Aakash Hassan Indian people living near the country’s disputed Himalayan border with China have accused their government of giving away swathes of land after both sides agreed to withdraw troops from some contested areas and create buffer zones. Earlier this month, Indian and Chinese troops, who have been locked in a tense border dispute since June 2020,… Read More Indian government accused of ceding land in Himalayas to China
First posted November 27, 2014 NB: Here’s the greatest (my humble opinion) short story of the 20th century. Not that I’ve read many. DS From Simon Ley’s translation of The Analects of Confucius; Introduction: Lu Xun (who is rightly considered as the greatest writer of modern China; he died in 1936, and – by the… Read More The True Story of Ah-Q – By Lu Xun
First posted July 13, 2017 NB: The Chinese Communist Party should hang its head in shame at this brutal judicial murder of one of China’s gentlest and kindest souls, whose only crime was that he wanted freedom and democracy for the Chinese people and had the temerity to demand a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. In… Read More Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) Dead At 61, After Years Of Imprisonment. ‘Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals’
Helen Davidson Chinese censors have reportedly been ordered to flood social media with innocuous posts about Xinjiang to drown out mounting complaints of food and medication shortages in a region under lockdown for more than a month. The Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture, also known as Yili, is home to about 4.5 million people, and is believed to… Read More Xinjiang lockdown: Chinese censors drown out posts about food and medicine shortages
First posted May 8, 2018 NB: This is a longer version of my review of this book which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Biblio. DS The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 By Frank Dikötter; Bloomsbury Press, 2016 The GPCR was yet another example of the totalitarian impulse, the open secret that motivates all… Read More Book review: The State as Faction: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity. Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour… Read More China’s treatment of Uyghurs may be crime against humanity, says UN human rights chief
First posted August 4, 2018 In 1996, Professor Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) presented the ABC Boyer Lectures. Subsequently published under the title The View from the Bridge the lectures were serialised in four parts in China Heritage Quarterly with the permission of the author. The first lecture was called Learning (some introductory paragraphs are given below; but the link will… Read More Simon Leys: The View from the Bridge. His lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home (1996)
History might have been very different if the original leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had not been decimated by Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror of 1927, or expelled by their own comrades in subsequent party purges. They were civilised and sophisticated urban intellectuals, upholding humanistic values, with cosmopolitan and open minds, attuned to the modern… Read More Simon Leys: The art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page. Book review
In 1999, the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser came across Wang Lixiong’s book “Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet.” On finishing it, she sent Mr. Wang photographs taken by her father, who was with the People’s Liberation Army when it entered Tibet in the 1950s and documented the early years of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa in the 1960s.… Read More The Cultural Revolution in Tibet: A Photographic Record. By LUO SILING
The Three Questions, by Leo Tolstoy It once occurred to a certain king that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would… Read More Leo Tolstoy: The Three Questions (1885) / Lu Xun: Waiting for a Genius (1924)
After the truth-shower 