Viral Alarm   China Heritage marked the 1st of October National Day of the Chinese People’s Republic series with a chapter in Viral Alarm: China Heritage Annual 2020 consisting of a number of poems.… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy     In Viral Alarm: China Heritage Annual 2020 we have previously remarked on the unsettling echo that can readily be detected between the xenophobic extremism of late-dynastic Qing politics and recent developments in the People’s Republic of China occasioned by the 2019-2020 coronavirus epidemic.… Read

Hong Kong Apostasy   The Cantonese expression 講耶穌 gong2 je4 sou1, literally ‘to give a sermon about Jesus’, or ‘to be preachy’, generally means to prattle, or to speak in a boring and vacuous fashion.… Read

Viral Alarm   Over the years we have all too frequently had reason to quote a famous observation by Sima Qian 司馬遷, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty: The refusal of one decent man
outweighs the acquiescence of the multitude.… Read

無辜籲天，穢德彰聞。 *** ‘Mouths Sealed Shut’ 封口 fēng kǒu
‘Speech Forbidden’ 禁言 jìn yán   As we noted in an earlier chapter of Viral Alarm: China Heritage Annual 2020: ‘Silent China and its Enemies is a topic to which we return time and again.… Read

Viral Alarm   The following poem was composed by Li Xueyuan, a calligrapher based in Wuhan, Hubei province. It started circulating online in the early hours of Saturday, the 19th of September, a week after the Beijing police had announced that Geng Xiaonan and her husband Qin Zhen had been taken into custody and were being questioned in relation to what they called ‘illegal business activities’.… Read