"On reflection, it is not at all surprising that Chinese establishment intellectuals said nothing about the 20th Party Congress, because doing anything other than repeating the Party line would be dangerous and foolhardy. In other words, they can write all they want to about how China’s rise will change world history and supplant American hegemony, but they cannot wonder out loud if the particular events occurring at the 20th Congress might not make one worry whether China’s rise to greatness is on the right path. I know beyond the shadow of the doubt that many, many Chinese intellectuals are deeply worried about China’s current trajectory, which means that their silence speaks volume."

Comment: David Ownby points out a vexing problem: there are many things Chinese intellectuals simply cannot say under the current political circumstances. How do we find out what they think short of going to China?

"Readers familiar with the history of High Maoism (c.1956-1976) will know the slogan ‘To rebel is justified’ 造反有理 zàofăn yŏu lĭ, which was paired with the line ‘revolution is legitimate’ 革命無罪 gémìng wú zuì. This was the clarion call of the Red Guards who, encouraged by the Chairman to overthrow his ideological and bureaucratic opponents wreaked havoc in 1966-1967...Many members of that generation of ‘politically awakened’ radicals would undergo a second, corrective awakening. First, in April 1976, they would rebel against the leaders of the Cultural Revolution in Tiananmen Square in April 1976 and then, in late 1978, they led the Democracy Wall Movement. That lineage of rebellion lives on in the efforts of young people...today."

Comment: Barmé's long, meandering post features a collection of sources on the theme of youth awakening and rebellion in modern Chinese history. He presents the Sitong Bridge protest as the latest manifestation of a venerable yet tragic tradition. One source that caused me some melancholy is a few passages by John Fitzgerald on Lu Xun's musing about a scene from A Doll's House, a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen published in 1879. Lu Xun problematises the very idea of "awakening" as part of the revolutionary agenda:

[John Fitzgerald:] "In his [1923] essay “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?” Lu Xun...is not content to let the question rest with a simple inquiry into Nora’s fate but raises a further question that has no place on any revolutionary agenda. If an awakening offers no “way out,” after all, of what use is awakening?

[In the words of Lu Xun:] "Since Nora has awakened it is hard for her to return to the dream world; hence all she can do is to leave. After leaving, though, she can hardly avoid going to the bad or returning. Otherwise the question arises: What has she taken away with her apart from her awakened heart?"

"America's latest efforts to block China's technological and economic development are likely to do more harm than good. The peaceful economic relationship of the past 30 years may not have been perfect, but it was certainly better than what will come from zero-sum rivalry and mutual suspicion."

"Notwithstanding the risks posed by Russian aggression, China appropriately looms largest in the Biden administration's new National Security Strategy. Yet by eschewing an assertive free-trade agenda, the United States continues to give China an advantage in precisely the area where it is ascendant."

"A clever code of rainbows and secret words that avoid online censorship is a must for talking to my LGBTQI+ activist friends in China these days. While a dictionary of this language does not exist and it is constantly changing, fluency in double-speak allows queer 酷儿 communities to communicate without directly mentioning ‘politically sensitive’ and increasingly banned phrases like ‘gender and sexual diversity’ or ‘LGBTQI’. Just like when Chinese feminists replaced the censored #MeToo hashtag with the homophonous #MiTu/米兔 which was then translated as #RiceBunny, double-speak helps LGBTQI+ people avoid direct censorship online.

LGBTQI+ communities are surviving — if not thriving — in the digital space under the current political climate. Queerness is not something that can be suppressed, including by censorship, and resistance inevitably follows control and surveillance. A practice with historical roots when sexual and gender diversity was outlawed, double-speak is an important strategy for self-preservation of LGBTQI+ individuals, and to preserve their digitally connected communities. As one of LGBTQI+ activists and advocates put it in conversation with me, ‘even if lotus seeds are dormant for a hundred years, they will bloom when the conditions improve.’"

"What we can celebrate is the fact that, by refusing to compromise on any area of Australia’s national interest, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was able to go into the meeting with his counterpart in a position of strength. Beijing has effectively accepted that its coercion of Australia has, so far, been unsuccessful. That is a significant achievement, not just for us but for all countries that were watching to see how far Beijing would go to bend another country to its will."

Comment: the idea that Australia should "refus[e] to compromise on any area of Australia’s national interest" in dealing with Beijing is unrealistic. Of course, countries give and take in their dealings with great powers; compromise is unavoidable. When Beijing refused to improve relations, the hawks accused Beijing of trying to grind Australia into submission. But when Beijing took steps to improve relations, the hawks taunted Beijing for "capitulation". One wonders, under what circumstances would these hawks reflect?

"Zhao Dingxin: The two-in-one system known as the Confucian-Legalist state has indeed been broken; more precisely, the Confucian part is largely gone, but the Legalist part remains...

the two main institutional foundations that sustained the Confucian tradition, the imperial examination system, known as the keju, and the lineage-based social organization, were destroyed during the transformation of modern China. What is more, the prolonged implementation of the one-child policy has destroyed the culture of large families, undermining a diffuse institution that once sustained Confucian values...

The continuation of Legalism in China is supported by the following institutions: A state with both the strong desire and capacity to adopt rigid control measures when dealing with social complexity, a population that readily accepts the penetration of the state into their private lives, and a culture of managerialism reinforced in child rearing and education."

"Similar to its cousins, cyberpunk, steampunk, and solarpunk, silkpunk represents a mix of two equally important elements: silk — an aesthetic style inspired by Asian-Pacific mythology, history, and culture — and a punk-like tendency to question, deconstruct, and rebel...

Silkpunk is neither about showcasing diversity and underscoring one’s “origin story,” which could quickly degenerate into an ethnocentric trap where everyone is shoehorned into their own little box of cultural representation, nor is it about appropriating the flashy elements of Asian-Pacific culture and grafting them indiscriminatingly onto fundamentally Euro- or American-centric stories. The result is neither Chinese nor Western, but a kaleidoscope of vibrant, varicolored myths: a reimagination of the past with the potential to rewrite the future of sci-fi and fantasy."

Comment: if we can accept this level of syncretism in the fiction that we read, why not then in the imagining of our identities and the visions for our communities?

"中宣部长李书磊重提“百花齐放、百家争鸣”，究竟是要“引蛇出洞”打击异议，还是释放调整信号，放松针对舆论的严控？...

事实上，李这么表述，不过是出身于学者的李同时作为主管意识形态的中共最高官员，重复中共的一贯说法而已...

可以想见李做中宣部长的难处，大概习给他的任务是划个圈，以不得攻击中共的领导社会主义制度马克思主义特别是习近平为界限，在此界限内，允许一定的学术民主艺术民主探索，思想、观点和表现形式可允许某种程度的偏离主旋律，但出了这个圈是决不允许的。当然，中共接下来的意识形态到底会更左，还是往右进行一定程度的修正，不久或许能见分晓。

Comment: This is a sensible read on the People's Daily article 《增强实现中华民族伟大复兴的精神力量》by Li Shulei, the new head of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee. Xi is unlikely to repeat a Yan'an-style rectification or repeat the Anti-Rightist Campaign for various reasons.