China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.
In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems-the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea-were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago-but continues to motivate and direct policy today.
I’ll be talking old Shanghai with James Carter (author of Champions Day) and Tina Kanagaratnam of Historic Shanghai this Thursday. It’s all online so you can watch from anywhere and there’s a great online bookstore too, courtesy of Bookazine. More details here.
Hong Kong folk – Monday morning 9/11/20 my first story of the day for RTHK3’s Morning Brew this Hong Kong Lit Fest month is the tale of Bobby Broadhurst, 1920s old Shanghai nightclub dancer turned teacher, artist, couturier & fabric designer. She was key to why and how Shanghai swung in the late twenties….11.40am RTHK3. There’ll be a different excerpted chapter from my book Destination Shanghai every day this week on RTHK3 between 11am and noon.
Another great study of Hong Kong from Patricia O’Sullivan and Blacksmith Books…
Kwan Lai-chun was sick of being made to feel second-class by her husband’s concubine; sick of her mother-in-law’s endless carping about the money she spent; sick of the whole family really. Late one sticky, humid night something snapped in her – and she grabbed the meat chopper. Within minutes, three people were dead: the concubine with over 70 gashes, many of them to the bone.Kwan was found guilty and became the second and last woman in Hong Kong to suffer the death penalty. But behind her story, and those of the city’s other female murderers, lie complex webs of relationships and jealousies, poverty and despair. Taking the first 100 years of Hong Kong’s colonial history, this book unravels the lives of women – Chinese and Westerners alike – who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Hong Kong’s female prison population was a tiny fraction of that in America, but there are still plenty of tales from its women kidnappers, fraudsters, bomb-makers, thieves and cruel mistresses.
The 20th edition of Hong Kong International Literary Festival has kicked off, and from today until November 15 will presents 76 live and online events featuring over 150 writers and speakers from around the world.
Big names include Paul French, Kevin Kwan, Shannon Lee, Colum McCann, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sebastian Barry, David Frum, Chan Koonchung, Chan Ho-Kei, Christina Lamb, William Dalrymple, Marilyn Chin and Mary Jean Chan. You can find the full writer and speaker list right here.
A Festival Pass with access to 52 online events is HK$500 (or HK$350 for students) and will include talks, readings, panel discussions and more. With a flexible format, timing and pricing, this year’s festival offers something for everyone, and is a great chance to hear world-famous authors and discover emerging voices. Events will be in English, Cantonese or Mandarin.
Tim Harper’s Underground Asia is a great history of Asia’s spies and revolutionaries…
The end of Europe’s empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare. In Tim Harper’s remarkable new book the narrative is very different: it shows how empires were fundamentally undermined from below. Using the new technology of cheap printing presses, global travel and the widespread use of French and English, young radicals from across Asia were able to communicate in ways simply not available before. These clandestine networks stretched to the heart of the imperial metropolises: to London, to Paris, to the Americas, but also increasingly to Moscow.
They created a secret global network which was for decades engaged in bitter fighting with imperial police forces. They gathered in the great hubs of Asia – Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong – and plotted with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism, the end of the colonial regimes. Many were caught and killed or imprisoned, but others would go on to rule their newly independent countries.
Drawing on an amazing array of new sources, Underground Asia turns upside-down our understanding of twentieth-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, assassinations and conspiracies, as young Asians made their own plans for their future.
A long form piece by me in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on those Russian emigre dancers, choerographers and ballet teachers who came to Shanghai, launched a craze for ballet, and taught a new generation of Shanghailander and Shanghainese ballerinas to dance that created ripples throughout the global ballet world….
