The China Thread

[Jacob]

Li Keqiang has just died of a heart attack.

The former premier stepped down last year, having been the highest ranking CCP member speaking against Xi's policies. Whether or not Xi had Li murdered, Li's death will certainly generate rumours and perceptions to that effect.

[Sheilbh]

Many mentions of his wife who translate Yes Minister into Chinese in the obits (he was very supportive).

And interesting detail from a former British diplomat:

Shaun Riordan
@shaun_riordan
Obits of Li Keqiang mention his wife translated Yes Prime Minister into Chinese. When I was in the Embassy there in late 80s we lent our videos of Yes Minister to MFA. When we asked for them back they said they were using them to train Chinese diplomats @vtchakarova

Apparently - and this is not confirmed but given the above sounds more plausible - Deng was a huge fan, which is very weird to discover

[Jacob]

An interesting phenomenon is that the memorializing of Li is used to criticize Xi heavily. I've seen some pretty brazen things expressed.

I don't know how much this made ripples in the West, but Li was seen as being in opposition to Xi. Xi would make statements like "we should celebrate how we have lifted everyone in China out of poverty" and Li would almost immediately say things like "there are still X million people in China living on less than [poverty line]. We still have much work to do."

I mean, he was still one of the top CCP officials in the country, with the CCP being an authoritarian dictatorship - but it's still a thing.

[Josquius]

Ripples in the west?
I haven't seen this guy even mentioned on the news since that incident at the conference.

Hell. China in general rarely gets a mention these days unless xi is meeting someone or there's worries about supplying Russia.

[Sheilbh]

It is worth noting that restrictions on Western reporters are far, far stricter than they used to be. I know the Economist, NYT and FT, for example, have all had people expelled or pulled for their safety to Taiwan, South Korea or Singapore. There are some still able to do reporting on the ground, but it is restricted - which I think is part of why you see less general China coverage and more about say Xi meeting x.

Even his last speech when he'd ended his term as Premier had a line that "heaven is watching" which was reported a bit.

I think the Western media realy strugges to cover Chinese politics because there is a little bit of a black box element that it's difficult to know or explain what's going on in the Party. I think Richard McGregor's The Party is still seen as one of the best books explaining Chinese politics and it's about 15 years old.

The way to report Li also I think reflects the particular challenges in the Xi era. Wen Jiabao got more coverage as part of Hu-Wen's term. I think to begin with Li was reported in similar ways but as it became clear this wasn't like Hu's term, the focus shifted to Xi because that's where power lied and was the most important story - so reporting Li as people had Wen would be misleading. On the other hand, by not covering him especially as Jacob points out, you're perhaps reinforcing Xi's message and project because there's no (guarded) internal pushback. If you report Xi like normal, you're missing the story; if you just report Xi, you're maybe still missing the story?

[Jacob]

Yeah it's an interesting observation. I don't really have any answers.

While looking at photos of the massive flower arrangements that spontaneously have appeared to commemorate Li's passing. Whether truly spontaneous, or organized by a counter-Xi grouping of some form, it's still noteworthy in that official media is downplaying all of this and basically not reporting on Li's passing (keeping in mind that the protests that led to the Tiannanmen Square massacre started in a similar way).

Messages on some of the flowers - circulating on social media - have been pretty blatantly anti-Xi, denouncing autocratic rule and such.

I mean, this is unlikely to quick off an actual rising or anything like that - but anti-Xi sentiment is definitely bubbling under the surface.

[Sheilbh]

That also seems resonant in China with the respose to Zhou Enlai's death.

I read that one indication this was a genuine surprise/natural causes was the extent to which state media and the CCP weren't really prepared. Obviously CCP leaders normally live to a very long age, which means a line is normally prepared by the time they die. Apparently on this it took some time to actually put that together which is unusual in China.

[DGuller]

Question for older American folks here:  how much did reasonably educated Americans know and understand about USSR, pre-Gorbachev, compared to how much they know and understand about China today?

[Jacob]

That also seems resonant in China with the respose to Zhou Enlai's death.

I read that one indication this was a genuine surprise/natural causes was the extent to which state media and the CCP weren't really prepared. Obviously CCP leaders normally live to a very long age, which means a line is normally prepared by the time they die. Apparently on this it took some time to actually put that together which is unusual in China.

... so if he was murdered, it apparenlty wasn't a widely planned for event.

(Just a note for the conspiracy theories floating around)

[Valmy]

Question for older American folks here:  how much did reasonably educated Americans know and understand about USSR, pre-Gorbachev, compared to how much they know and understand about China today?

I am not sure as I was not particularly well educated back then but it sure seems like the shitty state of the USSR and its former satellites caught us by surprise. I vaguely remember us thinking East Germany was a far stronger entity than it actually was.

[Jacob]

I'm not American, but personally I had no real idea of how thoroughly hollow the USSR was. I think I have a much better idea about China today than I did the USSR.

[Admiral Yi]

I grew up at the time of detente, START II, the Helsinki Accords, Brezhnev.  I think most people had a decent understanding of the political workings and the geopolitics and had a general (not very finely grained) image of the incredible dreariness of life in the workers paradise.  I think we have a better understanding of life at the street and village level of China now.

[The Minsky Moment]

Funny story  - I was on a high school debate team in the 1987.  In one debate round I argued that if Gorbachev's reforms were allowed to proceed it would eventually lead to a peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union.  I lost the round, because the judge said that the scenario was inherently so implausible it couldn't be taken seriously.  (this is in the context of an activity where people regularly argued that minor changes to ERISA or farm supports would result in nuclear annihilation).

I recall that a key source material were articles in a journal called "Problems of Communism" which apparently still exists.

Not sure how this cuts in terms of answering DG's question. 

[Josquius]

To totally flip the topic on its head....
Barbie.
Random LinkedIn post from a Chinese translator (nobody I know.) I found interesting.

Barbie totally blew up on Chinese social media when it hit the big screen in China. Some of my friends who aren't that great with English told me they thought Barbie came off as kind of pretentious with this fake or pseudo-feminism vibe, just based on the subtitles.

A couple of days ago, I ran into this cool post that was comparing the official Chinese subtitles with the ones from this "wild fansub group" (野生字幕组).

I went through all the examples they gave super carefully, and wow, it turned out to be such an interesting dive!

Every single translation in Example 2 (V2) was done by an official translator from 甲骨易 (BestEasy) in Beijing. People were not only calling out the pretty messed-up translations but also the super obvious stereotypes and biases towards Barbie and all the female characters.

It kinda seemed like the translator was standing in Ken's shoes. I can't say for sure if the official translator did this on purpose (not counting those mistranslations), but it sure made a lot of female viewers feel attacked, humiliated, and just plain mad with all that gender-biased Chinese.

This might be why this fansub group took matters into their own hands and decided to re-translate the subtitles.

This fansub group is made up of some awesome female translators who mainly work on female-led movies and TV shows. They really went all out to use inclusive, unbiased, and just the right language to capture the essence of the original text in all the examples in V1. A few peeps mentioned that their V1 versions might be a tad too academic or straight-up.

The fansub group's translation is even gonna be used as a reference for this girl's grad thesis on "the subjective differences in Barbie translations by translators of different genders." And there are other folks out there working on similar thesis topics too.

Scratching further apparently this is a big thing in China. Officially sanctioned subtitles which completely miss the point, sanitise, and render shit, and then fan retranslations which get things right.

I do wonder whether its just the official people being 'wrong'. This post blaming it on their gender. Or something more nefarious and (self?-) censorship.
Fascinating and I'd love to find out more.

(alas the cool post they talk about is in Chinese so useless to me- https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E22AQGO98q4OUQ9Tg/feedshare-shrink_800/0/1698303080724?e=1701907200&v=beta&t=m8dqY4gJgbiBUGJL3eLaC9yYDXqjUQm3C7D8r1DtCD4)

[Sheilbh]

It's not about films but it reminds me a bit of a brilliant book by Megan Walsh called The Subplot which is about what China is reading but also how it is reading (and often creating) particularly digitally. FT review:

The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters
An illuminating insight into the web fiction, sci-fi and subtle dissent read by one-fifth of humanity

Isabel Hilton January 27 2022

Earlier this month, one man's story caught the imagination of millions of China's "netizens". Mr Yue is 44, a former fisherman. He had left home to look for his son, who had vanished after working in the capital as a chef. Yue left behind a paralysed father, a mother with a broken arm, a wife and child, all of whom he continued to support in a gruelling round of poorly paid shift work across Beijing. His was a schedule that barely allowed for meals, let alone sleep.

We know this because Yue's life was laid bare when he tested positive for Covid-19 and his travels around the city were tracked. He was one of the shadow army of migrant workers in China's glistening cities, whose stories are largely unheard.

Except that now, as critic Megan Walsh reveals in The Subplot, a short but illuminating exploration of the reading habits of one-fifth of humanity, the prose and poetry of migrant workers such as Yue are one of several new genres that have blossomed in China's digital spaces. The Chinese internet may be a place of unpleasantness and censorship, but it is also, as Walsh explains, a creative space that has given migrant workers an unprecedented platform, beginning with the viral success of the 2017 diary of a domestic worker, I am Fan Yusu.

There are several other literary phenomena in this fascinating account. Another is the cut-throat world of Chinese web fiction, in which novels are pushed out at punishing speed and in staggering volume on online fiction platforms, in the hope of attracting a film or TV deal. China's online reading platforms, she notes, carry some 24m fiction titles by writers who hammer out between 3,000 and 30,000 words a day. This disorderly energy apparently worries President Xi Jinping, not least because it bypasses the traditional gatekeepers of the Chinese Writers Association, who used to be able to weed out authors who might signal trouble for the Party.

There is still, of course, a more formal publishing world in which established authors try to make sense of the massive upheaval and disruptions of the past 40 years. Writers such as the 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan, best known for his 1986 debut Red Sorghum, or Yan Lianke, author of the novel Hard Like Water and the memoir Three Brothers, continue to write — if not always to be published in the People's Republic.

For many authors who must navigate the uncertainties of shifting official red lines, science fiction offers a safe haven. It is a genre in which to address the disruption and dislocations between past and present, and between official narratives and reality, and to explore otherwise dangerous themes such as social injustice.

Liu Cixin, a computer engineer and bestselling sci-fi author, locates real-world problems such as pollution and human greed on distant planets, while in the story Regenerated Bricks, Han Song describes recycling the rubble of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which contains victims' remains, into "intelligent bricks" for space colonisation, thus populating distant planets with unhappy ghosts.

It is a fair guess that most readers of The Subplot will never read the bulk of the literature Walsh describes. Yet she argues persuasively that the foreign reader who wants to understand Chinese society should explore the fictional worlds that lie beyond what she calls the "broad-brush political and economic narratives of the public domain." And for those keen to explore a bit more, Walsh has pulled together a further reading list.

The world she explores is a vigorous panorama of multiple genres that encompass the rural nostalgia of "cottagecore", espionage fiction, crime stories and fantasy martial arts heroics. Little of it — despite official exhortation — seems to sing the praises of the Party, preferring to grapple with the massive social and personal dislocations of recent times.

Despite this teeming landscape, there are, however, still missing voices: Uyghur and Tibetan writers and intellectuals have all but vanished from the public sphere — some have fallen silent, others have literally disappeared. Han authors write versions of China's "minorities" but their own stories await a future reckoning.

The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters by Megan Walsh, Columbia Global Reports $16, 136 pages

Isabel Hilton is the founder of the China Dialogue Trust

You also think of, say, Lan Yu which is an amazing gay Chinese film from a time when things were a little more open (there is no way it would be made now) based on a novel published online in the late 90s - and the huge popularity of those gay love stories in online fiction, which Xi is trying to repress. Even with the control, represssion, whipped up nationalist fury - all of which exists - on the Chinese internet it is still, I think, a place of creativity, perhaps something like resistance or counter-culture (even if just in the Havel way of writing about etc things outside the party). Especially with things like writing and I'd include unofficial translations in that because it is more difficult to control than, say, film.