Among the many praises for the documentary American Factory, the filmmakers’ non-judgmental way of storytelling is a major point. Their determination not to villainise any individual indeed conveys a commendable commitment to humanity—in an age of polarisation when people are used to pointing fingers at others, this film is refreshing. This was supposedly also why […]
On 29 September, amid global anti-totalitarianism protests (Cheng 2019), pro-Hong Kong activists in Boston called for the disruption of the city’s annual People’s Republic of China (PRC) flag-raising ceremony. Anticipating conflict, the Boston police put up street barricades, separating the crowd into two groups. On the inside were elderly Chinese residents from Boston’s Chinatown and […]
Australian nationalist discourse rarely acknowledges the existence of Chinese international students except within ethnicised stereotypes—variously, as ‘cash cows’, ‘CCP spies’, and ‘patriotic students brainwashed from birth’ (Four Corners 2019; Hamilton 2018, 4). Daphne Zhao—a pseudonymous Australian-based Chinese graduate student—offers a welcome break from this increasingly paranoid oversimplification in her recent op-ed in this issue of […]
When the mass protests against the extradition bill first broke out in Hong Kong in late March, I was not particularly surprised by this new wave of mobilisation. After all, having lived in Hong Kong for a few years I had already witnessed numerous protests that had drawn global attention to the Asian financial centre, […]
Born and bred in Hong Kong, I normally pay a visit a couple of times every year to see relations and friends. The last visit, during July 2019, was to a city in turmoil. Many Hongkongers had been taking to the streets weekend after weekend, and then daily, for well over a month. It was […]
On 21 July, Hong Kong had a hair-raising night. In Central, where the city’s business district is located, riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of protesters gathered for the anti-extradition bill march organised by the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of pro-democracy activists. At around 11pm at the Yuen Long […]
‘Speak this clearly: the development goal for Chinese society is a Marxist social community; it is not a Western civil society of state-society opposition.’ This comes from a recent article originally published on the public WeChat account of a central academy (CPPCC Daily 2019). The academy is charged with training people from the ‘democratic parties’, […]
Recent weeks have seen the reemergence of an extraordinary protest movement in Hong Kong. Perhaps one million of the city’s seven million people turned out on 9 June to demand the withdrawal of an extradition bill put forward by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam that would have left people in Hong Kong vulnerable to […]
What would happen if Xi Jinping suddenly died, killed by assassination or incurable illness? Would such an unexpected departure of the paramount leader paralyse the government and release the suppressed chaotic energy in the upper echelons of the Party leadership, with all those vying for such an opportunity racing to fill the power vacuum and […]
In March 2019, graduate students at Peking University (Beida) were given a survey on ‘the conditions of the development of university students’ (Park 2019). One of the questions addressed the one-hundredth anniversary of the first student demonstration in Chinese history, when students marched in the streets of Beijing to protest the terms of the Versailles […]
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