May 19, 2021 11 min read digest

China Analysis Digest #12

Issue: 2021/12

Neican Digest aggregates new China-related publications.

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Issue: 2021/12

Date range: May 11-18, 2021
Sources scanned: 84
Content: 206 publications from 50 sources
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Recommended readings:

5.16 — Sorry, Not Sorry (Geremie R. Barmé):
Part of a larger narrative that built on the Party’s historical vision of China that dates from the 1840s to the present day, Xi’s View of the [two] Thirty Years [of the Mao and Deng eras] was coupled with the forward trajectory of the Two Centenaries (1921-2021 and 1949-2049) that frame the New Epoch. The peerless leadership of Xi Jinping is supposed to be that of a Grand Unifier, one with a particular historical vision and mission. For the victims of the Former Thirty Years, and their descendants, such unity imposes a nearly unbearable emotional and intellectual toll.
Objective Falsehoods (David Bandurski):
For the Chinese leadership, journalistic objectivity hinges on the capacity of media to reflect the strength and legitimacy of the system as led by the Communist Party. All else is wanton bias.
Don’t Politicize the Lab-Leak Theory (David Frum):
In many ways, what is happening [the use of the lab-leak theory as a political weapon] is highly reminiscent of the anti-Communist battles of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those days, the United States faced a dangerous external challenge from Soviet Communism. Isolationist Republicans had little interest in meeting that challenge: It would cost money and implied foreign commitments. They opposed the Marshall Plan, NATO, everything that really mattered. Instead, they used the foreign threat to justify launching a purge against an enemy within: domestic ideological opponents.
The United States is today in danger of repeating that sorry history. Pro-Trumpers want to use Chinese misconduct—real and imagined—as a weapon in a culture war here at home. They are not interested in weighing the evidence.
Everything under heaven (Linda Javin):
Art, poetry and literature are densely woven into Chinese history too; they illuminate its patterns with their bright, shining threads. To fully understand the implications of a poem Mao wrote about heroism, you need to know he was riffing off an eleventh-century poem that reflected on a third-century battle which, thanks to a fourteenth-century novel, has been a big part of popular culture and political rhetoric ever since.
Much of what we know about the lives and concerns of ordinary people, meanwhile, comes from ancient folk songs, literary works and paintings. The story of the evolution of the Chinese language itself is another inextricable part of China’s story.

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