Category: Uncategorized
-
On (not) knowing politics
My father was a grassroots bureaucrat who hung out with other grassroots bureaucrats. A few years ago I attended a family banquet, as you usually would when returning home after being away for some time. There would usually be relatives who were grassroots bureaucrats. They were talking about local politics and policies at some point.…
-
Repost: Debate on the nature of Chinese society among the Chinese left
Editor note: I came across this article, first published in 2017, on the debate around that time over whether China is socialist or capitalist, and whether it’s imperialist, among the Chinese left. The author themselves argues that China is capitalist and imperialist, but they introduce and present a range of different views from academics and…
-
My mother’s ghost stories
When I began to listen carefully to my mother’s ghost stories, I found out that they were all about girls who died wronged, killed by poverty and patriarchy, and whose misfortunes cast long shadows in the hearts of the girls who survived
-
Some thoughts on Zhongyuan Mandarin
On why re-examining our “dialects” is about resisting hierarchies, opposing discrimination, and pursuing linguistic justice, rather than cultural “orthodoxy”.
-
On the ephemeral ‘digital public sphere’ and the contentification of everything
When I try to think through why Xiaohongshu as a platform has always felt weird to me, I realize that it might just be a reflection of what the internet would look like if the logic of contentification completely dominates how we interact with others and perform ourselves online. If platforms have a language, just…
-
-
Tweets on politics and the Chinese language
I doubt if I’ll have time for any ‘serious’ blogging here but for now I might use this place for organizing and recollecting some of my tweets – or, fragments of thought in the time of fragmentation. Today’s theme is politics and the Chinese language, including political “newspeak”, internet slang terms, and some other stuff.…
Chenchen Zhang 