I don’t often enter the Maoist world but Vanessa Hua’s novel Forbidden City looks interesting covering Mao, his young women and the secret life inside Zhongnanhai…won’t win many friends among the super-Nationalists and neo-Maoists but…
On the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman’s opulent residence–a forbidden city unto itself–that she learns that the girls’ job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman.
Mei gradually separates herself from the other recruits to become the Chairman’s confidante–and paramour. While he fends off political rivals, Mei faces down schemers from the dance troupe who will stop at nothing to take her place and the Chairman’s imperious wife, who has secret plans of her own.
When the Chairman finally gives Mei a political mission, she seizes it with fervor, but the brutality of this latest stage of the revolution makes her begin to doubt all the certainties she has held so dear.
This new book from Patrick Chiu (below) caught my eye as it has a famous photo of MacTavish & Lehmann’s major Shanghai store on the cover. MacTavish & Lehmann were early to the Settlement with a store at #1 Bund before moving to a larger location (pictured below) at the junction of Broadway (Daming Lu) and Soochow Road North (Suzhou Bei Lu), often referred to as Hongkew Medical Hall (and roughly where the Boradway Mansions building stands today). A chemists, parfumerie, medical instruments store and a photography studio all in one building including a dark room for the use of amateur photographers. In the photo below blown up you can also see the Tramways Offices by The Eastern Produce and Jewellery Co. To the right of the Medical Hall, are two shops, Havana Cigar Depot and Broadway Drapery & Outfitting Stores.
For the first time since Mao, a Chinese leader may serve a life-time tenure. Xi Jinping may well replicate Mao’s successful strategy to maintain power. If so, what are the institutional and policy implications for China? Victor C. Shih investigates how leaders of one-party autocracies seek to dominate the elite and achieve true dictatorship, governing without fear of internal challenge or resistance to major policy changes. Through an in-depth look of late-Mao politics informed by thousands of historical documents and data analysis, Coalitions of the Weak uncovers Mao’s strategy of replacing seasoned, densely networked senior officials with either politically tainted or inexperienced officials. The book further documents how a decentralized version of this strategy led to two generations of weak leadership in the Chinese Communist Party, creating the conditions for Xi’s rapid consolidation of power after 2012.
In the spring of 1918 a pneumonic plague epidemic swept through nothern China and close to Peking. Few cases were reported in the city itself though new arrivals from the countryside were eyed warily and the Legation Quarter prepared to slam shut its gates in a quarantine from the rest of the city. Quarantine and disinfection camps were established city-wide and railway stations temporarily closed to limit spread. Still there were some cases. Controls on foreigners were considerably less than on Chinese peasants arriving in the city and so three Russian travelers who lodged at the Hotel des Wagons-Lits in the Legation Quarter without inspection died. Alexis Leger (also known as the poet Saint-John Perse) was a secretary at the French Legation at the time and wrote:
‘As a matter of fact, this pulmonary plague, which is the most serious (he reports that the recovery was so low that some men sat with loaded revolvers ready to kill themselves if infected and avoid the horrors of the disease), is also the easiest to avoid individually. B y simply wearing a mask you can avoid catching it even in a particularly infected area. Real danger exists only for the teeming masses plodding along the roads.’April 9, 1918, Peking…
And here is a Japanese soldier on duty at the Japanese Legation in Peking wearing a mask…
Just noticed that the new UK Paperback edition from Granta of Emma Larkin’s Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok uses a quote from my South China Morning Post review (here) on the back cover…
Looking back at Shanghai’s history we mostly all remember Longhua (Lunghwa) Airfield (and the adjacent Civilian Internment Camp) to the south, Hongqiao (Hungjao) Aerodrome to the west, Jiangwan Airfield to the northeast, and the far flung Pudong much later. But rarely do people remember Dachang Airfield to the northwest around Baoshan (Paoshan). For a long time the airfield remained and was used occasionally as an emergency runway, a test runway and by the air force. As the Baoshan/Zhabei area rose up as a nest of hi-rises the airfield remained controlled by the airforce, annoying both the local politicians who wanted the land to build on (and so enrich thesmelves and their property developer cronies, such is the basic land/profit/Party nexus of Shanghai, and locals occasionally woken by randomly landing and taking off planes.
Of course visits to Shanghai are a bit tricky at the moment so I when i was looking at a 1985 guide to Shanghai the other day i wondered if Dachang has survived or been swallowed up with more Ballardian hi-rises? Anyone who knows please do drop me a line…
I’ve been working on scripts, longreads & audio projects for a while. But now it’s time to get back to books. Been wanting to do the little known story of Wallis Simpson’s ‘Lotus Year’ in China (1924/25) for ages & now it’s happening thanks to Aitken Alexander Associates & St Martins Press…From Publishers Marketplace…
Stefano Evangelista’s Literary Cosmopolitanism in the EnglishFin de Sièclelooks interesting and, for those with Asian-related interests, has a good chapter on Lafcadio Hearn. Of course it was the cover image that caught my eye – Japonisme…In this case the Norwegian painter Oda Krohg’s (1860-1935) A Japanese Lantern (1886) held by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.
The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism—or world citizenship—informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging.
Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.
