All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
See below the full programme for the latest in the so far excellent conference series on China in Britain at the University of Westminster….I’m up with Frances Wood for a chat and very much looking forward to it…..more details and RSVP contact Anne@translatingchina.info or see the website….
Well, back in 1996 we had Japser Becker’s Hungry Ghosts about the Mao-engendered famines of the Great Leap Forward and then, more recently, Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine. Now a view from a Chinese academic (well based in HK so presumably able to say a bit more than a mainland academic), Zhou Xun’s The Great Famine in China…
Beginning soon after the implementation of the policies of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, when the drive to collectivize and industrialize undermined the livelihoods of the vast majority of peasant workers, China’s Great Famine was the worst famine in human history. In addition to claiming more than 45 million lives, it also led to the destruction of agriculture, industry, trade, and every aspect of human life, leaving large parts of the Chinese countryside scarred forever by human-created environmental disasters.
Drawing on previously closed archives that have since been made inaccessible again, Zhou Xun offers readers, for the first time in English, access to the most vital archival documentation of the famine. For some time to come this documentary history may be the only publication available that contains the most crucial primary documents concerning the fate of the Chinese peasantry between 1957 and 1962. It covers everything from collectivization and survival strategies, including cannibalism, to selective killing and mass murder.
Zhou Xun is research assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong. She lives in Hong Kong and in the United Kingdom.
As it’s Party Congress this week seems apt to note this new book on Mao – apparently the real story. Well, maybe but the general consensus of reviewers seems to be that this is a bit apologetic and skirts some of the more controversial (certainly in China anyway) aspects of Mao’s madness noted in Jung and Halliday’s early bio. blurb and covers for Mao: The Real Story as ever below:
Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot.
Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death.
Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor.
RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 13th November 2012 at 7.00pm – starts 7.30pm prompt
Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xingguo Road, Shanghai
Anne Witchard
author of Lao She in LondonÂ
the first of theÂ
RAS Shanghai’s China Monographs
Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution
Lao She remains revered as one of China great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924-1929 have largely been overlooked. Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce. Lao She arrived from his native Peking to the whirl of London’s West End scene – Bloomsburyites, Vorticists, avant-gardists of every stripe, Ezra Pound and the cabaret at the Cave of the Golden Calf. Immersed in the 1920’s West End world of risqué flappers, the tabloid sensation of England’s “most infamous Chinaman Brilliant Chang” and Anna May Wong’s scandalous film Piccadilly, simultaneously Lao She spent time in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse. Out of his experiences came his great novel of London Chinese life and tribulations – Ma & Son: Two Chinese in London. However, as Witchard reveals, Lao She’s London years affected his writing and ultimately the course of Chinese modernism in far more profound ways.
Anne Witchard is Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate Publishing, 2009), co-editor with Lawrence Phillips of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (Continuum, 2010) and editor of Chinoiserie and Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
“A beautifully written book that combines literary biography with a remarkably succinct account of British modernism and an evocative portrait of interbellum London.â€
           Julia Lovell, Birkbeck College, University of London
“Witchard’s wonderful weaving of Chinese and British intellectual lives with the horror engendered by characters such as Dr Fu Manchu is a fascinating reminder of how attitudes and prejudices needed to change.â€
           Frances Wood, Curator, Chinese Collections, British Library
“This perceptive and engaging book explores the London years and writings of one of China’s finest twentieth century novelists… fiction and essays he wrote in Britain teach us new ways to understand 1920s London, Anglo-Chinese relations, and the transnational world of modern literature.â€
           Professor Robert Bickers, Department of History, University of Bristol
RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
ENTRANCE: Â 80 (RAS members) and RMB 130 (non-members).
Includes one drink: 150ml glass of red or white wine/draft beer/soft drink/ tea or coffee.
PRIORITY BOOKING for Members until 10th November 2012.
MEMBERSHIP applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
RAS MONOGRAPHS – Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. 100 rmb each.
This picture shows the American leftist journalist Edgar Snow with Zhou En-lai and his wife – the wall behind them indicates to me that this was taken in Shanghai…
Regular readers will know that I liked Kitto’s book, China Cuckoo, on Moganshan and I know he likes to talk about the former hill resort and the old days when Shanghailanders retreated there in the hot summers….
Mark Kitto joins us to discuss his work, writing life and that Prospect article. In his 2009 memoir, China Cuckoo, Kitto details his rise to ‘mini media mogul in Shanghai, the dramatic end of that business, and then his retreat on Moganshan where he created a restored community and home. Join us to hear Kitto discuss the book and more.
The Amazon.co.uk Book Harvest of discounted titles for Kindle ends tonight (Tuesday) UK time 11:59pm – last chance to get Midnight in Peking for your e-reader at a discounted price…you have been warned!
(and if you liked and wherever you are you can vote for the book in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2012 in the biography and history category – I know there are other elections going on this week in America and a Congress in Beijing but this one’s more interesting…)
Volume 1 of Peter Cunich’s History of the University of Hong Kong is now out…it is the centenary of HKU this year….
