Publisher of Book Critical of China’s Leader Is Arrested
Yiu Mantin, a retired engineer from Hong Kong, had plans to distribute a withering denunciation of Xi Jinping.
A Chinese Filmmaker Points His Camera at the Darkest Moments in Communist Party History
Hu's films are tolerated by the Chinese government and have been screened at independant film festivals in China.
China Teams Up with Hollywood for Terracotta Army Superhero Movie
"Super Terracotta Warriors" is China's response to the recent slew of Hollywood films based on comic books.
Chinese Novelist Guo to Jonathan Franzen: American Lit. ‘Massively Overrated’
“The worst way to be universal is to try to be universal,” Franzen said in response.
Spring Festival Gala Performance by Chinese Rock Icon in Doubt
The popularity and pizzazz of China's “Godfather of Rock” is not worth the political risk for CCTV.
In Rare Video, Wife of Jailed Nobel Laureate Reads Poems While Under House Arrest
The video was filmed by the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a free-speech advocacy group established by Ms. Liu.
Found in Translation: King’s ‘Dream’ Plays in Beijing
The CCP emphasizes American history of inequality while leaving out points of domestic overlap.
The People's Republic of Television Portraits from 1980's China
“Soon, photographs of people and their televisions began appearing around China.”
C. T. Hsia, Who Brought Chinese Literature to the West, Dies at 92
Hsia argued that Chinese writers suffered from an "obsession with China."
Why are China and Japan Accusing Each Other of Being Voldemort?
Ill-tempered media exchanges between the Chinese and Japanese ambassadors to London invoked the universal cultural icon to embellish attacks over islands in the Asia-Pacific.
A New Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum Puts a Modern Face on Chinese Art
The art world has embraced the evolution of Western art, but when it comes to China, we seem stuck in the past. A new exhibit at the Met wants to shake up these stereotypes.
The Curious, and Continuing, Appeal of Mark Twain in China
Mark Twain’s “Running for Governor” was taught alongside the writings by Mao Zedong and other prominent Chinese thinkers and literary figures in middle schools across China for more than 40 years.
The Critics Choose Their Oscar Nominees
Two of three New York Times film critics would nominate “Touch of Sin” for Best Picture and Jia Zhangke for Best Director in this year’s Oscars.
Gay Love Theory as Fans Relish Sherlock in China
"Curly Fu" and "Peanut" are the names given by Chinese fans to Sherlock and his sidekick, Dr Watson, men who many Chinese fans like to think of as being in love.
Q. & A.: David Der-wei Wang on C.T. Hsia, Chinese Literary Critic
C.T. Hsia, the Chinese literary critic who died in New York on Dec. 29, aged 92, had a “legendary career” as “a true cosmopolitan, shrewd, critical and brilliant,” says David Der-wei Wang, Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, in...
Media
01.03.14
Coming to Chinese Headlines in 2014
Chinese people have spent another year breathing dirty air,...
China of My Mind
When I tell people that I have recently published a novel set in China, one of the first questions they ask is whether I’ve been there. My response seems to be a letdown.
Books
12.30.13
Every Rock a Universe
The Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) of China’s Anhui Province have been famous for centuries as a place of scenic beauty and inspiration, and remain a hugely popular tourist destination today. A “golden age” of Yellow Mountains travel came in the seventeenth century, when they became a refuge for loyalists protesting the new Qing Dynasty, among them poet and artist Wang Hongdu (1646–1721/1722), who dedicated himself to traveling to each and every peak and site and recording his impressions.
How Andy Warhol Explains China’s Attitudes Toward Mao
The sheer number of Warhol’s screen prints of Mao’s face—at once persistent and reinvented—that captures, with unusual clarity, the attitude of China’s leaders today toward Mao, coloring and recoloring this legacy within an enduring outline....
Sinica Podcast
12.27.13
Sinica Goes to the Movies
from Sinica PodcastAs much as expats in China like to complain about the state of Chinese film and television, this week Kaiser and Jeremy remind us that there is a lot of great art out there, too, in a show that asks the critical question of: what is worth our...
Culture
12.19.13
Chinese Literature Online
In July of last year, Brixton, U.K.-based novelist Zelda Rhiando won the inaugural Kidwell-e Ebook Award. The award was billed as “the...
Landmark Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art Opens at Metropolitan Museum of Art
A major loan exhibition of contemporary Chinese art presenting works by 35 artists born in China is now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including 70 works in various media from the past three decades, from artists such as Xu Bing,...
Sinica Podcast
12.13.13
From the Underground to the Internet—Contemporary Art in China
from Sinica PodcastIn the late 1990s, the visual arts in China operated on the fringes of society, and those who dared to flirt with public prominence risked finding themselves on the disapproving end of a government clampdown. And yet how different things seem...
A Homecoming
Shot in big cities and small towns across China in recent years, Shen Wei’s photographic project “Chinese Sentiment” is a personal journey to recapture bygone Chinese life in both private and public space. Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei...
Hong Kong’s Gilded Cage Unfolds in ‘Bends’
Flora Lau’s new movie began, as all her film projects do, with the director grabbing a handheld camera and wandering the streets of Hong Kong for inspiration.
Unhinged in China
“A Touch of Sin” is made up of four interlocking stories that are meant to encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what director Jia Zhangke sees as the epidemic of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life.
The Challenges of Conveying Absurd Reality: An Interview with Yu Hua
Thus, Los Angeles Review of Books Asia Co-editor Megan Shank and Yu exchanged Chinese-language e-mails about history’s most over- and underrated Chinese writers, the evolution of an ancient language and why Yu will never read Anna Karenina ...
Small Part, Big Screen
Every morning outside the imposing gate of the Beijing Film Studio, a throng gathers to try to find a way inside. These aren’t fans, exactly. Look at their faces, the practiced way they crane their necks or square their shoulders when the man...
Sinica Podcast
10.29.13
Chinese Literature in Translation
from Sinica PodcastThis week, Sinica is delighted to be joined by Linda Jaivin and Alice Liu for a discussion on Chinese literature in translation. As many listeners will know, Linda is a long-standing force in the Chinese literary community and the author of many...
Hollywood Must Think Bigger About China
In the period from January to June, domestic films in China outperformed imported ones by 65 percent. That was a major reversal from the same period last year, when proceeds from imported films almost doubled those of domestic productions...
To Live and Die in Ordos
This film is a character study of a socially responsible cop in a get-rich-quick modern bordertown whose life conveniently sums up the social and ethical tensions through which the whole country has been going during the past decade or so...
Line by Line, the Artist Luo Ying Alters Chinese Tradition
Luo upturns centuries of tradition and offers a daring rethink of the meaning of traditional Chinese painting which has struggled for the past century with how to re-invent itself amid a haunting sense of being out of step with the modern...
The NYRB China Archive
10.25.13
Unhinged in China
from New York Review of BooksIn one of the central scenes in Jia Zhangke’s new film, a young man working in the southern Chinese manufacturing city of Dongguan goes to an ATM and finds that he’s broke. He’s just spent the past month betraying his friends and hopping from job...
The NYRB China Archive
10.24.13
China: “Capitulate or Things Will Get Worse”
from New York Review of BooksThe massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal...
China Box Office Worth $5 Billion to Film Studios by 2017
BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research estimates the Chinese box office could yield $5 billion in value potential for Hollywood studios by 2017 including imported and local productions (with this figure potentially doubling under further...
Propaganda Artists From North Korea Paint a Rose-Tinted China
Thrusting China's contemporary icons into the aesthetic landscape of early Communist propaganda provides a striking image of quite how far the country has come since Deng Xiaoping began his policy of Reform and Opening in 1978....
A Novel About A Dystopian Future China Wins the Chinese Nebula Awards
‘The Waste Tide’ by Chen Qiufan is the winner of the Best Novel category in this year's China's Xingyun (Nebula) Awards. It’s hard to imagine the novel, which paints a pessimistic, dark view of a corrupt near-future China, even being...
A Muzzled Chinese Artwork, Absent but Speaking Volumes
Exiled sculptor Wang Keping’s controversial piece “Silence” — a wooden head with a plug stuffing its gaping mouth — has not been allowed in China since it was shown in 1979 and 1980, but the artist is now showing newer art in Beijing. ...
Back to 1942 Represents China at Oscars
China has chosen Feng Xiaogang’s Back to 1942 as its representative at the Academy Awards. The choice was revealed on the Academy’s full list of submissions for the Best Foreign Film award.
‘A Touch of Sin,’ Four Tales from China by Jia Zhangke
A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, “A Touch of Sin” is at once monumental and human scale. A story of lives rocked by violence, it has the urgency of a screaming headline but one inscribed with emotional...
Love of Sun
“Love of Sun” is an invitation to join an exploratory conversation that investigates systems of influence between two world leaders in contemporary culture: California and China.
Will Wanda Buy Its Way Into Hollywood?
Chinese companies have an unfortunate habit of announcing deals before they are signed, or even agreed on, but Wang’s past dealings and current success give him the credibility that some other wannabe film moguls do not have....
Zhang Huan’s Colorful Skull Paintings at the Pace Gallery
“Unlike Western masters, who will stick with one style their entire life until they reach maturity, I am in a constant state of transformation,” said Mr. Zhang, whose new oil paintings, which modeled after Tibetan masks, are a stark...
China’s Wanda Unveils $8.2 Billion Movie Fund
Wanda’s huge investment plan is an attempt to turn China’s movie industry into the world’s biggest within 5 years, and includes the Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis which contains a 10,000-square-meter film studio, 19 smaller facilities...
Media
10.02.13
ChinaFile Presents: Jia Zhangke on “A Touch of Sin”
On September 30 at Asia Society in New York City, film director and screenwriter Jia Zhangke and his wife, muse, and frequent leading lady on screen...
In China, Rural Elderly Are Being Left Behind (Slideshow)
Tens of millions older Chinese are struggling with poverty and loneliness as their children flee villages for cities. Decades of societal turmoil — radical communism followed by rampant capitalism — have frayed the ties that once bound the...
U.S.-China Film Summit Set to Expand
A step up from last year’s edition, the conference will expand to become an all-day seminar series on November 5, 2013 and will relocate to the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. Li Bingbing and Chris Dodd will receive their awards at a gala dinner...
Christopher Dodd, Li Bingbing to Be Honored at U.S.-China Film Summit
As Hollywood and the booming Chinese film business have worked with increasing urgency to forge deeper ties and more mutual understanding over recent years, the Asia Society’s annual summit has emerged as a noteworthy networking occasion on...
Conversation
09.27.13
Can China’s Leading Indie Film Director Cross Over in America?
Jonathan Landreth:
Chinese writer and director Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin won the prize for the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Though the dialogue and its fine translation and English subtitles by...
China’s Dalian Wanda Group Gives $20 Million to Academy Museum
The gift, the second-largest commitment received to date, was made as part of the Academy Museum’s $300 million campaign. The Academy will name the museum’s film history gallery The Wanda Gallery.
