You Want It Darker — Farewell 2023, Roll in 2024

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix LVIII 蠅營狗苟   In 2024 it will be a hundred years since Lu Xun published ‘The Shadow’s Farewell’ 影的告別, a darkly mesmeric prose-poem about the dilemmas of the age.… Read

Drongos and D-words

Watching China Watching   Watching China Watching, a series launched by China Heritage in January 2018, offers essays and reflections on studying the Chinese world and approaches to understanding the Chinese People’s Republic.… Read

Footnoting moonlight — Qiao Ji on himself

The Tower of Reading   ‘No one understands me!’ 莫我知也夫。 Confucius’s famous — and, truth be told, somewhat smug — lament is recorded in The Analects, the influential collection of observations, brief statements, short dialogues and anecdotes attributed to him.… Read

Other People’s Thoughts XL

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

Jimmy Lai’s Hong Kong Purgatory, Christmas 2023

Hong Kong Apostasy 香江煉獄 On Monday 18 December 2023, Jimmy Lai (Lai Chee-ying 黎智英, 1947-), a former pro-democracy media tycoon went on trial under a Beijing-imposed national security law. Lai has been in custody since December 2020 and, on 8 December, he had turned seventy six.… Read