Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium 下來吧 Since Xi Jinping’s rise to paramount power in 2012-2013, the Chinese Communist Party has unabashedly declared that ‘Everything in China is under the direction of the Communist Party: party, state, army, civilian life and education, as are all points of the compass’ 黨政軍民學，東西南北中，黨是領導一切的.… Read

Seeds of Fire at Forty 蜀犬吠日   In 1996, three decades ago, I was commissioned by Wired Magazine to undertake the first survey of the Chinese internet. Celebrated at the time as ‘the Rolling Stone of technology’, Wired had just published Computer Insect, my translation of an interview that the oral historian Sang Ye 桑曄 had conducted with an outspoken young tech-head in Beijing’s Haidian District, China’s nascent ‘Silicon Valley’.… Read

The Other China 浪蕩秋風裡 為了一天三頓飯，只知埋頭把活幹。
春風吹時也瞎忙，花開花落總不見。
可憐歲月催人老，錯過美景太遺憾。
索性浪蕩秋風裡，且把黃葉當花看。 Head down and focussed on my job,
fixated on covering three meals a day.
Not a moment to enjoy the spring winds,
flowers blossom and fall sight unseen.… Read

Mythopoetic China 口服、手服、心服   China’s party-state is underpinned by a culture of submission. During the Yan’an Decade (c.1937-1948), leaders like Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, along with their loyalist theoreticians, melded abiding elements of state Confucianism, the influence of which lingered far beyond the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, with Stalinism to create a Stalino-Maoist ideology (the term ‘Leninism’ still enjoys cachet, but it’s the virulence of Stalin that cohabits with that of Mao in Xi Jinping’s China).… Read

Contra Trump   胸次之罪 For two years, we’ve been trudging through sludge, trapped in Trump’s MAGgoty reality-show rerun. We wake up every morning to the dread realization that a demented conman in a mangy rug still occupies the glitzed-up Oval Office (or as Obama put it, Saddam Hussein’s version of a Cheesecake Factory) But is the Ceausescu balcony moment drawing near on Nov 3?… Read

The Other China 秋風落黃葉，亭下喝杯茶。
世事有人管，你說我忙啥？ Golden leaves are being downed by autumn zephyrs
while I sip tea at my leisure here in this pavilion.
Let others deal with all of those mundane matters,
surely you don’t think that I should be bothered?… Read