So I’ll avoid talking too much about recent events today and instead post up a few links to translated writings by people within China today. Enjoy!
The Other Chinese Response to Spielberg
This is a pretty funny translation of a Chinese blog on China Digital Times about Spielberg and Zhang Yimou. Just a quick introduction to Mr. Zhang, this is a director who made some pretty good films, like Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live… as well as some pretty terrible movies like Not One Less, Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower. Basically, his old movies were pretty good and subtly critical of the state while his later movies were like 1960’s style Communist propaganda or, in the case of Curse of the Golden Flower, just really really bad.
But yeah, the translated entry of that Chinese blog is pretty funny, showing that sarcasm, cynicism, and dissident behavior in Lu Xun’s tradition is still alive. Check it out.
Jailed Dissident’s Letter About the Olympics
Here is a link to The Guardian’s translation of a letter written by Hu Jia, a Chinese dissident currently in prison for ’subverting state authority’. It’s about the many problems plaguing China these days, mostly things that people talk about in whispers at home or when they’re excessively drunk off baijiu on trains. Here’s a little quote if the article is too long for ya:
“Fang Zheng, an excellent athlete who holds two national records for the discus throw at China’s Special Sport Games, has been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the 2008 Paralympics because he has become a living testimony to the June 4, 1989 massacre. That morning, in Tiananmen Square, his legs were crushed by a tank while he was rescuing a fellow student. In April 2007, the Ministry of Public Security issued an internal document secretly strengthening a political investigation which resulted in forbidding Olympics participation by 43 types of people from 11 different categories, including dissidents, human rights defenders, media workers, and religious participants. The Chinese police never made the document known to either the Chinese public or the international community”
And finally…
Overseas Democracy Advocates All Talk
This is a link to the EastSouthWestNorth blog with a translation of an article by Zhang Heci. First, a little background. The government in Xiamen and a Taiwanese corporation were planning on building a large chemical plant in the city that led to massive protests by the citizens of that city. Surprisingly, the government eventually backed down and decided not to build it. The article criticizes the lack of a reaction to this victory because, as the author asserts, the overseas Chinese dissidents and exiles, foreign civil rights activists, and governments cannot accept that there has been improvements in Chinese society since Opening and Reform in 1978. He goes on to say that those who criticize China are all talk, expecting the Chinese to risk their lives and shed their blood while the activists are all safe in their western suburbs.
Now here’s a bit of my own opinion. I mean while the people in Xiamen have won their victory, the government is still looking for a place to plop down that chemical plant. In fact, there was a pretty violent confrontation between villagers and police over this a couple days ago.
And then the accusation that people who criticize China refuse to acknowledge its advances. Well, Kang Youwei, one of the earlier proposers of reform in China, once criticized everything about Chinese culture and said the only way to modernize is to adopt everything western. When he was later criticized on this, he simply replied that to catch the people’s attention and incite change, they must take to the extremes as those in the middle will just be ignored…
…something to think about.
