Hong Kong Apostasy   In late 2017, China Heritage published ‘We Are The Wooden People’ 我們都是木頭人, an essay by Lee Yee 李怡 (see Hollow Men, Wooden People (The Best China, VI), China Heritage, Christmas Eve, 2017).… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy   This is the latest chapter in ‘Hong Kong Apostasy’, a feature of ‘The Best China’ section of China Heritage that is devoted to the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protest Movement.… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy   This is the latest chapter in ‘Hong Kong Apostasy’, a feature of ‘The Best China’ section of China Heritage that is devoted to the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protest Movement.… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy   Students of elementary Chinese are taught a simple rhyming saying: 活到老，學到老,
還有三分學不到。 The longer you live the more you learn.
Even then, you’ll never know it all.… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy   This is the latest chapter in ‘Hong Kong Apostasy’, a China Heritage series devoted to the 2019 Hong Kong Protest Movement and featured in ‘The Best China’ section of this site.… Read

The Best China   This is the latest chapter in ‘Hong Kong Apostasy’, a feature of ‘The Best China’ section of China Heritage devoted to the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protest Movement.… Read

The Best China   This is the latest chapter in ‘Hong Kong Apostasy’, a feature of ‘The Best China’ section of China Heritage devoted to the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protest Movement.… Read

The Best China   In this latest instalment in our series ‘The Best China’, we offer a meditation by the veteran journalist Lee Yee 李怡 (李秉堯) on the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement of Hong Kong.… Read

The Best China 頭條新聞：壽終正寢 ‘The Bill is Dead!’ Following the announcement of the demise of Ah Biu, Eunuch Ho-chi has invited Monk Tripitaka to the Palace. He beseeches the priest to recite sutras to ensure Dead Bill will enjoy a speedy, one-way passage to an afterlife in the Western Paradise … 太后已經宣佈阿標壽終正寢, 眼見阿標死得不明不白, 小豪子拜託唐僧要好好超渡阿標，好讓它早日登極樂 … So reads the online teaser for the 12 July 2019 episode of Headliner 頭條新聞, a satirical show produced by Radio Television Hong Kong 香港電台 that, for thirty years, has reported on, analysed and mocked the politics of the day.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXIX)   In late June 2019, as Hong Kong was rocked by demonstrators protesting en masse against an Extradition Bill proposed by Carrie Lam (Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor 林鄭月娥, 1957-), the city’s Beijing-anointed chief executive, Professor Xu Zhangrun of Tsinghua University in Beijing published two books in the territory that, as chance would have it, highlighted the widespread concerns being expressed on the streets of the former British colony.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXVIII)   For over three months, voices of protest have been raised in China and internationally in response to the persecution of Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, a professor of law at Tsinghua University in Beijing.… Read

The Best China   In this latest instalment in our series ‘The Best China’, we offer a commentary cum exhortation by the veteran journalist Lee Yee 李怡 (李秉堯) on the June-July 2019 Hong Kong Rebellion.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXVII)   Gong Renren (龔刃韌, 1954-), the author of the following essay, is a professor (retired) in the Law School of Peking University (see here for details) and the head of the Institute for Human Rights 人權研究院.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXVI)   The following speech was addressed to the graduating class of students in the College of Foreign Languages and Literature at Fudan University 復旦大學外國語言文學學院 in Shanghai on 17 June 2019.… Read

Translatio Imperii Sinici   In the speech translated below Wang Ke’er 王珂兒, a first-year student in senior high school, confronts the topic of 祖國 zǔguó, the ‘mother-/ fatherland’. The text of Wang’s speech was circulated online in October 2014, although assiduous official Net-Nazis scrubbed it from the Internet as quickly as it spread.… Read

  ‘Open Source’, a program based in Boston, MA, North America, calls itself ‘an American conversation with global attitude’. Initially a podcast it is now a weekly show on 90.9 WBUR, broadcasting on Thursday nights at 21:oo and on Sundays at 2:00 pm.… Read

*** During the early hours of the 4th of June 1989, the authorities reoccupied Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital by force of arms. As the repression of nationwide rebellion unfolded in Beijing and dozens of other cities, often with great local violence and always with punitive glee, the work of convincing the nation, including the army and the Communist Party itself, that the official account of events starting with the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi’s appeal to Deng Xiaoping to release the dissident Wei Jingsheng in February, up to and including the Beijing Massacre of 3-10 June, commenced.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXV)   Despite being under a formal interdiction that bans him from writing or publishing new work, Xu Zhangrun has taken to reworking and releasing essays on a range of topics composed before the authorities of Tsinghua University launched their ‘kangaroo investigation’ into him in late March 2019.… Read

June Fourth, 1989-2019   The following commemorative work is a revised version of ‘The Gate of Darkness’, published in China Heritage on 4 June 2017 in the series New Sinology Jottings 後漢學劄記.… Read

Translatio Imperii Sinici   In China Heritage Annual 2019, the theme of which is Translatio Imperii Sinici, we discuss aspects of the People’s Republic of China in the twenty-first century as both a nation-state 國 guó and as an all-inclusive global presence 天下 tiānxià.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXIV)   Upon taking up a position at Tsinghua College (later Tsinghua University) in 1914, the prominent thinker and political activist Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873-1929) addressed a student audience on the theme of ‘The Gentleman’.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXIII)   Gao Quanxi 高全喜, the author of the following essay of protest concerning the persecution of Xu Zhangrun 許章潤 by Tsinghua University, is a chair professor in the Koguan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 上海交通大學凱原法學院講席教授.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXII)   Since he has been subject to an ‘internal investigation’ — one that, apart from being an egregious assault on a respected scholar’s dignity, is both psychologically torturous and physically debilitating — conducted under the auspices of the ‘human resources’ department of Tsinghua University (and ‘shadowed’ by its murky overlords), Professor Xu Zhangrun is forbidden from writing for publication on mainland China.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XXI)   For some six weeks, voices of protest have been raised in China and internationally in response to the persecution of Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, a professor of law at Tsinghua University in Beijing.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XX)   The following record of the 28 April 2019 protest by Tsinghua University alumni centred at the Wang Guowei Commemorative Stele on campus was written by Yan Huai 閻淮, one of the organisers of the 31 March petition that appealed for the reinstatement of Professor Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, who had been put under investigation by the university for unspecified reasons.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XIX)   It was not until 1989 that ‘Live Not By Lies’, an essay written by the Soviet dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) in 1974, finally appeared in the Soviet media.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XVIII)   As we noted in ‘May Fourth at Ninety-nine’, published in China Heritage on 4 May 2018: The Fourth of May marks China’s annual National Youth Day 五四青年節.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XVII)   In this season of anniversaries, and as the ‘May Fourth Spirit’ of patriotism, democracy, science and student activism is claimed by Communists and independents alike, we would encourage readers to consider Homo Xinensis — ‘Xi Jinping-era Humankind’ — the most recent version of the ‘New Socialist Person’ that has been inculcated by the Communist Party since the late 1930s.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XVI)   Tsinghua University formally celebrated its 108th anniversary on the 28th of April 2019. Grand ceremonies involving prominent government officials, local and international dignitaries and hand-picked scholars and students were hosted by the Communist Party leaders of the university.… Read

Xu Zhangrun vs. Tsinghua University
Voices of Protest & Resistance (XV)   One of the themes of Tsinghua professor Xu Zhangrun’s essays on contemporary China is censorship, the multifaceted efforts of officialdom to silence any views that do not accord with the latest propaganda line.… Read