Six Chapters — One Hundred and Twenty Years

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University    It is three years to the day since we inaugurated China Heritage by publishing the essay ‘A Monkey King’s Journey to the East’. In our discussion of the incoming president of the United States of America we observed that: The Chinese Communist Party under its Chairman of Everything, Xi Jinping, hasn’t had to confront such an erratic and populist leader since Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution fifty years ago.… Read

Dust and Spring in Beijing

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University   The following essay by Xu Zhangrun has been translated with the author’s permission. *** In His Dark Materials — a trilogy by the novelist Philip Pullman — the concept of ‘Dust’ or ‘Rubashov Particles’ is used to indicate consciousness and independent thought.… Read

Talking to My Mother About Hong Kong

Hong Kong Apostasy   Yangyang Cheng is a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, and a member of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Born and raised in China, Cheng gained a Bachelor degree in Science from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young and, in 2015, she completed a doctorate in Physics at the University of Chicago. … Read

Superfluous Words

Hong Kong Apostasy   The veteran journalist and commentator Lee Yee has been writing about Hong Kong’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China for over forty years. During the Hong Kong Uprising of 2019 he has expressed his views, his concerns and anguish, in the regular column that he contributes to Apple Daily, a leading independent media outlet in the city.… Read

The Best is Like Water

Hong Kong Apostasy   The exhortation ‘be water’ — that is remain fluid, flexible and fast-moving — encapsulated the approach of protesters during the Hong Kong Uprising of 2019. Although Bruce Lee (李小龍, 1940-1973), the martial arts hero of Hong Kong cinema, is quoted as the modern source of this strategy, water as symbol, metaphor and meaning has a venerable history in Chinese thought and culture.… Read

I Will Not Submit, I Will Not Be Cowed

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXXI)   On the 5th of October, Xu Zhangrun 許章潤 reprinted an essay that he had written earlier this year, on the 23rd of March, just two days after he had effectively been ‘cashiered’ by Tsinghua University, the Beijing educational institution at which he had for many years been a prominent professor of law.… Read