Category: Essays

A vanished professor, remembered by students and colleagues – Darren Byler

On December 4, 2017, the disappearance of Professor Rahile Dawut, an eminent scholar of the Uyghur ethnic minority which she herself belongs to, sent quiet shockwaves among her students and colleagues around the world. On that day she had packed her bags for a flight to Beijing from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the majority of Uyghurs live, and has not been seen since. Presumably she is being held in detention. The cryptic text messages a colleague sent regarding what happened did not provide many details. They ended with the message, “I am going to delete my VPN [virtual private network, for communicating behind the Chinese firewall] and never use it again. So please if you care about people here, stop asking questions.”

Dawut’s Uyghur students care too deeply to stop asking questions, but for many months they have kept their questions quiet.

Mafia extortion of Chinese supermarkets in Argentina – Frank Beyer

In Argentina, a Chinese supermarket – supermercado chino, súper chino, argenchino or even just un chino – is not a store catering to Asian expats. The target market of these shops is the general population. In addition to several aisles of food and alcohol, there is usually a counter to buy meat, cheese and cold-cuts, and a fruit and vegetable stand. An Argentinian might be behind the meat counter, a Bolivian weighing the vegetables and a Chinese attending the till.

On September 18, 2016, on Bacacay Street in the Floresta neighborhood of the Argentinian capital city of Buenos Aires, two men on a motorbike pulled up in front of a small Chinese supermarket. One of them fired two shots through the entrance. In the aftermath there was a lot to clean up, but nobody was hurt.

Jennifer Duann Fultz reconnects with her cradle language

When I was very young, I would oblige by commenting on the weather or their outfit, but I eventually got tired of feeling like a zoo animal and learned to respond with, "Something in Chinese," which usually made it clear that I was not interested in continuing the conversation. I have only recently begun unpacking some of the resentment and confusion I felt toward my cradle language.

My parents settled in the Midwest among a community of highly educated immigrant Chinese professionals. We attended a Chinese church and most of the kids I grew up with could speak a smattering of Mandarin, Cantonese or Taiwanese. But in those days there were no trendy Mandarin immersion schools or Mandarin-speaking kids shows, so our cradle language was quickly subsumed by English. I dutifully went to Chinese school two hours a week from first grade through middle school, but I resented the extra class time and homework. Despite my  attitude, I clinched the speech competition year after year, which I sometimes suspect was due to my deeply entrenched study habits rather than any latent gift for gab. I outperformed my peers linguistically overall, to the delight of my parents and their Chinese friends. "Wah, hao bang, ah! Your Mandarin is so good!" they cooed, and I would do a few more verbal backflips in response to their applause.

Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’, 100 Years On – Emily Baum

Editor's note: We're delighted to run this essay not only on the 137th birthday of Lu Xun, but on the one year anniversary of the China Channel. Thanks to all our readers, and if you enjoy our fare, please do tell a friend to follow us, or give to our translation drive to bring Chinese voices to the fore. – Alec Ash

A hundred years ago, Lu Xun published a short story that would forever leave its mark on both Chinese fiction and Chinese history. ‘Diary of a Madman’ (Kuangren Riji), Lu Xun’s first vernacular short story to appear in print, was published in the May 1918 issue of New Youth (Xin Qingnian), a radical journal edited by some of China’s foremost progressive thinkers. Modeled on Nikolai Gogol’s work of the same name, the story follows an unnamed protagonist’s descent into lunacy as he convinces himself that the people around him are harboring a secret desire to “eat men” – that is, that they are complicit in a feudal cannibalistic tradition.

Why Beijing’s global propaganda drive is struggling – Martin Gelin

Standing in New York’s Times Square in June, I gazed up at the iconic neon-lit skyscrapers and counted four gigantic advertisements for Chinese companies and media firms. At one prime spot, an electronic billboard glowed with the name of China’s state news agency, Xinhua. According to recent estimates by Quartz, advertising on these billboards costs at least $2.5 million a month, so it is likely that the Chinese government is paying around $30 million annually just to have the Xinhua logo shining brightly over the people of Manhattan, 365 days a year.

It is unclear exactly what the Chinese government hopes to achieve with this splurge. But one thing is for sure: Times Square billboards are just a tiny fraction of the full efforts of Beijing’s spending on global promotional efforts.