2021 Archives

Beijing, 1st July 2021 — ‘It was a sunny day and the trees were green…’

Spectres & Souls In 1949, in one of his first acts as the mayor of a ‘liberated Beijing’, PLA General Nie Rongzhen (聶榮臻, 1899-1992) approved the establishment of two new territorial ‘exclaves’ of the city.… Read

Apple Daily, ‘The Four Noes’ & the End of Chinese Media Independence

Hong Kong Apostasy This is the second part of an envoi written for Apple Daily, until this day, 24 April 2021, the leading independent media outlet in Hong Kong, by Lee Yee, a renowned essayist, editor and journalist.… Read

Lee Yee on the Demise of Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily

Hong Kong Apostasy ‘Apple Daily said on Wednesday that it was closing less than a week after the police froze its accounts, raided its offices and arrested top editors, as the government’s escalating campaign against dissent takes aim at the city’s once vaunted media freedoms.… Read

Other People’s Thoughts, XXIV

Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.… Read

A Love Letter to a Lost Hong Kong

Hong Kong Apostasy This is the latest chapter in an account of the former British colony, now a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. It consists of three excerpts from For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege, a book by Hana Meihan Davis published by Global Dispatches.… Read

Xi Jinping’s China & Stalin’s Artificial Dialectic

Spectres & Souls The following is part of a series focussed on China’s long century of revolution, starting with the Wuchang Uprising in 1911 and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.… Read