碎篇 // Suipian // Fragments
Welcome to the 1st edition of Suipian, my new personal newsletter in which I share thoughts and resources that help me make sense of Chinese society and its relationship to the rest of the world.
You’re receiving this because you have been subscribed to Changpian, my previous newsletter sharing Chinese nonfiction writing. Suipian, too, will share selected writing from and on China that I found worth my time, but recommendations will include more genres, including academic and policy research, and will now be in both Chinese and English (and beyond). 碎篇 is of course derived from 碎片 or ‘fragments’ but another character I kept thinking of was the 随 of 随笔, and there will be some of that too, mainly in the form of reporting notes.
To me, the shift from Changpian to Suipian reflects change in my own life (with chronic illness leading to more fragmented reading) and real shifts in the China media landscape. The small boom in nonfiction writing at Chinese domestic media has passed, and my Wechat timeline is no longer the treasure trove it was in the late 2010s. At the same time, with more Chinese writers and journalists working outside China, the amount of high-quality content on Chinese society produced in other parts of the world and in other languages is growing every day.
Also, geopolitics happened. Where in my early years as a reporter in China, I focused on telling stories that aimed to shed some light on ‘China beyond the headlines,’ that’s more difficult now that ‘China’ seems to be in all the headlines. I still try to highlight individual perspectives and diversity, but the new context of geopolitical and narrative shifts I can hardly keep up with somehow makes it very different.
Back in Beijing since January as a journalist for Dutch media, I find myself enjoying the work but in need of an outlet to process some of the changes. In a piecemeal way, I hope to do some of that here. It’s not quite what you signed up for (and there are a lot of newsletters out there these days!) so please consider if you’re still interested or want to unsubscribe. Suggestions and other feedback are, as always, very welcome too.
随笔 // Suibi // Notes
Sharing thoughts or resources related to my work as a correspondent
1. Back to reporting. When I came back to Beijing this year, it had been more than three years since I lived in China, and six years since I worked here as a journalist. Given the tightening political environment in those years, I was wondering to what extent it was still possible to interview people like I was used to. Would anyone agree to a street interview? Would spontaneous reporting trips still work out? A few months in, I find that interactions with ordinary people actually have changed the least: whether at a concert, a mountainous tourist site, on a Shanghai street or in a border town, you can find people willing to chat with a European reporter.
By contrast, planning interviews is more difficult, as people working in institutional settings such as universities or companies face more restrictions on talking to foreign media. Of course, state surveillance can also make it more difficult to engage, as I found during a recent trip to the border between China and Russia at Manzhouli, an Inner Mongolian border town, during which I was quickly followed around by plainclothes security people. That is nothing new, although stories from colleagues suggest it has become more frequent.
Even my limited reporting on that trip gave some insight into the contrast between the booming China-Russia trade that dominates headlines, and that was visible at the border in the form of hundreds of lined-up, brand-new trucks from places like Shandong and Henan, and the depressed border town, where residents felt sad and frustrated about the increase in poverty and destitution at the Russian side of their border (part of Russia’s Far East on which the war has exacted a much higher human toll than in its urban areas) which had collapsed traditional cross-border trade. These Chinese views on “the war” (and not ‘the crisis’) felt much more personal than what you hear in, say, Beijing. Glad I was able to hear them.
2. A great book. I recently reviewed the Dutch translation of novelist Shi Tiesheng’s magnum opus 虚无笔记, which had not been translated into any foreign language until Dutch literary translator Mark Leenhouts took it on. In my review (if you would like to read it but do not read Dutch, Google’s in-browser translation is mostly ok), I write about how the experimental novel from 1996, an interweaving set of love stories written as 237 notes over almost 700 pages, feels more postmodern and psychologically wrought than other great Chinese novels set in the Cultural Revolution.
I especially loved Shi’s recurring reflections on how we are shaped by the people in our lives – with our inner worlds a mix of the fallible memories of our own experiences and of our attempts to understand others’ – as well as his observing, non-judgmental, “just-right” tone, perhaps a product of his famed ability to, as a partially paralyzed individual in a society poorly equipped to deal with disability, “跳出个人的苦难看到了普遍的生命困境，由个人的残缺看到了普遍的人性的残缺”.
If the novel seems like a lot, consider [re-]reading Shi’s famous essay 我与地坛, on when he spent his days in his wheelchair in the famous park (“跟上班下班一样”) before discovering he wanted to write, or the equally moving and reflective 我二十一岁那一年 (also in excellent English translation).
点赞 // Dianzan // Likes
Recommendations in and out of the news-cycle
“From Palestine to ‘Xinjiang’”—an online teach-in with Darren Byler, organized by the 巴勒斯坦团结行动网络.
Yangyang Cheng compares recent student protests to those in China in 1989, arguing that the legacy of Tiananmen must be released “from the distortion field of Cold War politics and place it in a longer, larger history of struggle”.
An essay by veteran journalist 江雪 on how activists from different generations commemorate Tiananmen. It provides insight into the clear differences in style and priorities between these generations, on which I’m sure more will be written, but, as former TAM student leader Zhou Fengsuo concludes, “极权之下的抗争，六四依然是最大的公约数。”
Candid and moving reflections by lawyer and former journalist徐凯, who has taken on many public interest stories and legal cases while, as he writes, also struggling with professional ethics and the overlap between 公共利益 and 个人利益 . The rare Wechat 刷屏 article that stayed online. See also this podcast in which Xu elaborates on the artice in conversation with media scholar Fang Kecheng. (Includes a Shi Tiesheng reference.)
New additions to the 人社部 list of official professions, from 网络主播 to 滑雪寻救援, provide a glimpse into the times.
“54岁，做一个不扫兴的爸爸“. On 澎湃‘s 极昼工作室, a father shares his parenting philosophy, which has brought him fans: “在我女儿很小的时候，我就想明白了，我跟女儿是平等的，上一代不好的都要在我这里斩断，痛苦不能传播到下一代，我得让女儿在宽松、自由的环境下成长.”
Also by 极昼工作室, a story on the “代送阿姨” who deliver takeout in buildings the delivery drivers cannot easily enter, operating in an algorithmic grey zone.
An interview with 庄祖宜 Tzu-I Chuang Mullinax, the Taiwanese-American food blogger and wife of the (for now) last American consul in Chengdu. In her conversation with reporter Chai Jing, Chuang discusses the online violence she dealt with in 2020, when her popular social media accounts attracted months of nationalist attacks as US-China relations deteriorated. (Also, this lovely song.)
Interviews with historian Shen Zhihua and legal scholar He Weifang by SCMP-reporter Yuanyue Dang.
That’s it for now. Thanks for reading :)