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

Viral Alarm   Professor Xu Zhangrun was detained by police at his apartment in the western suburbs of Beijing on the 6th of July 2020. Accused of having solicited a prostitute during a trip to Sichuan in November 2019, Xu was questioned for six days before being released without charge.… Read

Viral Alarm *** *** In the editorial introduction to ‘Geng Xiaonan, a “Chinese Decembrist”, and Professor Xu Zhangrun’, (China Heritage, 10 September 2020) we quoted Jerome A. Cohen, Faculty Director Emeritus of New York University’s U.S.-Asia… Read