June 1 2024 – ChinaRhyming Substack of bits and pieces that may be of interest….

My new substack for this fortnight – From Lady Artists to Narcotopia & Plenty In-between… click here

Doing Your ‘Bohemian Duty’ in Shanghai

Reading Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel, the catty Answered Prayers…. a little reference to Shanghai showing how the Bohemian sojounrer culture of the city permeated wider society once…

Behind the Walls of Zhongnanhai – Jonathan Chatwin

Jonathan Chatwin, whose new book The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future is the latest publication in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series (out now everywhere including Bloomsbury’s site here). Jonathan just wrote an interesting piece for CNN Style on how Zhongnanhai became the secretive centre of Chinese communist power….here…

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingelson’s Made in China

HOW THE US, UK & OTHERS MADE CHINA THE WORLD’S FOREMOST TRADING POWER – Today’s contentious trading relationship between China & the West shows how times have changed, according Made in China by Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson. I spoke with Ingelson for my May China-Britain Business Council Focus magazine author Q&A – click here to read…

My Latest Long Read for the South China Morning Post – Anna Hotchkis & Mary Mulikin, two artists in interwar China

Two intrepid women artists in China, who documented country one painting at a time, almost forgotten today – They have faded from view now, but Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mullikin were intrepid artists who documented China in paintings before World War II tore them apart. Click to read here in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine….

Yao Emei’s The Unfilial – Coming this September

An early plug – pre-orders really help books – for Yao Emei’s collection of four short stories, The Unfilial, out this September from Sinoist Books (translators: Honey Watson, Martin Ward, Olivia Milburn, Will Spence). I was lucky enough to get an early copy and it’s among the best writing out of China I’ve read in the last few years.

Excerpt from Jon Chatwin’s The Southern Tour in the SCMP weekend magazine

Read the excerpt here. Buy the book here!

Chinese Workers of the World – Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway

Selda Antan’s Chinese Workers of the World (Stanford University Press)…

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China thorough examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898–1910. The Yunnan railway—a French investment in imperial China during the age of “railroad colonialism”—connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%.

Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia.

About the author

Selda Altan is Assistant Professor of History at Randolph College.