“Will it be an auspicious year?” Old Zhang wondered aloud as he opened more bottles of beer. “I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to move to the outskirts.” We toasted to that. This article is from Danwei.org
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This review of '20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth' by Guo Xiaolu was written by Ian Wallace.
I could mention numbers. Everyone always mentions numbers when it comes to China. They’re so overwhelmingly impressive.
Mark Leonard reports (Prospect, March 2008) that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing has 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. Whereas Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds. Yet, he asks, how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker?
Well, here’s your chance.
The numbers in this particular case, however, spell trouble. Big trouble. This book is only 126 pages long. You’ll finish it, and you’ll want more. Much more.
You could, of course, read it twice. And if you’ve never done that before, let me explain why you’ll probably want to do so now.
If you’re anything like me, the films you watch again and again are those that somehow achieve the impossible: a conviction that you’re really watching a slice of someone else’s life, yet at the same time clocking the man-made construction that has gone into the whole damn thing. It’s seeing art being created, and believing the result.
In her book 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth Xiaolu Guo delivers a written equal of this cinematic act over and over: the narrative injecting you right into the workaday, bulldozed, breathless, crumbling, reconstructed, jagged, messy, fascinating and bountifully beautiful detail that is the rubble out of which a new Beijing is being born. The “ravenous youth”, Fenfang, becomes your own eyes and ears, through which you soon realise you’ll never, ever, get to see this again. Because this is not just Beijing, this is us, as we move into life. This is us as we grow up. Yet at the same time, this is clearly a very selective and edited intimacy—fragments of [her] life in that city—reminding us that this is, in fact, a construction, a story being told. But her lovers, apartments and jobs will appear to you as real as violence, cockroaches and luck.
The real poignancy, though, is in the effect all this has on Fenfang when she leaves any of these things behind. Or when they leave her behind. Just like the entire districts of Beijing that are disappearing from her horizon every day as the city re-builds itself to another design.
It’s the gaps in between people – be they empty lovers’ beds or the bulldozed areas of a city – it is what happens in those seemingly mute landscapes – that provide the focal points, the anchors, the revolving doors through and by which fate is condensed, weighted and spun out again.
The most vulnerable relationships, buildings and neighbourhoods are collapsing all round. Slowly, surely, something better takes their place. These are the metaphors chosen for lives in modern-day China.
This is no coincidence. Just look at Jia Zhangke’s astonishing film Still Life (三峡好人). Buildings and lives are being knocked down left, right and centre as the Three Gorges Dam takes shape. But there, in between the shells of empty buildings, human hearts go on beating. Human brains go on hatching ideas. Huge personal dramas unfold at the same speed with which concrete is being pulverized.
"Things are changing so fast, I had to change the pace of my filmmaking to keep up," says Jia Zhang-ke.
“Everything around me was changing so fast_my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere….I had to do something….so I could match this fast-moving city,” says Fenfang.
She may have been a girl from peasant stock, brought up in “a nothing place that won’t be found on any map of China”. But in these twenty fragments of Fenfang’s life after she ‘escapes’ to Beijing, the skill of her humour, the tales of her loves and particularly her losses combine as gleaming coordinates to fix her new position clearly. As she tears up her own foundations, the new building of her career as a scriptwriter starts to arise.
And if Fenfang mutters that her work will never match the talents of China’s ‘Fifth Generation’ of film directors, then Guo Xiaolu need have no such fears: this is writing that easily reaches the humanity, the humour and the hope of the likes of Zhang Yimou, or his brilliant Taiwanese contemporaries Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang.
Oh, Heavenly *** in the Sky, this is your golden opportunity to see what’s being made in China. So buy the book. Read it. Twice.
This is them as they grow up.
You can purchase '20 fragments of a ravenous youth' on Amazon, or Guo Xiaolu's better known novel 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers'. This article is from Danwei.org
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 In Sichuan Given the prominence of Wen Jiabao during the Wenchuan earthquake disaster, it's worth considering Jane Macartney's insightful exchange with him in September 2006: How books and learning reveal mind of a man who will shape future.
Excerpt:
Asked about his late-night reading preferences and what anxieties gave him insomnia, Wen Jiabao displayed the depth of his knowledge of China’s classics and the breadth of his interests beyond politics.
He told The Times that the question was a difficult one to answer. “You are actually asking about my reading and thinking.”
Rather than answer directly, the Prime Minister chose to quote from writings that he found most pertinent to his life.
“They will tell you something about me, what is on my mind and what I read.”
His choices ranged from a 19th-century Chinese general credited with military victories in the far northwest but whose poems were banned until 1993, to the thoughts of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
One theme ran through all Mr Wen’s choices of aphorism: his anxieties and concerns for the trials of the Chinese people and the tribulations ahead for his country.
Mr Wen paused for what seemed like an age as he gathered his thoughts, his emotions on display. For emphasis he leaned forward in his elaborately carved rosewood chair, a crocheted anti-macassar placed over the padded red seat-back.
Rarely has a Chinese leader shown such erudition in public. In doing so, he opened a window on to a way of thought that can be traced back to the young idealists who made it their mission to try to modernise China in its declining years as an imperial power in the late 19th century.
Mr Wen gestured above his head and then held his clenched hand to his heart as he quoted Kant. His voice quivered when he recited a verse by the 3rd-century BC statesman Qu Yuan, regarded by many as the father of Chinese poetry. “Long did I sigh to hold back tears, saddened I am by the grief of my people.”
This article is from Danwei.org
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Below is a review by Linda Jaivin of the recently published English translation of Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize. The review was first published in The Australian Literary Review, on May 7, 2008, and is republished here with their permission, together with an introduction written for this website by Geremie R. Barmé.
You might also want to listen to a much more positive review of the book from NPR, or buy it on Amazon and read it yourself.
Milking Wolves’ Totem
—reading Linda Jaivin on Jiang Rong’s lupine love story
by Geremie R. Barmé
Linda Jaivin’s review of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem is a timely intervention on a subject that has been a hot China topic in the international media. Again, it is one that touches on the issues of non-Han ethnic cultures, this time dealing with a novel the author of which finds succour in what writers like Rae Yang (see her memoir Spider Eaters) and Yuan Weishi (the Zhongshan University historian attacked in early 2006) have called “wolves’ milk” (langnai). That is, the atavistic politics of passion and rhetorical violence fostered by ideologues, media carpet-baggers and the “engineers of human souls” in the guise of supporting righteous patriotic fervour.
Wolves in chic clothing have been around for most of the “open door and reform period”, an era that marks its thirtieth anniversary this year. Indeed, contemporary Chinese cultural producers have been making a meal of borderland themes and peoples to express cutting-edge artistic and ideological views since the 1980s. Some writers and artists have sought in various borderland ethnic Others an invigorating tonic replete with the essence of the masculine, the swarthy and the heroic, one they hope can infuse the peoples of the Central Plains (Zhong Yuan) with greater vigour and militancy (and make them a buck and a name in the process). One thinks, for example, of some of the early the writings of Zhang Chengzhi, the Beijing *** writer who came to post-Cultural Revolution fame for his novels about the Mongolian and later Chinese sufi worlds (since his fame as a novelist has long overshadowed his first career, most people don’t know that he was one of the founders of the Red Guard movement), or indeed of the director Tian Zhuangzhuang who made such films as Liechang Zasa and Horse Thief. Then there is the famous “misty poet” (menglong shiren) Yang Lian whose Nuoerlang cycle of poems set in Tibetan China, and he is in good company with Ma Jian, author of the vile Stick Out Your Tongue, another example of priapic narcissism.
Commentators have debated the value and significance of Jiang Rong’s best-selling Wolf Totem for some time, especially since its prize-winning debut (and canny marketing) in English. For me the Chinese version of the novel was so odious that I failed to finish it; I fear that, having read Linda’s scarifying review (reprinted below), I won’t get much further with Howard Goldblatt’s rendition. But in reconsidering this grim gem of Chinese literary production, I am reminded of another writer in this vein, one who has long been forgotten by mavens of new Cathay: Yuan Hongbing.
Yuan is worthy of recall at this moment for, in his best-selling 1990 “Sino-fascist” (my description) screed Wind in the Wilderness (Huangyuan feng), he called for “rebirth of the China spirit” (Zhonghua jingshen). He declared that the upcoming Asian century would require a new kind of Chinese “totalitarian style”, one which would “fuse the weak, ignorant and selfish individuals of the race into a powerful whole”. In this looming new era, he declared, the Han race would need strong, idealistic, dignified and free men to achieve such an end. “Scientific rationalism has said all it can within the context of Western civilization”, he said. It was now necessary to “cast aside the attitude of national defeatism, [for] if we fail to do so, the China Spirit will not be smelted into an iron will, and it will be as lifeless as the fallen leaves of history”.
In the guise of Han-China bashing works like Wolf Totem excoriate the soft, the compassionate, the humane and the feminine—perceived weaknesses of China. They exploit the Other to worship an unreflective, ultra-masculine and über-virile ideal.
Yuan Hongbing’s words have come to mind as I have read the lucubrations of Wang Xiaodong (who has crowned the “4.19” movement of this year as China’s new May Fourth) and Gan Yang (who has celebrated the global Chinese protests as emblematic of a “new internationalism”). Fire in the blood has been a theme of many works of popular culture in China for some time (indeed, it is hardly unique to contemporary China, though censorship and guided public opinion make for a heady mix). But what happens when people go on the “wolves’ milk” drip again? One thing’s for sure, the cubs you get are going to be more than mere ankle-biters.
Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, translated by Howard Goldblatt
Reviewed by Linda Jaivin
Published in the Australian Literary Review, May 7 2008
Boy meets wolf. Boy loses wolf. Boy writes Wolf Totem, wins inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. A multi-million copy bestseller in China since its release four years ago, Wolf Totem is as much a phenomenon as it is a novel. Its fans liken it to Moby ***. It has spawned a children’s version, manga, a big budget movie (to be released this year) and several counterfeit sequels. China’s businessmen trawl it for pearls of lupine wisdom. Environmentalists wave it like a manifesto. Now Wolf Totem is out in translation, ready to sink its fangs into a broader Western readership.
Jiang Rong (real name: Lu Jiamin) based Wolf Totem on his experiences as a Chinese student living among nomads on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, Mao fired up China’s urban youth to fight his factional enemies, literally as well as ideologically. Several years later, having accomplished his goals and tiring of the havoc, Mao dispatched the students to the countryside and border regions to cool off, for the rest of their lives if necessary. It was an experience which branded, scarred and in a way, culturally privileged a generation. Over the four decades since, they have reflected on those extraordinary times in countless, increasingly nuanced and even humorous novels, stories, memoirs, poems, films, plays and artworks; Wolf Totem comes from this tradition.
In Wolf Totem, protagonist Chen Zhen becomes fascinated with wolves, the totem animal of the Mongolians, whose independent, nomadic lifestyle also comes as a revelation. His oft-stated respect for his hosts does not prevent Chen from raising a wolf cub in conscious violation of Mongol customs and beliefs. The decision brings him into direct conflict with his Mongolian mentor, Bilgee.
Wise old Bilgee comes across as the archetypal ‘noble savage’ of the sort who used to populate Western fiction before writers became embarrassed by the concept, Marlo Morgan excepted. Bilgee teaches Chen about wolves and shows him how even vicious predators are an essential part of the natural environment. The fact that Chen calls Bilgee ‘papa’ begs the question: what has happened to Chen’s own parents and does he ever think of home -- and if not, why not? There are no back stories on offer, none hinted at.
Unlike the characters in many other contemporary novels of the Cultural Revolution (think of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, for example), Chen and his friends rarely discuss anything so mundane as sexual desire or love, or what and whom they left behind in the city or even their feelings about the cataclysmic events which have shaped their young lives. Their conversation seesaws between harsh intellectual critiques of China’s ‘peasant mentality’, moral lassitude and moribund civilisation on the one hand and on the other, panegyrics on the local way of life. ‘These Mongols,’ says Chen, ‘all I can do is stand back and admire them.’
That is a typical example of the novel’s dialogue, by the way. Jiang’s prose style is in general so bloated with banality, repetition and cliché, that comparisons to Moby ***, to my mind, relate only to the ratio of blubber to ambergris. Howard Goldblatt’s translation abets, inflicting such vivid oddities as: ‘It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.’ One is at least spared the 60-page ‘call to action’ which concluded the Chinese original. At 500-plus pages, Wolf Totem is still thick enough to stun a marmot.
Marmots don’t come off too well in Wolf Totem. The hunted generally don’t. The wolves are the real heroes. If the human characters lack motivation, the wolves more than make up for it. Wolves plan for battle and harbour more ‘murderous thoughts of revenge’ than your average kungfu hero. They are capable of experiencing disgrace, humiliation, hatred, joy and religious awe. Wolves, we are told, trained Mongol horses and were behind Genghis Khan’s conquest of the world. They can take credit for the economic and political dynamism of the West. They are expert climatologists and devoted to the protection of the grassland (as opposed simply to being an integral part of its ecosystem). We know all this because Chen says it’s so.
Wolves are certainly intelligent animals with developed social behaviours and hunting strategies. Yet much of the ‘wolf nature’ theorising in Wolf Totem rings crackpot. The author pays homage to Jack London. But London managed to ascribe personalities to his wolf characters without unduly anthropomorphising them or investing them with mystical powers. London writes in White Fang, for example, that a wolf ‘did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide vision. He was single-purposed, and entertained but one thought or desire at a time.’ The cub in London’s novel learns that some behaviours result in pain, and others in pleasure, and acts accordingly; to obey the laws of the pack ‘was to escape hurt and make for happiness.’ Jiang read London, but it doesn’t appear he paid much attention.
Horses in Wolf Totem are also big thinkers, imbued with notions of responsibility and forward planning. Even mosquitoes – especially ones made ‘wolfish’ from lupine blood – are credited with rational intent. If this makes the animals sound like characters, they’re not -- they’re simply talked about a lot. The inner lives of the garrulous humans, by contrast, are a weird blend of emotional disconnect and mawkishness.
Characterisation in Wolf Totem is as thin as a poorly felted yurt, the plot a ragged pelt stretched over a writhing cluster of historical, cultural and ecological hypotheses.
If Wolf Totem were a person, it would be one raised by wolves: somewhat autistic, lacking in empathy. The students don’t worry overmuch about someone falling off a horse in the middle of a stampede but choke up over the death of a swan. Several times we are told Chen could never love a son as much as he loved his wolf cub. There’s no reason to think otherwise.
Is sentimentality the last refuge of the crypto-fascist? Chen and friends praise the ‘murderous swath’ Genghis Khan’s warriors cut through Europe and Asia. Chen admonishes another Chinese to ‘be careful when you place the civil over the military’ and elsewhere states that a people who adopted the wolf’s gladiator-like temperament ‘would always be a victorious people.’ The author is not shy of using the word ‘race’ when praising (Mongol: good) or criticising (Chinese: bad).
The idealisation of the Mongols, held up in Wolf Totem as virile, free, independent and wolf-like has echoes of the fetishisation in the 1980s of Tibetans as both spiritual and sexually liberated by Han Chinese authors such as Ma Jian (Stick Out Your Tongue). The authors are ultimately most interested in making a point about their own culture.
The most effective passages in Wolf Totem describe how migrant workers, Chinese and sinicised Mongols alike, have ripped the guts out of the Olanbulag’s fragile grassland ecosystem as ferociously as a wolf taking down a gazelle. In its creepy and cack-handed way, Wolf Totem draws attention to the dangers posed by short-sighted materialism not just to the grasslands but, by extension, the earth itself. Perhaps that’s what moved the judges of Man prize; it would astonish me to learn it was literary merit.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Happy World Reading Day! (or World Book and Copyright Day, if you prefer.) As part of book-related activities on 23 April, Xinhua bookstores are offering discounts and Chinese government agencies are promoting reading among the people.
But how should you pick what to read? Can you trust newspaper book reviews to be honest criticism and not merely disguised press releases?
Back in January, Wang Danhua, a freelance translator and writer, discussed Internet literature with the literary website Paper Republic. During the interview she touched upon the topic of book reviews:
"Now, Douban is a good resource for information about books you're interested in, and seeing other readers' reactions. If I want to know if a book is worth reading, I'll look on Douban. If you read actual book reviews elsewhere, those are written by professional critics, and they're mostly marketing tactics. I read China Reading Weekly (中华读书报) and Publishers Magazine (出版人杂志), but there's not much real criticism in there, to be frank, it's mostly sales. I worked briefly at a publishing house, and that was my job—I wrote press releases about new books and sent them around to journalists. I couldn't stand it. The book might be trash, but the 'critics' are just writing what the publishing houses give them. The comments on Douban might be shallow, but at least they're honest.
Earlier this month, China Reading Weekly talked to Dong Ningwen, an editor of book-related publications, about "grass-roots" book reviews—criticism posted on Douban and other places online. In the interview translated below, Dong doesn't mention the paid review problem that plagues the print media, but he does agree with Wang's points about the usefulness of online reviews.
He also notes that the boundary between traditional reviews and "grass-roots" criticism is becoming increasingly fluid—many of the reviewers who show up in print media keep blogs, and good blog-based criticism sometimes shows up in newspapers.
Dong Ningwen: How I See Grass-Roots Book Reviews
by Pu Qinglian / CRW
Dong Ningwen, pen-name Zicong, was born in 1966 in Nanjing. At the beginning of 1996, he started work as an editor with Yilin Publishing House's Yilin Review. In 2000, he became editor of Open Book (开卷) [the newsletter of Nanjing's Phoenix Book Club]. In 2003, he published the essay collection Ties With Book and People. To date he has edited three installments of the "Open Book Series," and the "Open Book Reading Series" that he co-edited with Qiu He was just published by the Nanjing Normal University Press.
China Reading Weekly: Six months ago, Sina's Book Channel launched a "public book review group," with the intention of consolidating the strength of grass-roots book reviews and setting out space for netizen's book reviews. Their slogan was "Select book critics from the masses, build a high-quality reading lifestyle." In your view, what type of criticism does the term "grass-roots book review" refer to?
Dong Ningwen: We typically use the term "book review" to refer to something relatively conventional put out by some academic or professional. You can trace this back to Xiao Qian in the thirties and forties, and then there's the New York Times book review, and so forth. But I see "grass-roots book reviews" as something different, a concept much broader than that: commentary related to books that netizens publish themselves on online platforms like Sina's "Public Book Critics" site. They may not be as systematic as conventional reviews—there's much more freedom as to form, language, and even length.
CRW: What do you mean by "much more freedom"?
Dong: Compared to the professional nature of conventional book reviews, grass-roots criticism is more inviting, and less distanced from the reader. The majority of conventional book reviews—that is, book reviews written by most academics—follow certain methods and forms; they stand aloof and are somewhat condescending to readers' tastes. They aren't really on the same level as the reader. Instead, they are like a teacher standing at the lectern imparting knowledge to students, while the students themselves are more or less passive listeners.
Grass-roots book reviews, as I understand them, are more web-based. If you want a less-than-rigorous definition: they're just book reviews by netizens. The Internet is a different sort of communications platform from print-based media. It's quicker, livelier, and more egalitarian. The majority of grass-roots reviews exist because someone read a book and felt they had something to say so they wrote down their thoughts. There's no need to adhere to some pre-existing formula, and there's no word limit—if you have more to say, then you can write hundreds or thousands of words; if you have less to say, then three or five lines might be sufficient. It's really free and casual. Also, writers and readers can easily interact and can freely exchange ideas.
CJW: Indeed. Like Douban, for instance, which won the "New Media of the Year" title at the 2007 China Book Industry Awards: they have various types of book reviews, both long and short, written in all kinds of styles. You don't even know the real names or identities of most of the writers, but looking at the reviews on Douban is becoming a way to get a first sense of direction for more and more readers.
Dong: True. This is a good thing. The audience of the Internet isn't a fixed group of readers, as is the case with newspapers and periodicals. Some people don't read print media, but they go online. If grass-roots book reviews can lead these people to read books, then what does it matter what sort of reviews they are? This is a new force that deserves to be recognized.
CJW: In light of this kind of trend, do you believe that the Internet has qualities that make it better suited to making recommendations than the print media? Or, in other words, do the more easily-approachable grass-roots book reviews have an even greater advantage when compared to conventional book reviews?
Dong: They're not mutually-exclusive—they ought to be complementary, working together to promote the development of book criticism and the overall climate of book reading in society. Their audiences are different, and they focus on different areas. Grass-roots reviews more often resemble readers' reactions: they're more casual and personalized, yet their feistiness covers a possible lack of professionalism. Grass-roots reviews have few restrictions, they're not carefully contained pieces of criticism. They can be more real and objective, but this does not necessarily make them well-written. And the openness of the Internet provides advantages as well as disadvantages. To provide a short example: one advantage of print media is that it filters out impurities, but the Internet does not. Extreme, overly-caustic language is in evidence all over the Internet, despite the fact that it violates the principles of "fairness and objectivity" that book critics should follow.
But my views on grass-roots book reviews aren't rally all that absolute. Netizens come in all shapes and sizes, and on Douban you can run across lots of famous people. Besides, people publish book reviews on their blogs, and this includes lots of fairly well-known writers. Would you call those "grass roots" or "conventional" book reviews?
CRW: It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. It doesn't matter what form the book review takes—so long as it promotes reading among the populace and social progress, or if it contributes to self-improvement, then it deserves support?
Dong: Indeed. The form isn't the important thing. When I edited the "My" series (My Study, My Encounters With Books, My Pseudonyms, and My Free Seals), lots of people wrote reviews—grass roots and famous writers both. A truly good book will accumulate reviews into word-of-mouth, and that praise will spur other writers to write their own reviews, forming a virtuous cycle.
On the other hand, we shouldn't overrate the use of book reviews, just as we shouldn't underestimate the force of the audience themselves. A book exists as an independent unit; it's not good merely because someone says it is, nor is it bad simply because someone calls it that. Reviews can exert an influence on an ordinary reader, but they may not be able to on a mature reader.
CRW: Building on the foundation of the past two years, the Central Publicity Department, the Party Office of Spiritual Civilization Development and Guidance, and the General Administration of Press and Publication have continued to promote civic reading activities. These nationwide activities ought to be good for the development of book reviews in all areas.
Dong: Like I said before, conventional book reviews and grass-roots reviews are not enemies. They each have their own strong points, and they both can make progress. The most important thing is to find a point of connection that will allow the two to better harmonize and unite. I think that everyone can be a book critic, so long as you enjoy reading and can express your opinion in words, then even a short several-hundred words can form a good book review. I also hope, whether this year, next year, or in the future, regardless of whether "reading activities" are held, that everyone can pick up a book and a pen and be a book critic.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 A whodunit in the Grand View Garden Adapting a classic work is a risky undertaking.
This warning from an online commentator becomes all the more significant when the classic involved is one of China's four ancient masterpieces. Or when the adaptation is a detective novel. Or if the author is Japanese.
Ashibe Taku's Murder in the Red Mansions (芦辺拓, 《紅楼夢の殺人》, Koromu no satsujin), an award-winning novel published in 2004, is all of these. Ashibe's book, which was released on the mainland this January in a translation by Zhao Jianxun, retells Cao Xueqin's immortal Dream of the Red Mansions as a murder mystery.
Unlike various parodies of Dream of the Red Mansions, Ashibe Taku's mystery is quite respectful of the original novel. However, as if anticipating opposition from the traditionalists, the Chinese edition includes a "reader's guide" at the front that emphasizes this point:
No wonder so many Japanese readers couldn't help opening Dream of the Red Mansions after reading Murder in the Red Mansions; this detective novel awakened their intense curiosity toward a classic Chinese masterpiece.
...
For Japanese readers, a detective novel drawn from the plot of the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Mansions can stir an interest in ancient Chinese culture at the same time it satisfies their interest in the mystery plot. And to some degree, the excitement they get out of this book exceeds that of Red Mansions itself, so its attraction is not only its connection to that novel.
For the Chinese reader, then, if you are a fan of detective novels, then read it as a unique detective novel. If you are a Red Mansions fan, then read it as a whimsical retelling of the Red Mansions story. If you are a fan of neither detective fiction nor the Red Mansions, but simply an ordinary reader, then don't worry: take a look at how the story proceeds in the "story first" novels of Ashibe Taku.
The story generally follows events in the original novel, and all the members of the Jia family retain the personalities that Cao gave them. In fact, the author provides enough background that even a reader unfamiliar with the original can still get a sense of the complex relationships among the huge cast of characters.
As Murder begins, Jia Baoyu and the young women of the Jia family are invited by Yuanchun, an imperial consort who has made a rare trip home, to take up residence in the expansive Grand View Garden, which was constructed especially for her visit. Ostensibly this is so that the garden doesn't go to waste, but the local Criminal Bureau is of the opinion that Yuanchun suspects that foul play will occur in the future, and she wants to keep her young relatives safe. The Bureau dispatches Lai Shangrong to keep an eye on things in the garden. Shangrong, a corrupt local official in the original novel, is an accomplished detective in this retelling, and such a strong believer in the rule of law that his colleague Jia Yucun needs to remind him of the deference he must show toward influential families. For his part, Baoyu is a crime enthusiast: instead of concentrating on his studies, he spends his time reading the tales of Lord Bao and running the Crab-Flower "Mystery" Club with his cousins.
The book starts slow, but once Yingchun is discovered strangled and floating in a lake, the bodies start accumulating and the pace of the novel picks up. In the course of his investigations, Shangrong begins to suspect that Baoyu is toying with him, and it all plays out in a satisfying conclusion that echoes the sentiments of the original.
 Blood in the mansions Naturally, Ashibe's claims of reverence failed to impress the most stalwart defenders of traditional culture. Most of their arguments we've all heard before, but one piece posted on Sichuan Online just begged to be translated:
Dream of the Red Mansions Adapted into a Murder Novel
by the Japanese
by Die Huayu
Adapting a classic work is a risky undertaking. An author not up to the task ends up despoiling it, and even a famous author, if careless, could still end up botching the job. If a foreigner who does not understand native culture adapts it, then its hard to say just how great the risk may be.
The Japanese writer Ashibe Taku has turned Dream of the Red Mansions into a violent, blood-soaked "murder novel." The mainland Chinese translation of that novel has sparked an intense controversy in recent days because Jia Baoyu has been transformed into an amateur detective, and the women of the Grand View Garden fall victim to a series of murders. Those opposed to the novel say that the mockery of a classic goes too far, but its supporters acclaim the foreign writer for bringing the original work "to new heights" (reports the Chongqing Evening News).
One of China's Four Great Books has, under the pen of a Japanese author, became a "murder novel." Merely from the title of Ashibe Taku's Murder in the Red Mansions, one can tell that this Red Mansions story is no longer in the same arena as Cao Xueqin's, but that it has become something in which the characters in the Red Mansions are imbued with a Japanese "military soul." To apply the word "ratiocination" to such a novel is the height of hilarity, because that supposes a strict logic in the telling of the story. But in this adaptation, Jia Baoyu is an amateur detective, and Wang Xifeng, Lin Daiyu, and Shi Xiangyun all get killed. This goes against everything Dream of the Red Mansions stands for. There's nothing at all rational about this—it blasphemes one of China's literary masterpieces. For such a work to be published in mainland China, if not a national shame, is at least a portrait of an ignorant publisher who is unaware of national literature.
 A finely-crafted murder mystery Ashibe Taku's "murder novel" purports to "seek justice" for Wang Xifeng, Lin Daiyu, and Shi Xiangyun, but as a matter of fact, it is actually playing with Chinese literature in order to "massacre" one of China's literary masterpieces, if not Chinese culture itself. As a representative of the highest standard of Chinese literary and artistic expression, Dream of the Red Mansions is the pinnacle of art, one that posterity has found hard to match. Adapting Dream of the Red Mansions into another art form is of course permissible. And writing a sequel is a form of exploration. All of those creative works are founded on one precept: respect for the original artist's basic concept, which means not tearing apart the structure of the original work or parodying its main characters. Murder in the Red Mansions upends the substance of Cao Xueqin's novel, turning a novel in which a love story brings to light major historical material into a blood-soaked murder case. The two are so different that their artistic merits can hardly be on the same level. But such a "murder novel" does not stop at slaughtering merely the novel Dream of the Red Mansions; it is clearly a distortion and slaughter of China's ancient culture. If similar acts are not stopped, our literary masterpieces are at risk of further mockery.
The individual copyrights of the authors of China's literary masterpieces have long expired, but those rights have reverted to the state. An irresponsible mockery of Dream of the Red Mansions like the one undertaken by Ashibe Taku violates China's copyright. This means that the General Administration of Press and Publication of China can use the law to stop the publication and circulation of Murder in the Red Mansions. And not only in China—it can't be published in Japan, either, because this novel harms China's national character in addition to violating the copyright of a literary work. Ashibe Taku may claim that "this is a book that pays respect to ancient Chinese literature from far-off Japan as well as making new explorations in detective fiction," but it is undeniable that the book blasphemes China's Dream of the Red Mansions.
Oddly, there are individuals on the mainland who have praised Ashibe. Those people enjoyed the "thrilling scenes." Conversely, it fell to readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan to express their dissatisfaction: "This sequel feels crude all over" (reader Gfinger in Hong Kong). "If you are in love with the original and value textual research, then come nowhere near this novel" (Lin Siyan in Taiwan). "The Japanese are destroying the outstanding culture of the Chinese people. The Chinese cannot permit them to do this. Suppose for a moment that we took Japan's traditional literary works and messed with them—how would they feel?"
A "murder novel" should not trample on a Chinese masterpiece, nor should it slaughter Chinese culture. I hope that the government can give this the attention it deserves.
* * *
Die Huayu's warning notwithstanding, the dangers involved in adapting Dream of the Red Mansions have been braved by countless authors since the novel's publication. We've collected a number of titles, both ancient and modern, in the post Dreams of mansions, stories of stones.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Chen Xiwo: known pornographer in Taiwan? Chinese customs regulations state that "prohibited" books and printed materials can be seized at the border and destroyed. Precisely what is prohibited is not always clear—sometimes a book's status can be deduced from other regulations, as in the case of the improperly-colored map that put the Lonely Planet: China on the list, but it's often hard to guess at just what will catch the customs agent's eye.
Take author Chen Xiwo (陈希我), for example. His novella collection Book of Offenses (冒犯书) was published on the mainland by People's Literature Publishing House early last year, and then in Taiwan by Aquarius (宝瓶文化) in March. In June, Aquarius sent him a package containing twelve copies of his book.
All that reached Chen's mailbox, however, was a letter from the customs office informing him that the package had been confiscated as "pornography." Over the next sixth months, Chen tried to free his books, but the General Customs Administration ultimately sent down an order declaring that the books were in violation of relevant customs regulations and had to be seized. Chen then requested a hearing.
Fujian's Straits News reported on the hearing, which took place on the 7th:
Customs said that when People's Literature Publishing House published Book of Offenses, it deleted certain sexual content. The Taiwan edition, however, claimed "the mainland edition had many cuts. This is the first complete Chinese edition in the world." Customs agents did not question that Book of Offenses had literary value, but like Lust, Caution, it came in two versions, cut and uncut. The uncut version had more "bedroom scenes," and was prohibited. The cut version retained the artistic value of the original while removing those "gratuitous" scenes and was permitted to be shown.
But the Fuzhou customs agents could not explain their examination standards or which sections of the book were pornographic. Nor did they know how the General Customs Administration had arrived at its determination.
Sadly, it appears "banned in China" is still a big selling point overseas. However, Book of Offenses wasn't actually banned. In the afterword to the mainland edition, Chen writes of how the first story he wrote in high school surprised his teacher by its darkness. He continues:
But I was never able to publish a single story. Some editors gave me suggestions, like "adding a bright ending," or moving the setting overseas, or to "miserable" Taiwan, but I rejected them all, preferring not to publish....these twenty years, my style hasn't changed; how I write now I was already writing when I was 17. What's different is that society has become tolerant. But tolerance is relative: when my works get published they still need to be processed, and my manuscripts still make the rounds of publishers and agents. That includes this book: it originally contained ten pieces, but with the deletion of Sheltering (遮蔽) (published online as I Love Mom), it is now nine. I have been acknowledged, but only in certain areas. I am an author, but only in respect to a few works.
In reviews published following the mainland publication, Book of Offenses was described as a loosely-connected collection of stories that together formed a response to the Ten Commandments—all but for the absence of Sheltering.
The novella tells the story of a lame man who is in an incestuous relationship with his mother and, at her request and using a whip she provides, flogs her to death. Bannable? Maybe, but Sheltering had previously been published in Xiamen Literature (2004.01) and was the focus of animated discussion in subsequent issues of the journal.
Here's a blog post Chen Xiwo put up on the 8th, the day after the hearing:
Just because it's always been like this, does that make it right?
by Chen Xiwo
At the end of last June, I returned from the Philippines with the image of the sunset in Manila still lingering in my mind. I wrote a piece called "Manila Sunset." Reportedly, that country is impoverished, troubled by poverty even, but I saw that their spirits were not troubled by poverty. Looking at the streets full of Filipinos sitting, reclining, and at play, I saw that they may have been materially impoverished but they were wealthy in spirit. A people trained that "food is the people's heaven" or who have been baptized in a materialist world outlook cannot comprehend this. They may not have had a home to return to, but they were free. This too seems to stir us to sympathy, but I really want to live well, to live "comfortably." Thus conflicted, I returned to China, exhausted.
 The clean mainland edition When I arrived, I noticed an envelope on my desk. I saw that it was from Customs and felt a strange sense of foreboding. Sure enough, I was being informed that my Book of Offenses had been seized. At the start of 2007, Book of Offenses had been processed on the mainland and a simplified character edition had been published. In Taiwan, they read the information on the Internet and contacted me about releasing a traditional character edition, which came out with no obstructions whatsoever. Then problems arose: the obstruction-free publication of Book of Offenses was deemed "printed material prohibited from entering the territory."
Obstructions can be divided into physical and mental obstacles. Fatigue can become an obstacle of the flesh, particularly when sparring with enforcement departments. But for a writer whose written works are seized, there's another kind of obstruction, a mental obstacle. As someone who sees writing as life, I find this obstacle difficult to root out. No wonder beauty can drive one to "kill the Buddha." So I made a stand. I remember it was a hot afternoon, and I spoke until my mouth dried out, moving from the purpose of writing to the rules of literature, from ancient times through today, both within and without China. But it was of no use. Physical obstacles prevailed. I suggested just letting me take one copy as a memento; the rest I was willing to discard. But I was denied yet again. So I continued to fight. Finally they said, hand it over to the General Customs Administration to decide.
That decision took half a year. Countless telephone calls, countless questions to spur them on. Through it all I felt a mixture of dejection and excitement. Excitement, because I read the law: in Article 367 of the Criminal Law, it reads, "Literary and artistic works of artistic value that contain erotic contents are not regarded as obscene materials." These works had all been published in literary magazines and some had won awards (I never felt that winning awards was very important), so shouldn't they fall under "literary works of artistic value"? But the higher-ups never gave a written reply, so regardless of my thousands of reasons, I just had to wait.
The weather cooled down and became cold. Trees became bare, and I caught a new illness myself. Quite a few people around me died—would I end up dying, too? I thought of death, and asked myself what was most important. Physical obstacles once again took precedence. Best to put it out of my mind and go on living. But then the telephone rang: the matter was to be disposed according to Article 6 of the Customs Law of the People's Republic of China and Article 20 of Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Implementing Customs Administrative Penalties. I rushed to look up the Customs Law, but it looked like Article 6 did not apply to me. Perhaps the heart of it was Article 20 of the Pentalties: "Where anyone, when transporting, carrying or mailing articles the entry or exit of which is prohibited by the State into or out of the territory, fails to declare them to the Customs but does not evade Customs control by concealment, disguise or other means, such articles shall be confiscated, or be ordered to be returned, or be destroyed or undergo technical treatment under Customs control." Was I in violation? It didn't look like it. Perhaps the issue rested on the word "prohibited" (禁止). What was "prohibited"? But they don't tell you.
Maybe some dispute of mine in the past had put them on their guard. I was an important person! Oh, the vanity!
When I learned that I had the right to ask for a hearing, I felt renewed hope. I didn't understand, so naturally I wanted to hear them out. Besides, they hadn't paid any attention to me at all, so maybe I'd get them to listen. I'd just opened my mouth when it was gagged: Don't bother applying. It's no use. The General Customs Administration sent down that order!
Many people have read my works and have felt them cruel and heartless, not noticing that they are actually extremely gentle. People say I'm nothing like my works. I'm mild, but my works are frightening. But when I speak I'm suddenly vehement. Which is the true Chen Xiwo? So there's only one possible conclusion: this guy's a puzzle! When I'm mild, I'm really mild. When I'm disagreeable, I'm disagreeable with a vengeance. You tell me not to, so I say I'll do it anyway. When I get hot-headed, the mental takes over from the physical. I wrote up an application. Hearing time!
Am I crazy?
But at the hearing, my opinions weren't heard, and I couldn't understand their words.
In the first place, the "order" from the General Customs Administration was actually contestable within the scope of administrative actions. So I asked, where is its authority? Particularly concerning the examination of literary works: was it authoritative? Had the censors been given training in literary theory corresponding to the demands of that job?
 The dirty Taiwan edition Second, where was the evidence for deciding that Book of Offenses was a "prohibited" item? The response was: this is confidential; it cannot be made public. Is it made public by telling me? I'm involved in the matter. I know that under certain conditions there can be a closed trial, like in the case of rape. But how can it not be opened to the rapist, criminal, or suspect involved? You've got to at least point out the details of the case, like what sort of rape it was and how many centimeters it went in. Reportedly, there's a difference. You can't be tagged a rapist simply the utterance "You're a rapist." Customs said: the supervision and examination of printed materials is a special case that involves confidentiality, so it cannot be made public. The order from the Supervising Office was sufficient to show that these actions were legal and effective. Where's the logic in this roundabout authentication? Isn't working under this mentality a "black box operation"? When pressed, they admitted that they did not in fact know what the Customs Supervising Office had relied on when they issued that order. I literally fell off the hearing platform. It's so murky—how have they managed to decide cases for so long? Probably no one in this situation has ever gone at them before. Or they've turned around in fright? But this time their up against someone who's foolhardy enough.
They say it's always been like this. Lu Xun asked, "Just because it's always been like this, does that make it right?"
Aren't we all talking about the rule of law? If we can't even make out what the law is, how can China's authors write? Or will we continue on like we always have: when you're banned, tough luck; when you're given the go-ahead, it's like you've slipped one past them, and you chuckle to yourself.
Of course, I am fully aware that the customs agents before me have no recourse. As enforcers, they can only enforce. As someone who's subject to that enforcement, I can only ask them. They're caught in the middle—how painful!
So after all of that, what's the root of the problem?
Perhaps I shouldn't press them so hard; they might end up suffering for it. But then I'll be the one suffering, which doesn't really matter, except that in abetting irrationality they'll eventually suffer anyway.
So that the rest of us don't have to suffer.
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Writing in The Beijing News, Pan Caifu, an editor, speculates on why the customs agents chose to seize the books:
This writer is fairly familiar with the works of Chen Xiwo, and after a sentence by sentence reading of Book of Offenses, I can't think of anything in this book that deserves to be banned. Reportedly, the traditional character edition added just one piece to the mainland's foundation. Using the process of elimination, we can analyze each of the possible "infractions":
Pornographic publication. This is perhaps the most likely reason that the book was seized at customs. But if Book of Offenses is the standard for "pornography," then a whole pile of literary works, including The Abandoned Capital (废都), White Deer Plain (白鹿原), Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅), would be trapped by the enlightened gaze of the customs officials, for those books are clearly far more "pornographic" than Book of Offenses. But this writer has never heard any news of those books being seized at customs. Customs would not be exercising a double standard, so this option can be ruled out.
Next comes ideological issues. If customs was sensitive enough they'd seize it. But the power to "rate" and decide the fate of books rests in the hands of GAPP. Would Customs try to move in on GAPP's turf? GAPP didn't ban it, and it was published by the most authoritative literary press, yet it was seized by Customs. How will they explain that to GAPP? Do they have issues with GAPP's metric? That shouldn't be the case, and I have full confidence in GAPP's ability to hold the line, so this option can be ruled out, too.
So if the two choices above don't apply, that leaves only one possibility: the title Book of Offenses is too offensive, too provocative. But there are tons of provocatively-titled books: Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀), Tie Ning's A Woman Bathing (大浴女), Chi Li's Shout Out When You Feel High (有了快感你就喊), and Bi Shumin's Save the *** (拯救乳房). Which of those titles doesn't push the limit of taste? Which doesn't offend the eyes? So this option should be ruled out, too.
This writer has one final question: according to Article 367 of the Criminal Law, "Literary and artistic works of artistic value that contain erotic contents are not regarded as obscene materials." Works contained in Book of Offenses won the "People's Literature Prize" and other literary prizes and were published by the People's Literature Publishing House, so they ought to have artistic value. But they couldn't pass customs. When did Fujian Customs take it upon itself to judge the value of literary and artistic works? How will it explain the reason for this ban to the People's Literature Prize judges' panel?
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Getting to the bottom of things Just three weeks have passed since the Lhаsa riots on 14 March, but the first book on the subject has already been published.
Lies and the Truth (谎言与真相), published on 4 March by SDX Joint Publishing (aka Sanlian Bookstore), is a book with a mission: it attempts to reveal the hand of the "Dаlai clique" behind unrest in Tıbet as well as the extent of the western media's bias in its reporting on the riots and their aftermath.
From the jacket copy:
For a long while, certain western media organizations have harbored prejudice and have made many distorted reports about China. After the 14 March Lhаsa riots, they spread lies through the news media and smeared China. This book collects reports and makes use of many convincing photographs and reference materials to clarify the facts and refute the western media's misleading reporting. The publication of this book will help the general public to understand the true nature of "press freedom" in the west.
The book's publication was accompanied by a media blitz, including a mention on the 7 o'clock news and a recent interview in the GAPP newspaper China Press and Publishing Journal with Sanlian's Zhang Weimin:
China Press and Publishing Journal: On 4 April, CCTV's Network News reported that Sanlian Bookstore, a unit of the China Publishing Group, had just published Lies and the Truth. What was your motivation in publishing this book?
Zhang Weimin: Fundamentally, this book was a direct outcome of Sanlian and the China Publishing Group putting into practice the requirements of the party and the country in respect to publishing: encompass the overall situation, serve the people, and uphold the "three closenesses" [close to reality, close to the masses, and close to real life]. At the instigation of the "Dаlai clique," a small number of people engaged in burning, looting, and destruction in Lhаsa, bringing down upon the local people massive loss of life and property, and inflaming their righteous indignation. Some western media entities engaged in fabricated reporting that violated basic facts, and their slanderous attacks on China generated strong dissatisfaction and anger in the general public. Under such circumstances, which involve the image of the country and its overall interests, the publishing industry could not be silent; we had to frame a response to demonstrate our position. We worked to show the true state of things to those unaware of the truth, and to rebut the axe-grinding, misleading reports of the western media. This was what the circumstances required, and it was also part of our responsibility to address the overall situation and serve the people. Ever since Zou Taofen founded Sanlian Bookstore, we have had a tradition of championing the health of the country and the people, and of paying close attention to social problems. In recent years, Sanlian has published a number of significant books; therefore, when the leadership of China Publishing Group suggested that we edit a book responding to the western media's distorted reporting on the Lhаsa riots, there was immediate agreement, and we went straight to work.
CPPJ: Could you tell us a little bit about what's inside the book?
ZW: This book is made up of previously-published articles, reference materials, and photographs, divided into four sections: Three articles in the first section cite irrefutable facts revealing that the Dаlai clique architected the 14 March Lhаsa riots and secretly planned a "Tıbetan Uprising" to split the people. The second section contains 12 articles and a number of photographs primarily aimed at clarifying and rebutting distortions of fact, misidentifications, unfounded accusations, fabrications, and fabricated reports in the western media, exposing their lies. The third section contains ten articles that analyze the heterodoxy of the Dаlai clique and its plotting for Tıbetan independence and splintering the motherland, and also describes the major achievements in economic, cultural, and social development that have occurred in Tıbet recently. The fourth section contains six background articles and a glossary of eight major terms. In sum, this book is a rich source of information and data, in-depth analysis, and powerful argumentation that uses substantial facts and photographs to expose the lies of the Dаlai Clique and certain western media organizations. It is an excellent reference book on the truth of the 14 March Lhаsa riots.
CPPJ: Reportedly, Lies and the Truth was edited and published in very short time frame. Could you tell us a bit about that process?
ZW: The manuscript was commissioned on 27 March and final publication took place eight days later. For Sanlian, this set a record for the fastest publication ever. The leadership of China Publishing Group was greatly interested in this project starting from the topic selection, and provided effective guidance. President Nie Zhenning suggested clear ideas for the editing work. Vice President Liu Bogen came to Sanlian Bookstore four times to discuss the structure of the content and the article listing. The leadership group of Sanlian Bookstore treated the book's publication as an important political mission, and Li Xin, deputy general manager and deputy general editor, was in charge organizing the project. The editorial, design, production, and general editor's offices, as well as various publication departments, were all highly aware of the importance and urgency of the book's publication, and threw themselves entirely into the work. From 29 March, when most of the manuscripts were in-hand, Li Xin led the copy-editors and layout editors through five days and nights at the office where they worked closely together through repeated changes of content at the greatest possibly speed until the book was formally published on 3 April. During this time, the people involved in the work slept just two or three hours a day, but they remained highly alert and worked willingly, exhibiting Sanlian's fine spirit of professionalism, responsibility, and drive. I would also like to emphasize the support and direction we received throughout the preparation and publication of this book from the leadership, agencies, and other publishers. Without their help, this book could not have been published so quickly.
CPPJ: What has the market reaction been to this book's publication? What sort of plans does Sanlian have for publicity and marketing?
ZW: The launch of Lies and the Truth on 4 April at Beijing's major bookstores was closely followed by bookstore leadership and industry professionals. Previously, the distribution department had given the table of contents and a summary to local retailers and province-level distribution companies, which reacted positively; orders have been enthusiastic. Yunnan, for example, ordered 3,000 copies; Jiangsu, Sichuan, Shandong, and Guangdong each ordered more than 1,000. Orders through Internet channels have been relatively high; Amazon China alone ordered 2,000 copies. On the first day, 10,000 copies were sold out. After CCTV's Network News reported on the publication of this book, orders came in from all over. In light of the book's importance, the China Publishing Group leadership instructed us to strike while the iron is hot and increase our publicity and marketing efforts to seize greater social and economic profits. Over the three-day Qingming Holiday, employees of relevant Sanlian Bookstore departments worked overtime. Distribution and shipping personnel worked fulfillment at the same time they were taking expanding orders from bookstores all over the country. Manufacturing personnel planned additional printings. The marketing department contacted the media to increase promotion. We hope that bookstores and the media can cooperate in promoting this book, and we hope that this book will be noticed by social groups and the general public so that it can prove even more useful.
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Some thoughts:
Question 1: What's the point?
The articles reproduced in Lies and the Truth come from the People's Daily, Guangming Daily, China News, and Xinhuanet, all of which are available online, and the glossary is taken verbatim from the Encyclopedia of China (中国大百科全书). Many of these, the Xinhua articles in particular, were republished in local newspapers across the country. The "substantial photographic evidence" originated online where it was viewed by millions of people.
The first print run of the book is 10,000 copies, more or less. Even allowing for the additional printings that Zhang mentions in the interview, there's no way that the book can compete with the Internet in providing exposure to this topic. The newspaper articles shouldn't be any more authoritative now that they're in book form, although there is indeed a permanence to books that the Internet still lacks. That wouldn't explain the need for such a quick turnaround—is the China Publishing Group simply cashing in on a wave of public opinion?
This task used to belong to the bootleggers, whose quick-to-press, shoddily printed and bound collections of news reports flooded the streets in the wake of major events such as the Chen Liangyu scandal, 9-11, and the death of Princess Di. Lies and the Truth falls into the same category, except that it comes on nicely-bound, quality paper inside a serious, scholarly cover bearing the imprimatur of Sanlian Bookstore. It's essentially prettied-up pamphleteering. But who reads pamphlets anymore?
 Cropped photos Question 2: How does CNN come off?
CNN was accused of having an anti-China bias when Chinese netizens discovered that it had used a cropped photo of a Lhаsa street scene that left out rioters on the right-hand side who were throwing rocks at military vehicles.
As online shorthand to represent anger at western media bias, "Anti-CNN" signatures and websites are understandable, particularly when you realize that netizens adapted the current catch-phrase "Don't behave like CNN!" (做人不能太CNN) from an earlier slogan lambasting CCTV for its underhanded tactics in an early-2007 poll (the slogan was revived for the recent "yellow violence" affair). But what started as an online meme has become an axiom in the discussion of the Lhаsa riots: CNN's reports can't be trusted.
Unfortunately, this book's analysis is just as superficial. Page 39 (shown at right) reproduces two photos of a street scene in Lhаsa. The top one, in which the rock-throwers on the right-hand side have been cropped out, is captioned
The photo at left is from the illustrious Agence France Press and is emblazoned with its logo just in case you didn't know. CNN also used this AFP image. They both cropped it to obscure the truth. After it was cropped, the original scene of rioters attacking a military vehicle now misleads readers into thinking that the army is repressing the people.
The photo was not taken directly from CNN but rather from a forum post complaining about the cropping (see the watermark in the lower left). And the text, with its gratuitous jab at the AFP's own watermark, is obviously inspired by the commentary in the original post, though the book's editors wisely chose not to reproduce the references to "human scum" in the cropped portion of the picture. Ironically, the "original photo" on the bottom of the page bleeds off the right-hand margin of the book—it ends up as a cropped photo that omits the AFP citation.
Nowhere in the text is CNN's original caption to the cropped photo: "Tıbetans throw stones at army vehicles as a car burns on a street in the capital of Lhаsa" (screengrab via ESWN).
 Maybe it's not out there Question 3: Anything special about the title?
"Truth" (真相) is often used in the title of books that purport to pull back the curtain on conspiracies—Mirror Books' famous 真相 series, for example, includes the June Fοurth: The True Stοry, The Last Days of Zhou Enlаi, and Sky Buriаl, and the term was once on a list of sensitive words probably because of this series.
On the other hand, Sanlian's book is not the first one to use the title Lies and the Truth. A compendium of hoaxes bearing the subtitle "Great Hoaxes and Mysteries Revealed" was published by Enterprise Management Publishing House in 2003. So this pamphlet's in good company.
Lies and the Truth can be found on displays by the front entrances of major Beijing bookstores, and ought to be available online before long.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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This book review is republished with permission from research firm Access Asia's weekly newsletter.
It was supposed to be conventional wisdom that as prices rise, not least wages, so China's manufacturing industry could move inland and gain access to cheaper land, cheaper inputs, cheaper workers and more of them. It hasn't happened quite like that, according both our own experience and to Alexandra Harney in her excellent and highly recommended new book — The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (Penguin). Regular readers, and Will Hutton, will know we're not easily impressed by China books here at Access Asia, but Harney is definitely not one of the 'Huttons' (now the official designation for bad China books).
Many factories moving inland in the hope of lower costs and enhanced competitiveness and better margins are finding that, '...in China's fast-forward economy, investors are finding things aren't as cheap or plentiful as they used to be. And the workers aren't pushovers either.' The time scale is accelerated - one factory boss Harney interviews, who moved inland from Guangdong, estimated that he had, '...three, maybe five more years before his factory loses its competitive edge.' And his wage bill was up from 5% to 15% of his costs and rising while commodity prices and logistics costs remained high. The price of the trek from inland to port was eroding any savings he might have made in other areas. Harney claims that those who have moved inland have at best saved 5-10% over coastal locations and, as noted above, that saving isn't going to last long as a growing number of inland provinces introduce minimum wage levels, workers assert their rights and land prices rise. In many inland provinces wages have doubled in a year or so.
There's a lot more to Harney's book than this, and we hope it is widely read, though know that much will be familiar to our readers, who probably (hopefully!) have a bit more in-depth knowledge than the general reader. However, it's well worth a read for both what's got better - silicosis compensation; minimum wages; factory owners who 'get it' and are now voluntarily introducing CSR practises into their factories — and what's arguably worse - illegal mining, the sophistication of dodging factory inspections — and, finally, and perhaps most importantly, what's the same — the western consumers desire for cheap-as-chips clothes, appliances, towels (you name it) that demands the China price remain low.
Buy the book on Amazon This article is from Danwei.org
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 Feuding friends on Sandglass Sharon (饶雪漫) is a prolific YA author who shoot low-budget teen soaps based on her novels. The actors in those shows have appeared on the covers of her recent books, including the Sandglass series.
A new set of "teen angst" novels was just released this month by Northern Arts Publishing House. Here's the cover of I Was Never Alone After All (原来我一直都不孤单):
 They're not alone after all It's not just the cover design that recalls Sharon's b | |
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