Hong Kong Apostasy The noted Hong Kong writer Ni Kuang passed away on 3 July 2022, two days after Beijing and its Hong Kong avatars had anemically celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of regime change in the territory.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XII 治 On 1 July 2017, China Heritage marked the twentieth anniversary of mainland China extending suzerainty over Hong Kong with a series of translations, commentaries and art works.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XI 屈 On 30 May 2017, China Heritage published ‘The Double Fifth and the Archpoet’, a commemoration of the annual Chinese lunar Double Fifth Festival 端五節 and a celebration of dissent, both past and present.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix X 敘 ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ This is the famous opening line of Joan Didion’s 1979 The White Album, a series of autobiographical essays about the 1960s.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix IX 蛻 During my first trip to New York in the northern autumn of 1986, my then-partner Linda Jaivin and I picked up a copy of Hans Askenasy’s Are We All Nazis? … Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Chapter I 比 Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers… — from ‘V.… Read