The Other China

禍起蕭牆

 

This is the latest in the series ‘Dasheng’s Calligraphic Comments on Current Affairs’. For a full list of these comments, see below.

***

Liu Chan 劉蟾, who also goes by the literary sobriquet Dasheng 大生, is a writer, scholar and calligrapher. Born in Shaanxi, he lives in Beijing where he edits The Chinese Study 中國書房. We have frequently featured Liu’s work in The Other China.

‘Dasheng’s Calligraphic Comments’ are an innovative use of an ancient art form. In them, Liu Chan uses quasi-poetic couplets, often parallel in structure, to encapsulate current new stories, often juxtaposing items that superficially have little in common. In the colophons that he composes — they run vertically along either side of the lines of the couplet — the calligrapher elaborates on stories that have been highlighted in poetic brevity.

Although he is still relatively young, Liu Chan often affects the style of an ‘old fogey’, a personality type that is more than familiar to China Heritage. It is a persona that allows Liu considerable latitude in commenting on, and gently satirising, the welter of current affairs in a style that gestures towards late-dynastic prose. Indeed, Liu Chan’s lapidary couplets and drole commentaries are reminiscent of literati jottings 筆記, miscellanea 掌故 and historical marginalia 稗官野史 — various forms of informal records used by later generations to help gauge the realities and absurdities of authoritarian rule.

***

China Heritage is grateful to Dasheng for sharing his recent work. An explanation of the Chinese rubric of this chapter in The Other China is provided below.

For more of Liu Chan’s recent work, see:

• Dasheng Goes West — a Scholar’s Travelogue, 14 September 2026
• Dasheng Goes West — a Scholar’s Travelogue, Part II, 20 September 2026

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
23 September 2026

---

Trump Offers a Pre-emptive Bribe
& a Disaster America Remembers

Dasheng Liu Chan 大生劉蟾

translated, with a note, by Geremie R. Barmé

On 10 September 2026, Trump Rex repeated a promise that if the Republican Party was victorious in the upcoming mid-term elections, every adult in the United States would be rewarded with a ‘Trump dividend’ of US$5000. Putting aside questions about where the money to pay for this would come from and if, when the time came, Trump kept his word, the offer was akin to a naked bribe. Regardless of this, there was no lack of support for the proposal [in the ranks of the GOP]. Curiouser and curiouser.

Prior to this, there was the 25th anniversary of September 11 2001, a terrorist act that not only failed to destabilise America, it actually hardened the nation’s resolve in dealing with its external enemies. However, [today], as I see it, the real threat to the USA isn’t found in the Middle East. Rather, as America’s founding fathers feared, it has arisen at the very heart of government [蕭牆之內].

— Dasheng Liu Chan, 12 September 2026

Note: ‘The heart of government’ is a translation of 蕭牆之內, literally ‘inside the palace walls’. The commonly used expression 禍起蕭牆 huò qǐ xiāoqiáng — ‘the menace lies within the palace’ — previously featured in a chapter Contra Trump series titled The Fourth of July 2025 & the Enemy Within. The locus classicus for the expression is found in The Analects:

Lord Ji was going to attack Zhuanyu. Ran You and Zilu came to see Confucius, and said to him: “Lord Ji is going to intervene in Zhuanyu.” … “For Lord Ji, I’m afraid, the real menace does not come from Zhuanyu, it lies within the walls of his own palace.”

季氏將伐顓臾。冉有、季路見於孔子曰：季氏將有事於顓臾。… 吾恐季孫之憂，不在顓臾，而在蕭牆之內也。

—《論語·季氏》, trans. Simon Leys

***

***

---