Viral Alarm   The New Yorker magazine has played a not insignificant role in my life. As my interest in traditional Chinese thought and contemporary politics burgeoned in my teenage years, my grandmother, who spent six months annually with ‘the twins’, female cousins she thought of as sisters and who lived in Forest Hills in Queens, introduced me to the cartoons that were, and remain, a feature of that weekly magazine.… Read

The Best China   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

Hong Kong Apostasy   International commentators, analysts, political scientists and students of contemporary China would be well advised to add the phrase ‘Legalistic-Fascist-Stalinism’ 法日斯 Fǎ-Rì-Sī to their everyday lexicons. Professor Xu Zhangrun 許章潤, the outspoken Beijing-based critic of Xi Jinping’s China, created the expression some years ago to describe China today, a country ruled by a form of social control that, as he put it, is ‘cobbled together from strains of traditional harsh Chinese Legalist thought [法 Fǎ; that is, 中式法家思想] wedded to an admix of the Leninist-Stalinist interpretation of Marxism [斯 Sī; 斯大林主義] along with the “Germano-Aryan” form of fascism [日 Rì; 日耳曼法西斯主義].’… Read