Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. And we’re coming to you from the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

LOUISA LIM  00:33

In one of our very first episodes, we devoted the whole show to the fate of the humble sea cucumber, which is being harvested out of existence to meet the demands of the growing Chinese market. This month, we’re visiting another of these boom-and-bust stories, this time, the Cocaine Of The Seas. That’s the nickname of fish maw, the swim bladder of fish, which is a culinary delicacy in Asia and particularly in China. It sprang back into the public consciousness a couple of years ago after an appearance in Bling Empire, the reality soap opera about rich Chinese, when it featured a couple of the characters in a store looking at shark’s fin and coming across fish maw.

Clip  01:23

This is like a fish maw? 15,000 what? 15,000 that’s like yen or something? Who would buy that? You’d have to be an idiot. Wait, do you buy that?

Graeme Smith  01:37

Our guest today is also a repeat offender, Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the Melbourne University Center for Advancing Journalism, a colleague of Louisa’s. Welcome back to the program Jo!

Jo Chandler  01:48

Thanks Graeme, thanks Louisa.

LOUISA LIM  01:50

So Jo, let’s talk about the genesis of this story, which you just kind of chanced upon when you were on a reporting trip to Papua, New Guinea. Tell us how you stumbled on the story.

Jo Chandler  02:02

I was preparing to do some field work in Papua New Guinea in 2022 and I had a commission from The Monthly to do a long form piece about climate impacts that were playing out in Papua New Guinea right now. So, I put out feelers over a few months to my networks: conservation people in Papua New Guinea, because I’ve been up and down from PNG for about 15 years, I’ve got quite a good network. And I was put in touch with this woman called Yolarnie Amepou, who is a zoologist who works down in the Kikori delta, which is a really remote part of Papua New Guinea on the southern coast. And I had heard that initially, my contact with Yolarnie was around the fact that in the Delta communities that she works in, sea level is coming up really fast. And several of those communities, in particular, one called Veraibari, which sits right down on the mouth of the Gulf of Papua and the Kikori Delta. And it was, you know, sort of sinking fast. This community had lost a lot of houses. It was losing, it had lost its schoolhouse, and it was preparing to move the entire village, about 200 households, and all of its community infrastructure, churches and marketplace, move it all further inland, a couple of 100 meters inland. So, it was the climate change story that I was going to look at in Kikori with Yolarnie, and so I rode along with her in a little small boat over in the rain and the humidity down deep into the Kikori delta. And that’s when we accidentally, I guess I came across this other story, which is that this community piled high on this vanishing beach, where the sea level is, you know, pushing up high, and there are drowned palm trees, sort of, you can see them just sort of surfaced along the shoreline are these piles and piles of gill nets, commercial gill nets.

LOUISA LIM  04:06

So that’s just a gill net, is just a fishing net?

Jo Chandler  04:08

Gill net are these, you know, big, long fishing nets, yeah. And they’re calibrated according to the sort of the gills to catch the gills of the fish that you’re after. So, if you’re after little fish, you’d have little holes in your gill net. And if you’re after big fish, you have bigger holes in your gill net. And until about 10, 15 years ago, maybe there would have been a few homemade gill nets being used by the local fisher people in this community. Mostly, they were still fishing using long lines and in canoes, but now they were in tin boats with dinghies with powered motors and with no shortage of fuel to run them. This is really unusual in a remote rural community, and basically they’re in the grip of what Yolarnie describes as a fisheries gold rush. And all of this bonanza of money has come into this community from the fishing of fish maw, maw? Fish maw? Fish maw? I will take advice on the best way to say it. But this bonanza, this windfall, is now being used by this community to fund its move inland away from rising seas. So it’s this kind of crazy powerful intersection of different issues, and made even more interesting by the fact that along the Kikori Delta, and not very far from these villages, are the big pipelines that bring gas and oil down from the highlands and then into the Gulf of Papua, where it is either piped or shipped off to the wider world, bringing sort of, you know, comfort and money to communities far away. And all this community really are getting back from that are the rising sea levels, and now they’re having to find the money to move away from those. And fish maw, fish bladder has become their lifeline, and they are aware that it’s precarious, and they know it won’t last, and they’re really concerned about what will happen longer term. One of the village leaders who is in Veraibari, and he’s actually one of the agents for the Chinese seafood companies who are buying this fish. He’s also the guy coordinating the move inland. But he said to me, we know that when we kill the mothers of all the fish, we will be in trouble, but we have no choice at the moment. If someone else wants to come and help us save our village from rising seas, you’re welcome to come and we’ll stop fishing. But at the moment, this is our only option.

Graeme Smith  06:46

Now before we dig too much into what this fish maw trade has done to this very remote community in Gulf province, maybe tell us a bit more about fish maw itself? Yubiao 鱼鳔 in Mandarin and sincere apologies for my Cantonese, faagaau 花膠 in Cantonese, I mean, what does it look like, and why is it so expensive?

Jo Chandler  07:08

It looks like an old lemonade plastic bottle that’s kind of been screwed up and tossed around for a while, and sort of, yeah, it does look like a screwed-up balloon, maybe? It doesn’t look particularly appetizing. So, it’s kind of extraordinary to think that this, that this, you know, strange, unappetizing, little dried morsel is worth so much money, but it’s apparently prized. It’s long been coveted within, you know, Chinese culture for it’s a sign of wealth. And, I mean, you know, jump in here, you probably know much more about this than I do, but wealth, prosperity, status. It’s used in traditional Chinese medicine, but these days it’s also being used a lot in, you know, sort of newer medicine. And, you know, here, it’s a marine collagen source. So, there’s all sorts of new markets that are rising that are kind of cashing in on this idea of marine collagen. And you know, over the centuries, or over the years, it’s actually been used, it was used extensively in Europe, and still is, to some degree. They’re pretty cagey about telling you about it, but it’s often used to clarify wine and beer, you know, Guinness. So, this particular, yeah, the fish maw, the fish bladder, has been used in in sort of, you know, liquor-making, alcohol, for a very long time. And so when you see companies now championing their vegan products, it will be, in theory, because they’re not using something like this. It’s kind of been phased out. But when I was talking to the Hong Kong researcher Yvonne Sadovy about this, she was saying she had been trying to get information out of the Guinness company about how much they use this, and they were really not inclined to tell her terribly much about it.

Graeme Smith  09:01

I mean so what bit of the fish is it, and does every fish have this thing, or are some species more valuable than others?

Jo Chandler  09:09

It’s very much some are more valuable than others. So many of the world’s bony fish, sort of is the broadest. Most fish will have this, but they have that at different sizes. And the reason that Papua New Guinea is particularly being targeted is that it’s got a couple of species of really big fish with really big swim bladders. So, the swim bladder is an organ that these fish use to regulate their buoyancy and it’s really easy to extract, which is another reason why it’s so profitable commercially for communities like this one in Kikori. Because you don’t need a fish plant to process and keep the meat cold and be able to transport the fish to a market. And that’s why the fisheries around the Kikori Delta have traditionally, really not been commercially exploited because they are so remote, and the fisher people there can’t get these big fish that are all through their waters, processed and to market. But with this product, all they have to do is slit it open and cut out this organ, and then dried in the sun, or you’ll see it hanging on little clotheslines, pegs all around the villages in the windows. So, there’s no infrastructure required, no energy required. You can keep it, you know, forever. It’s this dried thing. And then some guy, an agent, will turn up from one of the companies and offer you these staggering amounts of money for these dried fish. And just to give it, or the dried swim bladder, to give it some context. So they, Yolarnie Amepou and some of her research colleagues, a guy called Michael Grant from James Cook University and a couple ofothers, they documented that in Veraibari, they, agents, were offering over 15,000 US dollars per kilogram for fish maw. So that’s not for the fish, just for the bladder, and so the flesh basically gets chucked away most of the time. They just want, a bit like shark fin, you know, they just want the fin. So this price is believed to be the highest available anywhere in the world. And it’s because of the kind of texture and thickness and quality of these particular this particular species. It’s scaly croaker. Some call it jewel fish. Some call it jewfish. It grows to about a metre long. It’s, the locals don’t like eating it. They don’t like the taste, and they’ve got lots of other, better fish. So they’ve intended to not bother with this one. And now, of course, suddenly, everybody wants this particular species, and there’s a couple, there’s also a barramundi in that area that similar sorts of prices and similar size. So, it’s the size and the texture. And Yvonne Sadovy, this Hong Kong researcher I mentioned, she likens the market for fish maw or to the diamond trade, you know, where you’ve got kind of rubbish diamonds at one end of the extreme, and then you’ve got the really high-quality diamonds at the other end. And when you get into that high quality end, you know, where you might be looking at color and carats and cut. With these, they’re looking at sort of the texture and the size and the thickness of these particular swim bladders. And that’s why these ones from this area are being really snapped up. And then, you know, there are other parts, other swim bladders, you know, I think if you go into a market, you’ll see them at all sorts of prices, but these are the ones that are going to be kind of under glass.

Graeme Smith

So Jo, I quickly googled the per capita GDP of Papua New Guinea and the per capita GDP is under $3,000. So, a kilo of this is equivalent to five, six years pure income for the average Papua New Guinean. And Gulf is probably one of the poorest places in PNG.

Jo Chandler

So it’s extraordinary. It is. And I look, I worked quite hard trying to figure out the same thing and but the problem with Papua New Guinea is, as you probably know, with money and with income and with so many other things, is that there’s so little data that’s up to date. The best I could figure and I checked it out with a couple of other local economists at the time, and we figured that for rural Papua New Guineans. So, one of these swim bladders say you had a really nice, luscious, scaly croaker, 100 gram bladder. And so, you might have earned, then 5000, 6000 kina [US$1250 to $1500] for that one swim bladder. That’s about one year’s income in a household in rural Papua New Guinea, roughly, you know. So that was the that was, it’s pretty hard to nail those figures down, but that’s the closest I could get to it.

LOUISA LIM  14:02

So, when you were staying in that village, how did you see the fish maw changing people’s lives?

Jo Chandler  14:09

Oh, profoundly. And you know, you could see it the house that I was staying in, which was… I was staying in the house of a gentleman called Mr. Arakuo, who is a pastor in the community, and he’s the head of the relocation committee. And he is the agent for one of these seafood companies, and so he’s got one of the kind of, I guess, the fanciest houses in town. But it’s in a lot of trouble because he’s right down on the waterline. So it’s, you know, it’s a two story timber house. So, it’s not traditional. It uses modern materials. It’s still pretty basic, and it’s sitting up on stilts over the water to allow the tide to come in and out underneath it. But he’s got a generator running. He’s got solar panels. He’s got a big screen TV in the corner. And, you know, half the village come to watch it together and that’s what when I laid down to sleep, I stayed overnight in his house, which was as the king tide came in. And I just kept thinking about this juxtaposition, because hanging over my head were two of these little plastic, round clotheslines that you would, you know, clip your knickers to or something, and on them were maybe eight or nine fish bladders drying.

LOUISA LIM  15:28

$50,000 worth?

Jo Chandler  15:29

But I calculated about 40,000 Australian dollars, you know, up, you know, up or down, depending on the size of them. Some were a bit smaller. Some were a bit larger. So that’s floating over my head. And then in the night when the sea came up, because the king tide was just about there, Mr. Ara’s whole family were out in the water wading around in the dark, pushing the debris away from the house so the house would not get knocked down in the night. So, these are the conditions that, this is the reality of what they’re living with. And right next door to his house, there used to be, they’d managed to get some money, or funding somehow, to get a water tank that was going to serve this community, because it’s struggling to get good clean water, because, again, inundation is ruining some of the fresh water supplies. And people are having to walk further and further. They managed to put a tank up, but the previous king tide had knocked that down. So these are the realities that they’re struggling with. So, you know, on one hand, $50,000 worth of or, sorry, what did I say about thirty-eight, forty thousand dollars’ worth of, Australian dollars’ worth of dried bladder hanging over my head? And then there’s incredibly precarious conditions for life.

Graeme Smith  16:40

And how did the Chinese kind of come to find this place? It’s for those who don’t know, PNG, it’s almost hard to overstate how remote this part of the world is. I mean, you have eight metres of rainfall a year. There’s pretty well no tourists. I don’t imagine you even have Chinese shopkeepers. How did, how did they come to find this place?

Jo Chandler  17:01

The best we can figure, Yolarnie Amepou, the zoologist who I mentioned, and she’s a Papua New Guinean, but she’s from the other side of the country. Her people are from Madang. And she had just graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree, I think it was, from the University of Papua New Guinea, when she heard a visiting specialist come in to talk about a particular species of turtle, the pig nose turtle, that was endangered and so she volunteered to go to Kikori for a summer to collect data about the pig nose turtle. So that was 2012 and that’s when, when, even in that year, she heard rumors about people coming across the border from West Papua, and keeping in mind that that border is quite porous and it’s a very remote area, and there was… So, there were Indonesians coming across that border, and they were going to villages asking for what they called fish bell, which is sort of a mashed up pidgin kind of word that they’ve developed in that particular area for the bladder. And so word got out that these strangers, were coming over the border from West Papua, which is about maybe six to nine hours in a fast boat and reasonable weather away from the Kikori Delta. So they must have picked up on this, and they were getting the money, good money, selling it back over the other side of the border to Chinese seafood companies. And then, because Papua New Guineans and Australians are not too fond of people wandering back and forth over this border. I was told that, you know, the authorities, the police, came in and chased these agents away, which probably means that things probably got pretty lively. And so then the next thing, the Chinese agents started coming in themselves and building relationships with people in the local villages, and they obtained licenses. About half a dozen companies got licenses to collect fish bladder from the Kikori or Gulf province, is the province that Kikori is part of, and Western Province, which is the one next door that borders onto the Indonesian-West Papua border. So, about half a dozen companies have then bought in, developed networks and are coming in to buy this product regularly. But a couple of years ago, the Papua New Guinea fisheries department put a stop to that. They’re actually concerned about the unregulated activities, the illegal activities. There’s a lot of concern around potentially organized crime gets involved with something that’s worth so much money, and so they’ve stopped issuing any new licenses, but the half a dozen companies that are there already can keep doing business. But one of the things that has occurred is that, because there’s so much money to be made, the Chinese companies are now offering loans to the local fisher people to basically, “We’ll give you the money, we’ll give you the nets, we’ll loan them to you. You can pay them back. We will give you the boats, we will give you the motors, and you can pay that off with what you earn.” And so that’s why there’s been this sort of massive expansion of the activity over a really short period of time, because all of the infrastructure that you need, you know, boats and nets and motors have come into the place so quickly.

LOUISA LIM  20:27

So what are the other impacts in the village?

Jo Chandler  20:30

Keeping in mind, these are, you know, rural and remote Papua New Guineans who basically exist largely without the benefit of the state at all in many parts of their lives. I mean, you may have a school, if you’re lucky, that’s functioning and the schoolteacher has managed to be paid, then they might still be there. There are health services up in town in Kikori, but they’re a couple of hours away. And they’re heavily overused. Or there’s a lot of people waiting for those basic services. And really, existence is in many ways, not very different to what it’s been for centuries. It’s very hand to mouth. People live… it’s, you know, sustenance activities for their gardens and their fishing, and they look after themselves. And so just the fact of this money coming into the village has meant now that if somebody needs to go to town because they’re having an emergency medical event, they’ve got the fuel and the boats to put them into the boat and take them the three or four hours back to Kikori town. Which was a basic service that people didn’t really have before. They’re able to bring down water. So, when Yolarnie Amepou comes in and out of these villages doing her field work for the turtles and other creatures, she was always being asked to load her boat up with just drums and drums of fresh water, because they didn’t have fresh water. And now they’re able to bring that in and out themselves. They can send their kids to school in back in Kikori to high school, which many families would have struggled to do before. They can send them to university in Port Moresby, which, again, they couldn’t do before. So, it’s making a huge difference, materially to people that have really had very little in the way of, you know, money or state support at all.

Graeme Smith  22:18

And maybe one impact that I’m thinking about giving you’re talking about your researcher studying the pig nose turtle, and these nets being very fine, fine enough to catch these fish. I mean, what’s being caught in the nets, apart from the fish and their swim bladders?

Jo Chandler  22:35

Oh, so many creatures. And this is the problem. So, the Kikori Delta has been put forward to UNESCO as a place of significant, you know, world value, international value, because of its biological diversity. And these are incredibly, I think it’s the biggest mangroves in Papua New Guinea. And so you’ve got these wild mangrove forests. And to float, to fly in and out of Kikori, you know, there’s just these avenues of sort of dull, murky water twisting and turning through this vast mangrove wilderness. And so, you’ve got an enormous species, a range of species there that exists there, endemic, that don’t exist anywhere else. And so, when they’re… now that you’ve got these massive gill nets that are floating sort of the length and breadth of the Delta, they’re pulling up, there are a couple of endemic and highly endangered, critically endangered, local dolphin species. They’re getting caught and drowned in the nets. There was one case where ten dolphins were caught in a single net and drowned in that net. The pig nose turtle that Yolarnie went there to study, it was already in danger because of changes to its habitat, and it being exploited for its eggs and its meat by a growing population, and now it’s being caught in the nets. Dugongs. I think Yolarnie said on one occasion, they found a pygmy whale. Leatherback turtles have been caught there. So this, they did a survey Michael Grant and Yolarnie a couple of years ago and monitored the catch from boats going out of a particular village over a several months period. And I think from memory, only about twenty, twenty-two percent of the catch was the target species. The rest were these critically endangered, a whole range of things, but amongst them, critically and endangered species of sawfish, river fish, dolphins, you name it. And so, this is the really big concern, is that not only will the target species possibly vanish pretty quickly, because nobody has any idea how many there are. But meanwhile, you’ve got this collateral damage of all these others species and the community are aware that this is a problem. And again, it was something that Mr. Arakuo said to me, we don’t want to take the dolphins. You know, there’s long story and lore and spiritual stories attached to dolphins. They don’t eat dolphins. They never have. But they know that, basically, at the moment, as he put it, they have a choice between saving their children and saving the dolphins? So, they’re saving their children.

LOUISA LIM  25:23

So it’s a really basic question, but all those animals, if they get caught in the nets, they die?

Jo Chandler  25:28

If you get to them fast enough, you can maybe save them. So, dolphins, for example, if you were going to check your nets every couple of hours, if you happen to get there in time, you might be able to pull a dolphin up and save it. But in reality, if you can imagine what it’s like, if you’re, you know, you’re a village person, a not particularly well-nourished village person. They, the people of the fisher people in this area are very, you know, they’re very strong and but the idea of being in a boat and pulling up a net with a 50, 60, 70-kilo thrashing dolphin in it, and being able to cut it out and let it go. It’s just not, generally speaking, viable. It is one of the things that Yolarnie is working with the fishing community to try and encourage them to check their nets more regularly and come up with sort of strategies and ways to help them, sort of release animals that they find still alive, but mostly they’re long gone, or they’re not able to save them when they get there.

Graeme Smith  26:30

And Jo it’s an extraordinary story, but I did a very unscientific survey of my own in a corridor where I’m surrounded by the world’s highest concentration of Pacific academics, and not one of them had even heard the word fish maw or heard the words fish maw. I mean, why has this flown so far under the radar if it’s having these huge impacts?

Jo Chandler  26:50

It’s absolutely fascinating. And this is Yvonne Sadovy, who I spoke about before. So, she’s a fisheries expert who worked for many years in Hong Kong. And she tells the story about how it was only around the 2000s and she was working with a PhD student, and they sort of came across this mystery of this vanished species. It’s one of the largest of the croaker species, and the croaker species are coveted for their swim bladders. And this Chinese bahaba, there were records and photographs from the 1930s showing this is like a two-metre long fish that weighed like 100 kilograms, and now it was almost nowhere to be found. And what they discovered was that this fish only lived in a very small amount of waters around Hong Kong and China, southern China. And it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as they say, it kept… it’s very big, it’s always in the same place. It reliably turned up to swarm in big groups at the same time every year. And so, these fishers just went in there and scooped them up, and they were selling these enormous fish bladders. And basically, it’s commercially extinct, this particular species, but it had kind of vanished without anybody really noticing. Sadovy says that the point at which the world began to recognize there was a problem was really when the Totoaba, which is another big croaker, giant croaker, which existed in Mexico’s Gulf of California, and this, again, was once one of the most, you know, prized marine biodiverse areas in the world. Cousteau famously went to this area and filmed these beautiful documentaries and said it was, you know, one of the great natural aquariums of the world. And then it was discovered by the fish, the swim bladder, the fish maw business, and they came in with the gill nets looking for this Totoaba. And again, it was point, it was basically fished to the point of being critically endangered. It’s been banned since 1975 because the numbers are so low and because the damage from this fishery is so profound, and yet it still finds its way onto the market through various illegal channels. And one of the casualties of that is that there’s a tiny little porpoise called the vaquita that lives in that area, and because it kept getting caught up in the nets, last I heard, there’s maybe ten individuals left of the vaquita porpoise, which is the world’s smallest porpoise. It’s crashed entirely, and will probably, it won’t recover. So that’s a casualty of this market. But getting back to your question, Graeme, so really, this was all under the radar. And then, because Sadovy started to put the pieces together, she asked, one of the problems was that fish maw, fish bladder when it hits the market in Hong Kong or whatever, it’s all lumped in with other dried fish products. So, like the sea cucumber and the shark fin is, it’s all dried seafood, all dried luxury seafood. So, there was no commodity code to know how much of this was actually going through the markets. So she and a few others petitioned the Hong Kong industry, the market, to make sure that they could create a specific commodity code. And when they did that, and that came in in 2015 and she says, you know, when we did that, we looked at the data and “Wow” was the word that she used. They found that 3000 plus to nearly 4000 tons of dried maw was imported annually to Hong Kong, from 2015 to 2018 worth about 390 million US dollars. But think about the fact that the maw is only five percent of the weight of the animal. So, think about the tons and tons of animal that was once attached to that amount of maw, and you begin to get a sense of how big this market is. But so now in Hong Kong, which is the biggest market, they can trace this because of the commodity code. But the initiative that she and other fisheries experts are desperately hoping will be introduced is that other markets worldwide introduce a specific commodity code so that they can begin to track this market. And what she discovered in her research, when they looked at this, they tracked back, and they found the maw was coming from about 110 countries. When they went to those countries to ask about it, hardly anyone had heard about it. Nobody knew about it. It’s all under the radar, and it doesn’t require infrastructure, so you can kind of get in and out. The village people know that they can sell this material for these huge amounts of money, but the larger marketplace doesn’t… has really not been very aware of it. It’s been really under the radar.

LOUISA LIM  28:39

I remember when we did the sea cucumber story, what had happened in so many villages was that the cucumbers had been harvested to extinction, but because they were worth so much, the villagers had stopped doing all other trades. They didn’t even grow crops anymore, because they were just out picking up sea cucumbers from the seabeds, and when the sea cucumbers were finished, some of the villages were at risk of starvation. Are those kind of dynamics being repeated with fish maw in Papua New Guinea?

Jo Chandler  32:22

That’s the concern. There’s certainly and there’s an anthropologist called Simon Foale, who’s part of the network of researchers working with Yolarnie and Michael Grant. And they’re now trying to get some funding to look at the social impacts of this, because they are very concerned, exactly as you say, people give up other fishing activities. They don’t plant gardens because they don’t need to feed themselves out of their gardens. And so you end up with, you know, hunger. And, you know, sort of famine situations when the market busts. So, they’re very concerned about that. And there’s also, you know, so far, there hasn’t, doesn’t from what we’re hearing, there hasn’t been a lot of kind of piracy or people moving in on this market. In this particular area, the understanding of who has fishing rights in these waters appears to be sort of holding so far. But you would imagine that, given time, and when there’s more awareness, they’re going to be some kind of entrepreneurial criminal types who are going to muscle in and try and get some of this action. So that’s another concern down the track.

Graeme Smith  33:32

I think we’re ready for the Bling Empire question Louisa.

LOUISA LIM  33:36

I’ve been dying to ask about Bling Empire because it is my favorite reality soap opera. So $15,000 for a single piece of fish maw?

Jo Chandler  33:46

I think it was per pound. And I have to say, I had never, I was unaware of the joys of Bling Empire.

LOUISA LIM  33:54

Now you know.

Jo Chandler 33:55

But it popped up in my research. There was a story in the South China Morning Post a couple of years ago about the exploding fish maw market, and it blamed it in part, on, sort of on the Bling Empire on that particular episode saying it had, it had sort of fueled an already pretty dynamic interest in this product. And that now it was driving it even higher. So, I went down a very deep tunnel. And I ended up watching an awful lot of Bling Empire and found the episode and then freeze framed and took pictures to try and get, see if I could see what the label said about where it was from. And I think the product in that scene the best I can figure out, most of it was from Pakistan, which is not unusual. And the prices there were about $15,000 per pound, but yeah, I spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out whether that, whether or not Bling Empire was really to blame for the exploding market.

Louisa Lim  34:55

And what did you conclude?

Jo Chandler  34:56

Well, I think it’s broader than that. When you talk to the experts, and the papers that Sadovy, and there’s half a dozen other or there’s actually a couple of dozen experts that have had quite a growing kind of tempo of papers looking at this issue in major journals over the last, probably the last five years. And they say that they see a lot of the drive coming from increasing incomes and urbanization in China, in Hong Kong, and also diaspora, which is the Bling Empire market, I guess, where you’ve got wealthy people that are willing to pay this money. But for some people, they never eat it. It’s not about the soup. It’s literally kept under lock and key, and there are collectors of maw that are, you know, considered, you know, sort of priceless. And, for example, some of the species of that vanished Chinese bahaba, they are probably the most valuable maw in the world. And no one’s putting that in their soup. They’re investment pieces like diamonds.

Graeme Smith  35:59

Wow. So it’s like French wine almost. I mean, yes, perhaps we should declare interests here, like I’ve never had fish maw in my life. Louisa, have you ever had it at a wedding banquet?

LOUISA LIM  36:08

No, I haven’t. I was not a fan of the sea cucumber either.

Graeme Smith  36:13

No, well, I mean, that’s well established on this podcast. But the only person in the corridor I could find who’d heard of fish maw was, of course, my Chinese friend who immediately pronounced it delicious. His only knowledge of fish maw was it’s great. You know, you’ve mentioned organized crime in passing there, Jo. And given the value of this is perhaps not surprising. But is it using sort of similar networks and similar players, or is it a thing all to itself?

Jo Chandler  36:43

I guess this is something that deserves a bit more scrutiny. I mean, certainly you know this reference to it as being the cocaine of the sea that comes out of you know, a lot of the places where this bladder is being collected are in areas where there’s not a lot of scrutiny of the fisheries industry. There’s not a lot of, you know, sort of government oversight. You know, for example, this commodity has exploded right on the Australian Border, but Australia and Australian fisheries experts and officials got onto this pretty quickly and introduced a whole bunch of rules and regulations to protect the fish that happen to be lucky enough to swim on our side of the border. But in places like Papua New Guinea and a lot of other places in the world where it’s being fished, there’s not that level of oversight. And because there is just so much money involved in it, this concern that organized crime interests are likely to begin to take a keen interest, it just kept popping up in the interviews I was doing all the time. I couldn’t find any kind of concrete evidence that about anybody digging into that yet. But it was one of the reasons that the fisheries, the National Fisheries Authority in Papua New Guinea cited for stopping, you know, putting a moratorium on this market was, you know, illegality. And certainly, you know, that border, that watery border between Papua New Guinea, Australia and Indonesia, West Papua. It’s a very interesting triangle. A lot of, you know, murky things occur there. We know there’s human trafficking, there’s gun trafficking, there’s drug trafficking. So, this is just another potentially problematic, you know, reason that people are going to be active in this area, and not necessarily particularly savoury types.

LOUISA LIM  38:35

So it sounds like there’s a sort of daily massacre of these fish, and not just these fish, but all associated other species. It’s happening under the radar. No one’s really paying attention. The attempts to regulate it seem like they’ve been quite ineffective. I mean, what happens? Is it too late to save these species?

Jo Chandler  39:02

What the researchers from everyone from Sadovy, who’s now based in the UK, and her colleagues in Hong Kong, and Yolarnie and Michael Grant and their team, what they want to see is more research to know exactly how many fish are there and how many target species are being pulled up. That’s basic information that you need to know before you exploit a resource. You need to know how much of it exists. They are really concerned about suddenly turning off the tap because of the vulnerability of these communities. And as you’ve said, you know, it doesn’t take long for a community to become quite dependent on income from something like this. And these people, you know, they’re going underwater, they have all sorts of issues, unless we’re prepared to put some other kind of resources and support into those communities, they need some of this action. So, what the hope is that you do a bit more research, you have better scrutiny by fisheries authorities. Maybe you have quotas on the amount that’s being pulled out over any particular period. And you know, Yvonne Sadovy says, well, as you know, even though the amounts of money that are being paid to fishers at the point of sale might seem incredibly high, they’re still only a fraction of what that fish is worth when it hits the Hong Kong market. So, she thinks that if the market was better regulated, more of that actual value would end up in the hands of the fishermen themselves, the people who have rights over this resource. So they wouldn’t need to pick up as much of it, and they would be, maybe supported to be a bit more discriminating about when they take it. I mean, at the moment, for example, they drape these nets over tributaries and areas of the delta where they know the big fish come in and out to spawn regularly. And so they’re catching, you know, the mothers. They’re catching the future resource is going to go pretty rapidly, as well as things like the pig nose turtle and these endemic dolphins. And they think these dolphins are down to a couple of hundred left. So there’s a very good chance of, you know, local extinction of those species. If they’re not extinct now, they could be within one to two years. So there’s no time to waste on this, but there’s also very little momentum at the moment, at least within the PNG end, I kept trying to get an answer from fisheries about whether they’re going to do anything. There’s been some talk that they want to regulate, and certainly some of their people who are working in the area are profoundly aware of the problems and they want to do more. But there’s inertia there around bringing in any of the kind of mechanisms that need to come in. They need, you know, support. They need regular regulatory support, and they need resources, and they need a political will to turn off the tap on this money, which is just as likely to start, you know, finding its way to powerful interests who won’t want to turn the tap off at any time soon.

Graeme Smith

Jo Chandler, thanks for joining us.

Jo Chandler  40:22

Thanks for having me.

Graeme Smith

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, which it brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Jo Chandler and my co-host, Louisa Lim. Today’s episode was recorded in Melbourne University’s Horwood studios with our old editor, Gavin Nebauer. Our editor for this episode is Andy Hazel. Our background research is by Wing Kuang, social media and transcripts by Juliette Baxter, theme music is by Suzie Wilkins, and our cartoons and gifts are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Give me Maw: China’s Craze for the Cocaine of the Seas appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs. In this episode, I’m flying solo because my co-host is on leave, a very well-earned break indeed. As always, we’re on air thanks and support from the Australian Center on China in the world. Today is our third episode looking at Chinese online scam syndicates. We’ve looked at a pig butchering scam in the Pacific island of Palau. We’ve talked to Neo Lu, the victim of a scam compound in Dongmei Zone on the Myanmar-Thai border. He’s one of an estimated 220,000 people who’ve been trafficked into forced labor scam syndicates in mainland Southeast Asia. And it’s not just Chinese nationals. Research by one of our guests suggests that the nationals of 66 different countries have been trafficked to work in these compounds. So today, for a broader perspective on this industry, we’re joined by Jason Tower, the country director for the Burma program at the United States Institute of Peace. And Greg Raymond from the ANU’s Strategic and Defense Studies Centre. Jason, you first. I mean, it’s never a great idea to do the third episode as a prequel. But could you maybe give us a bit of a potted history on how so many scam compounds came to pop up on Myanmar’s border with Thailand?

Jason Tower  01:40

Yeah, no and first of all, thanks for having me on. Great to be a part of this. I listened to the earlier couple of podcasts on this topic, and they were great. So really, this grew out of a very dramatic expansion of illicit Chinese capital networks who for the past two decades, have been chased out of the PRC as they tried to continue to tap into that $40 to $80 billion per year market for illicit online gambling in China. Any form of gambling in China is, of course, illegal, and maintaining online gambling outlets in China is also illegal. So, you saw where many of these networks went to the Philippines, they went to Cambodia, they went to the China-Myanmar border, and they worked to set up spaces where they could operate offshore online gambling in impunity. Or often even in many cases, like the Philippines, they work to actually influence local elites to build a legal platform for these activities. Why not go beyond just online gambling and go into scamming, go into other forms of fraud? So, you saw, really throughout the 2000s, 2010s that in these different countries across Southeast Asia, they built more and more webs of influence to be able to perpetrate, not only the online gambling operations, but also scams targeting Chinese nationals. Well, you started seeing these crackdowns. I mean Chinese law enforcement chased after some of these actors even in the Philippines and into Cambodia. And you then saw that by around 2017 some of the networks that had been involved in those two countries pivoted to the Thai-Myanmar borderland area. And that was really when illicit Chinese capital networks made their first incursion into that particular space. 2017, you saw the rise of what is now known as the Shwe Kokko Yatai New City compound, which was initiated by a criminal cartel based out of the Philippines and Cambodia. And then that followed a range of additional compounds that started growing along that space of the Thai-Myanmar border. This is along the main trade corridor between Thailand and Myanmar, Myawaddy-Mae Sot. So Myawaddy is on the Myanmar side of that border. By the time of about 2020, you saw where there were about four or five of these large compounds that had started to take shape. But you saw where the elected government, at the time, which was moving towards trying to reform and bring more of the economy under civilian control, pushed back against a lot of this. And you actually saw where some of these compounds were getting shut down in 2020, just on the eve of a military coup, which unfortunately has plunged Myanmar into chaos. And you’re now seeing where there, we’re in the fourth year of a multifaceted violent conflict in the country. After the military coup, you saw a surge in these compounds. You went from having less than maybe half a dozen of them to having several dozen of them. And now this entire river area that separates the Thai and Myanmar border around Mae Sot-Myawaddy, this is really over 100 kilometres of river. It’s now lined by criminal compound after criminal compound. How did this happen? Well, you had a key Myanmar military proxy. This is the border guard force of the Myanmar military, which brought all of these malign actors into the region. And I think after the coup you saw where this became a major source of revenue for those militia groups. And it became kind of a space where criminal actors could more or less operate in impunity, operate these scam centres in impunity on that border.

Graeme Smith  05:55

And it seems that, I mean, when you look at this on a map, a lot of it seems to overlap with areas that formerly you would have associated with drug trafficking networks. I mean, is that coincidence? Or have, in some ways, these compounds arisen out of an existing culture of criminality?

Jason Tower  06:12

In order to understand this, we have to look a little bit at the history of this Border Guard Force and border guard forces more broadly in Myanmar. So part of the Myanmar military’s efforts to try to consolidate its control in the periphery, this is both along the China border as well as on the Thai border, was to push factions of different ethnic insurgencies to partner with it. So basically, to abandon struggles to support particular ethnic groups or ethnic movements for autonomy. And instead to align and come under the control of the Myanmar military. The Myanmar military, in the early 2000s introduced a scheme where by which ethnic armed organisations could come under the Myanmar military’s umbrella, in exchange for giving them the right to deal more or less in any form of business activity that they wanted to, regardless of the country’s laws. And so on the Thai-Myanmar border, you saw where one of the key insurgency groups it was formerly known as the Democratic Karen Buddhist army. It took this deal, an individual named Chit Thu basically signed up with the Myanmar military. He became a border guard force, giving the Myanmar military a lot more control in that region. And in exchange for that, he started operating and scaling up all of these illicit activities. You see where there’s been a pattern of drug trafficking, of smuggling, of illicit resource transaction, of environmental crimes, all of these things happen along that border now, with the Myanmar military’s Border Guard Force being the key player, involved. In 2017 with the sudden arrival of these Chinese mafia groups, you saw where that border guard force suddenly had an opportunity to really scale up and move into a range of other criminal markets. And so from there, you saw the expansion of the illicit online gambling business into that area. But then, I think, more importantly, the extremely lucrative, sophisticated online scamming or pig butchering scams also came into the same area, so there’s a lot of overlap with other criminal markets. But the key thing is, is you have this, this mafia like group that operates under the Myanmar military, which controls that territory, making, you know, kind of that place a natural partner for a lot of these illicit capital groups from China.

Graeme Smith 08.49

And Greg, if you could take us maybe across the border. I mean, all of these compounds that Jason’s been talking about, they run on Thai money, Thai electricity, and Thai internet. Yet the Thai government, and particularly the new prime minister, who was installed in mid-August by the highest court in the land, always described as pro-China. I mean, why aren’t Thai authorities doing more to target Chinese crime syndicates just across the border from them in Mae Sot?

Greg Raymond  09:16

Well the simple answer to that is they’re partners in many of these enterprises. So, I mean, there’s been a very long history of the Thai military cooperating with elements in Burma, in the drug trade that really goes back to the Cold War and working with Chinese syndicates. I mean, the Kuomintang, when they were sheltering in Thailand and Burma were involved in the drug trade that was sponsored, in fact, by the CIA. So Thai generals were involved in that trade then, and they appear to be still involved in various illicit enterprises across their borders, whether that be Laos, Cambodia or Myanmar. They’re often also involved in sponsoring casinos, because gambling is also formally illegal, except for one particular lottery in Thailand. So, Thais wanting to go and gamble have to go across borders, and Thai military and police have been very involved for decades. But there was, I guess, an attempt to sort of throw a little bit more light on this this year, actually, one of the liberal political parties in Thailand was then known as “Move Forward.” It’s been dissolved and has come back as the “People’s Party”, and before it was “Move Forward”, it was “Future Forward.” So, it’s in third incarnation now, and they keep trying to rattle the cage of the conservative establishment, who also in many ways, are a kleptocratic establishment. So one of their firebrand politicians, a young MP by the name of Rangsan Maneerat stood up in the Thai parliament in April this year as part of a no confidence motion against the Thai Prime Minister, who was then Srettha Thavisin and made the statement that he believed that at least 17 of the casinos and probably scam centres along the Moie River, along that Thai-Myanmar border were, had Thai partners, or Thai partial, partially owned by Thais. And most of these Thai military or police figures, and he, you know, describes some of them as, you know, owning immense properties with swimming pools and golf courses. And, you know, he expressed surprise that a police salary could, you know, enable that kind of wealth. But it’s pretty clear that there’s connections. And in fact, one of the kingpins, one of the scam centres, a Chinese transnational businessman who’s now actually in prison in Thailand, at the request of Chinese authorities, hasn’t yet been handed back. And some of the reason he hasn’t been handed back promptly is because there have been some senior Thais who are probably involved in that particular, in his particular scam centre, which is known as Shwe Kokko. It’s that scam centre is run by an individual who’s known by five different names, but She Lunkai is one of them. He appears to have quite close links to to various figures in Thailand. This is where it gets nebulous, but there’s certainly a lot of folklore around this. And one story I heard this year is that while in prison, in inimitable Thai style, he has his own chef, so he’s not a run-of-the-mill prisoner by any means and no, Thailand doesn’t always bend over when Chinese authorities want them to, if they’ve got other interests at stake.

Graeme Smith  13:11

Let’s, let’s zoom in for a minute just on Dongmei Zone, this place where Neo, who was in our last episode, was imprisoned for half a year. The Dongmei camp, the experiences that he described there, and the sort of the scam cartel, I mean, how typical was that sort of small-scale pig butchering operation in your experience, Jason. Was it a fairly representative scam compound?

Jason Tower  13:36

Yeah, so Dongmei, the history behind it is that one of the most notorious criminals in the Chinese speaking world, Broken Tooth, also known as Wan Kuok-koi, he initiated that zone. He initiated it in close partnership with a range of elite figures from Malaysia. And in fact, there was even a large, quite flashy ceremony that was held to mark the introduction of a number of investors into that zone that was held in Kuala Lumpur just before the world started to lock down around Covid-19. One thing to recognise about the scam syndicates is that you have these large compound owners who are generally partnering with some local elite. So, in the area where Dongmei is present, Broken Tooth on the one hand, is the one you know from the Chinese mafia world who has initiated this whole thing with the Myanmar military’s Border Guard Force. And then they’re providing a large amount of real estate, they’re providing security, they’re providing internet connections. They’re really providing all of the hardware as well as the software that the criminal syndicates need to enter into the zone and to set up shop. So in some ways and I’ve referred to these as Special Criminal Zones, because that’s kind of what they do, right? I mean, the Special Economic Zone is supposed to cut a lot of red tape and allow economic actors to come in and do things at a relative comparative advantage when it comes to costs, when it comes to taxes and other benefits. The Special Criminal Zone is, kind of, is designed to do the same thing. Then inside of the zone, of course, you have a lot of these smaller scam syndicates. Some of them will maybe purchase property in the zone and then lease that out to other syndicates. Others will just directly lease from an entity like Dongmei, or in the case of Shwe Kokko Yatai, they will lease space directly from Yatai. So, what you end up getting is you have literally hundreds upon hundreds of individual scam syndicates that are operating inside of these zones, operating inside of a place like Dongmei or like Yatai. But they’re operating with some autonomy inside. I mean, obviously it’s the compound owners and the Border Guard Force that are providing all of the protection and external security, but then they’re bringing in their own security to sort of manage things within the compound. They’re also determining their own focus as to who they scam, what sorts of criminal markets they get involved in. You know, the scam syndicates, once inside, have some autonomy to do that. But that’s kind of how the overall setup works. I think what was described in that last podcast is very typical, noting, though, that each individual scam syndicate often has a different focus. Some of them are maybe focused very specifically on a particular state in the United States, looking for victims, say retirees from Florida. Others are focused on scamming people in Singapore or others are maybe focused on scamming in India. Part of the reason why they’re going and reaching out to try to bring in labor, bring in victims of human trafficking and forced criminality from so many different places around the world is they’re looking to tap into all these different markets for their scams, and that’s what leads to them ultimately try to pull in a broader and broader range of individuals. The scam syndicates are specialising, and they’re working to make their scams more and more effective. And again, I think that that was also described in the last podcast how this really operates as a business, with these criminal actors thinking about costs, thinking about the efficiency of the scamming and so on.

Graeme Smith  17:29

Yeah, and that was probably one of the more alarming things that he said, and it was almost as an aside. This conversation that Neo had with one of his bosses, and they were reflecting that scamming China wasn’t as profitable as it used to be. And that, in fact, scamming English speaking countries was now twice as profitable as trying to scam people in China because WeChat was cracking down, and the central government also was occasionally raiding these compounds. I mean, do you think there’s going to be a big shift, especially with, you know, for example, generative AI coming in as a thing where these now focus, rather than China, focus, in many ways, on safer targets like the United States?

Jason Tower  18:07

This started during the pandemic, where a lot of these scam syndicates, I mean, they were no longer really able to do this as effectively in China after China put out this ban on cryptocurrency. That made it, meant it was a lot harder for Chinese who are getting scammed, because these scams are using crypto, right? It was a lot harder for them to actually access crypto. And then, of course, you had the labour problem, right? I mean, during Covid, China not only restricted the ability of its nationals to travel overseas. It called its nationals back. And it particularly targeted people in Southeast Asia. So, if you were a Chinese national who had been to Southeast Asia, or that was staying in Southeast Asia, I mean, you could face some pretty serious consequences just for not going back home, including having your assets frozen, including even having some of your assets confiscated, or even including having some crackdowns on your relatives. So, this meant that the criminal actors had to look for other sources, both of well, targets of scams, but then also for other sources of labor. And so that started this process of globalisation where the criminal syndicates were looking more and more to how do we tap into this global market? How do we bring in scammers from these different countries, and how do we scam effectively in other markets around the world? Now, the pace of this picked up dramatically after this massive crackdown occurred on the China-Myanmar border last October. And basically what happened there was some fairly savvy ethnic armed organisations. These are resistant factors in Myanmar. They keyed in on the fact that China had a big problem in Myanmar, that the Myanmar military regime was providing an umbrella for all of these scam syndicates to perpetrate online scams targeting Chinese nationals. And that that was causing China to really bleed out in a very big way, according to the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance army, which was one of those key ethnic armed groups that launched this, this operation, Operation 1027, which sought to eradicate the Myanmar-China border of these scam syndicates. They claim that roughly $9 billion per year was being stolen from China by the scam syndicates there. So, this operation actually led to the Myanmar army’s Border Guard Force losing. They were defeated on the battlefield, which sent roughly 45,000 people out of scam syndicates back across the border into China. Of course, many of the kingpins and scam syndicate heads were not among those who were sent back. They pivoted. They went to the Thai border, because these are highly linked and very well-connected criminal actors. So, they pivoted to the Thai border, and they started to rework their business model. They knew it was going to be harder and harder to scam Chinese, and they started targeting more and more that global audience. So, you’ve really seen, I think, since last October, with this, this big operation, the Chinese police are telling a story of diminishing losses to scams. They’re claiming as of I believe it was June, a 30% decline in online scams targeting Chinese nationals. Meanwhile, though, in the US, we’re seeing a massive uptick in this. We’re seeing pig butchering scams just really hitting almost every state in the United States now, and we’re seeing it hit other jurisdictions as well. I mean, you’re hearing about it. It’s off the charts across Europe and Japan and Korea and many other places, and also, I think, importantly, across Southeast Asia as well. And I think you know, really part of it is that you’ve got Chinese law enforcement cracking down somewhat selectively. So, they’re focusing their resources on people that are doing scamming in China or causing capital outflows from China. But then others, I mean again and we go back to Broken Tooth and Wan Kuok-koi, he’s a very, very active individual, very public, and he’s living in China, and he’s operating this scam syndicate. And you don’t really hear about that scam syndicate being cracked down on. Why? Well, perhaps, and you see he’s opening new businesses left and right in China, perhaps a lot of those funds are being brought back into the Chinese economy. Meanwhile, other scam syndicates, if they focus more on that international market, there’s less of a chance that they’re going to get cracked down on by Chinese law enforcement. There’s now a need for other countries to really look at what the PRC is doing, and to have some pretty frank conversations with the PRC on this issue. I mean, is this going to be similar to the Fentanyl crisis in the US, where you have the PRC kind of looking the other way, as a lot of these crime groups scam Americans or scam people from other countries. Or will the PRC start sharing intelligence and information about who is behind this and be more helpful in terms of cracking down on some of these crime groups that are, in fact, now I think starting to really hit other countries around the world pretty hard.

Graeme Smith  23:11

Yeah, and I think it’s a really interesting question around police cooperation, and we’ll get to that in a bit. The Australian police love to work with their Chinese counterparts. They absolutely love them because they’re so effective in getting stuff done, more effective than they are over here. But Dongmei isn’t the only scam compound on the Thai-Myanmar border. Just to the north of where Neo was held, is a place you both mentioned called Shwe Kokko, home to the Yatai New City development. And even more so than Dongmei zone, it hasn’t been at all shy about its efforts to attract investors, and I’ll just play a clip from one of its promotional videos.

Clip  23:50

Promotional clip.

Graeme Smith  23:59

Among the many claims that are made in this video. It claims to connect the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It brags of its access to high-speed rail and highways to Singapore and Bangkok. I mean, Greg, you’ve recently been to Shwe Kokko, the Yatai New City place. I mean, what did you find there? Was it anything like the glamorous place portrayed on these promotional videos?

Greg Raymond  24:21

Look, it wasn’t quite a city. It wasn’t quite a smart city that many investors in Thailand have been sort of dreaming of, or have been sold a 100 kilometre zone of factories and smart industries. But there was a lot going on in terms of building. So originally, apparently, the Yatai company got a license from the central Myanmar government to build luxury villas of 5.5 hectares, I think it was. But by the time they did that promotional video that I think you saw, they’re talking about 100 square kilometres of development. So, what I saw was somewhere between those two extremes. There was row after row of tin working man’s or labourer’s cottages and cranes on the horizon and some pretty enormous buildings being constructed. And these are sort of rearing out of what is largely either farmland or jungle, and look to be, I guess, some form of casino, judging by the facades which were at the front of these buildings, which were complete with cavorting nymphs, Greek gods, and other decorations. And the actual functioning part seemed to be relatively limited at that point. There were some very small gaming rooms run by some local Burmese Karen employees, mostly women, and there was a short stay hotel, I think, timed by the hour, I think for the benefit of the workers there. But big plans were clearly afoot and clearly significant sums being invested in there. There was already, I guess, an area with food and shops and offices, and it was driving past one of those that we received some very hard looks from some Chinese-origin gentlemen. And then that was probably at the time that we decided that the plan to perhaps stay there wasn’t going to be a good one. And we left and drove back to Myawaddy that day. So look, there was certainly ambition, very visible. No, the kinds of eco city, smart city, industry hub with connective infrastructure wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t in evidence at that point in time. But look, you know, if you look at the Golden Triangle SEZ on the on the Laos-Myanmar border, then you know, who knows it could still head in that direction. Zhao Wei seems to be creating all sorts of things up there, including, I understand it, a go-kart arena.

Graeme Smith  27:29

I have not heard of the go-kart arena. I mean, you know, given there’s these large amounts of finance, what role did Thai banks play in all of this Greg, are they, are they, where’s the money coming from? To put it bluntly.

Greg Raymond  27:41

Look I don’t know if Thai banks have financed any of Yatai, but certainly, Thai banks have been laundering money for figures in the Myanmar junta. That’s been established. The UN rapporteur released a report this year and noted that though Singapore had done its best to get its banks out of laundering Burmese funds, the same hadn’t happened in Thailand. And Siam Commercial Bank, amongst others, were still doing business with figures from the SAC, from the junta. So, yeah, that’s in terms of what their exposure is to the criminal elements of Eastern Myanmar. That’s a really good question.

Jason Tower  28:33

What’s interesting about She Zhijiang and the criminal cartel that he’s behind is just the web of connections that are there all across the region. So up until now, I mean, if you go to Manila, you’ll find that you still actually have a large Yatai presence there. There’s a large Yatai spa. Seemingly, there are other activities that are going on around this Yatai Spa. Then you had She Zhijiang in Cambodia, and that’s, of course, where he got the new passport and reinvented himself. Because if you look at the history here, going back to Chinese court cases from before 2014, that is when, you know, Chinese courts first launched a case against She Zhijiang for his cross-border criminal activity in the Philippines targeting people across China. But somehow, despite the fact that there were arrest warrants issued for She Zhijiang he managed to get a new passport with a new name in Cambodia around the end of 2017. And then you know, you also see where Hong Kong appears in this story. Actually the main entity that made the investment into Myanmar in the first place, and those couple of villas that Greg talked about that were really the only part of this that ever received any approval from Myanmar central authorities. You know, that actually was coordinated through a presence that had been registered in Hong Kong. And then, of course, there was the Beijing entity of She Zhijiang’s operation. She Zhijiang, actually, had a whole Yatai that was registered in Beijing, under the names of a couple of his key collaborators. These were two individuals, one who seems to be more of an underworld figure, and the other a guy by the name of Zhong Baojia who actually has held a number of official positions on Hainan Island, they held that entity there. And then, you know, to just make the matter even the make this more complicated, then there were also business entities in Singapore, where a couple of companies were registered under She Zhijiang’s name. And it seems that that’s where a lot of the financial technology that was supposed to power the Yatai New City was actually being designed and developed and innovated. So, you sort of see where there’s this broad web of connections. I mean, part of this may be just tapping into resources in different places, but I think part of it also was the ability and the agility of the criminal networks to kind of pivot and tap into different financial and technological resources across the region in order to facilitate all of this activity. I mean, clearly the Thailand connections are also interesting. I think because you really have seen where She Zhijiang, for example, around all of this, he bought into an airline in Thailand. There was a whole big ceremony that was around Yatai HG, taking over shares of something that was called Wisdom Airways, which was going to then have these charter flights going from China down to Mae Sot to be able to bring people across the border into that zone. What did the Thai authorities do with someone like She Zhijiang at this point? He’s claiming that he’s Cambodian and he should be extradited to Cambodia. The Chinese obviously see where he’s created a lot of problems in the China-Myanmar relationship. Because going back to 2020, you had the NLD [National League for Democracy] government actually pushing back, questioning, why in that video, is it showing that She Zhijiang is implementing part of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, when Myanmar planners were never consulted on that, they were never really brought into the loop on that. And probably the answer as to why the Chinese police are looking for She Zhijiang links back to the fact that the NLD government played a pretty strong role in pushing back and pointing out that massive criminal activity was taking place there in partnership with the Myanmar military, which was very threatening to the NLD government. And I think after the February 2021 coup, that proved to be very much the case.

Graeme Smith  32:59

And it is one of the great ironies that the overthrow of the democratic administration in Myanmar has actually made things harder for China in Myanmar, more than anything. Another thing that I found really intriguing about Neo’s account was the money laundering and the role of cryptocurrency in the money laundering. They were all being paid in Tether, this sort of so-called stablecoin of crypto, and a lot of the partners seem to be involved in blockchain to set up this sort of virtual financial infrastructure that almost seems to operate beyond traditional financial systems. I mean, I mean, how important is crypto to money laundering and these operations staying, you know, basically keeping their money out of reach of law enforcement?

Jason Tower  33:45

I think it’s critical, because if you look at the way in which these scams are perpetrated, they’re all using cryptocurrency. I mean the pig butchering scams have become almost synonymous with these crypto trading platforms that are often under the control, I mean, these platforms are directly under the control of the criminal cartels. And so crypto seems to be very much fundamental to this whole operation and the ability to use a wide range of both outright fraudulent platforms to trick people into putting crypto into a wallet somewhere and then transferring that to the criminal actors, that’s key. But then once they actually have, you know, that crypto in their control, they need to launder it, which means that this whole industry has arisen around, you know, getting crypto mules, crypto money mules, to basically move crypto across the blockchain, move it into different wallets, and then bring it out somewhere. So, I would say that cryptocurrency is fundamental to their operations. I think it’s also interesting to go back and look at the history of some of this, because if you look at what She Zhijiang was doing, this is again, a proponent of that Yatai New City project. Going back to 2017, 2018, 2019 in the Philippines, he was rolling out all of these different new forms of payment applications that worked with cryptocurrency. You then saw where he set up a whole association, a foundation that supported the development of blockchain around the world. And you saw him, along with a number of other actors who are known to be involved in fraud and scams in different places across the region, they started organising all of these cryptocurrency road shows, where they would bring in some of the key players in the crypto development space. They would put them up on a platform. They would buy influence with them. And then you saw where this foundation started giving out grants to all these crypto developers to develop different types of financial tech that the criminal networks could ultimately incorporate into their scams and incorporate into their business models. So I think in many respects, you saw what these networks were doing was they were becoming some of the key players advancing the development of cryptocurrency, and that gave them, I think, a lot of control and influence, but it also put them several steps ahead of regulators, several steps ahead of law enforcement, and that continues to be the case until now.

Graeme Smith  36:23

And look, we’ve unfortunately lost Greg due to the vagaries of Japanese internet. But what got me interested in this whole thing was a case back in 2017 in Fiji where 77 alleged cyber criminals were hooded and put onto his China Southern Airline and flown all the way to northeast China to Changchun, to be tried on the border with North Korea, in this Korean ethnic zone, for their crimes in no less than six different courts. Ultimately, 400 people went on trial. I mean, what usually happens to these people? You were mentioning, over 30,000 being pushed across the border into China from these scam compounds. Do the Chinese authorities distinguish between who was trafficked and who was organizing? Or is it just like you’re working in these scam organizations, we’re going to lock you away?

Jason Tower  37:15

In one respect, it’s good to see that there’s a crackdown on crime and that you’re seeing some of these scam syndicates get more pressure. But then, you know, there are now reports of about 50,000 people being repatriated from Burma since last September. And the vast majority of these are being treated as criminals. And if you look at the video clips of these people going across, I mean, there are people in crutches, there are people who are noticeably disheveled, who look underfed. I mean, these don’t look like, you know, high level criminal players. They look really like the rank and file of people who’ve been involved in forced criminality. And so, I think the question then is, are any of these people getting designations as victims of human trafficking? Well, they should be. I mean, if they’re in there and they’re being tortured, and their rights to leave, to exit the compounds are being withheld from them. I mean, that is a clear instance of a violation of their fundamental human rights. But that doesn’t seem to be something that’s so prominent in the response to this in China. And I think if you look at what’s going on in many other countries, there’s also a tendency to treat all of these people, even people who have been openly tricked into going into the compounds, to treat them as criminals and to give them quite harsh criminal sentences after they’ve been brought out of the compounds. And I think that that’s kind of across the board. You’re seeing similar kinds of trends happening with victims from many different countries around the world as this has been increasingly internationalized. And I’d say, you know, along with this, in some sense, is the fact that countries are treating people who’ve been trafficked or who’ve been tortured or who are in really difficult circumstances inside of those compounds as criminals. That actually plays to the favor of those that are holding them in captivity, because these poor people know, well, even if I escape, I’m going to have to deal with long prison sentences. I’m going to have to deal with legal problems. Think life is not going to be so good outside of the scam syndicate either, so maybe that even creates incentives for them to try to find some way to make it work inside, find some way to become a successful scammer inside. It’s really a terrible set of circumstances for people who wind up inside of these compounds.

Graeme Smith  39:38

Yeah. I mean, that was absolutely what I was seeing in Fiji, is these people who are being hustled and balaclaved and roughly treated. Most of them were teenage or women in their early 20s in their pyjamas. I mean, they didn’t look like hardened criminals at all, and yet they were being treated as such and paraded and humiliated for the cameras by the Chinese police. Now a final kind of looking forward question, because Louisa always likes me to have one of those. I mean, how do we deal with this, like in a global sense, because China has this thing called the Global Security Initiative, and in some ways, it would seem to make sense to cooperate more closely with Chinese authorities, because these are Chinese scammers. I mean, how do we go about addressing, you know, this out-of-control scam industry on the borderlands of China? Is it a matter of working more closely with China, or are there other strategies we should be looking at?

Jason Tower  40:36

This is much, much bigger than just a couple of criminal groups running amok on a border, you know, on the China border, or on the Thai-Myanmar border. You know, you have industrial scale scam compounds that already are deeply embedded in three countries in mainland Southeast Asia. You have a presence of these criminal groups still in the Philippines, which I will say, has been doing a lot more to crack down, to send signals that it’s going to crack down pretty harshly on this. But then you have the same criminal networks that are weaving webs of influence all around the world. You mentioned Fiji. They’re in the Pacific Islands. They’re now extending into different parts of Africa. They’re in the Middle East, particularly targeting Dubai. So, you really have a risk now that these criminal compounds are going to spread all around the globe. And then, of course, the criminal networks behind them are constantly adapting new technologies. The scams are becoming more sophisticated. We’re hearing a lot more beyond sort of the traditional pig butchering scams, which at this point have a lot of them have focused on, on romance scams or building relationships of trust that way. You’re hearing a lot more about these very, even more sophisticated, customs scams that are now targeting individuals who the criminals have actually gotten quite a lot of information about in advance of perpetrating the scam. These criminal groups, I mean, they’re really trying to build a foothold all over the world at this point. And they’re targeting a broader and broader range of countries. You see where they’ve gotten access to all these sophisticated technologies. They’re continuing to invest in different technological spaces. They’ve been able to find ways to launder money on scales we’ve never seen before. I mean, if you look at some of the recent money laundering cases, such as the case out of Singapore, this is the single largest money laundering case in human history that has been now exposed by Singaporean police. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s going on here. So, I think what needs to happen looking forward, is first that countries need to identify this for what it is. It is a global security threat. This is something that countries around the world need to start really looking at, how do we keep our homelands free from this? How do we prevent these scammers from stealing more and more from really, all demographics across different countries, right? I mean, because you have elites in countries who are getting hit by this, you’ve got the middle class, all these people whose bank accounts are being emptied out by this, but then you also have the poor people who are seeking jobs online, who get trafficked into this. So, it’s really something that hits every demographic that you can think of in a wide range of countries around the world. 66 countries, I’ve said this before, and it’s in USIP’s report that came out in May, 66 countries have been trafficked into this. And over 110 countries have now been hit by the scams. I think in order for individual countries to combat this, they’re going to need to really adopt whole of government approaches where they’re, you know, kind of building out strong coordination across law enforcement, with banks, with other financial institutions. And looking at this problem set from all angles, to think about how to cut off the financial flows, how to prevent more people from getting pulled into this, and how to really raise awareness. But then also the international cooperation is really critical. Because what we’ve seen, I think, over the last couple of years with this is that the criminal networks can pivot very rapidly, both geographically, you know, they can pivot from being on the China-Myanmar border to go over to Cambodia. They can go back from Cambodia to the Myanmar-Thai border. If the Myanmar-Thai border were to become unstable again, I mean, you have the Laos Golden Triangle Zone, and then you have all these other hubs that they’re looking at around the world. So, if you’re just going to have some bilateral crackdowns, what’s going to end up happening is Philippines decides to ban POGOs, and everybody rushes off and becomes more embedded in Myanmar and the Thai-Myanmar border. So, you’re going to need countries around the world to coordinate their action to ensure that when the Philippines cracks down, Thailand is ready, China is ready, the US is ready. They’re ready to prevent this from coming across other borders. So coordinated action is going to be one of the most effective ways of dealing with this. I mean, you mentioned the Global Security Initiative. I think one problem with this is that there’s also this instinct or incentive, this, this incentive on the part of the Chinese police to politicize this whole thing, right? And so I think what ultimately needs to happen is that this whole matter of how to deal from, deal with this issue from a law enforcement vantage point needs to be depoliticized. It needs to be disconnected from China’s Global Security Initiative. If you know, the prerequisite or condition for getting some Chinese support and intelligence is that countries have to sign up to the Global Security Initiative and have to somehow voice support for China revising global security norms. I don’t think that’s going to work. Countries are simply not going to want to do that. The fact that you have law enforcement in many countries who’ve become deeply involved in this, particularly in Myanmar, where you know the Myanmar state is, is basically the protector and guarantor of these criminal enterprises. I mean, that needs to be disrupted. And so, where China could play more of a role is in doing just that. I mean applying more pressure on the Myanmar military, preventing the Myanmar military from doing this. You’ve seen where China’s actually given some quite high-profile awards to some of the senior generals that are involved in all this criminal activity very recently. And, you know, I think China’s Great Wall commemorative medal went to, actually the head of police of Myanmar.  That was earlier this year, despite the fact that the Myanmar military’s Border Guard Force is still very actively involved on the Thai-Myanmar border in perpetrating this criminal activity. And very recently, he even organized a public prayer service where all of the members of that Border Guard Force, including himself, wore T-shirts with the likeness of She Zhijiang, the person who’s in that Thai prison, praying for his return. So, they’re praying not for his return to China to face criminal sentencing. They’re praying for his return to Shwe Kokko to continue operating this criminal hub. This is a global crisis that’s out of control. It needs governments around the world to take it seriously. It really needs societies to start mobilizing, and it needs countries to collaborate in dealing with this problem.

Graeme Smith  47:28

Jason, I really want to get home hold of one of those T-shirts if I can. If you do come across one, please, please send it to me. Jason, thanks so much for your time.

Jason Tower  47:37

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

Graeme Smith  47:39

You’ve been listening to Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Jason Tower and Greg Raymond. Our editing in this episode is by Andy Hazel, background research by Wing Kuang, social media and transcripts by Juliette Baxter. Our theme music is by Suzie Wilkins and our cartoons and GIFs are courtesy of Seb Danta, bye for now.

The post Special Criminal Zones: China’s Pig Butchers Pivot to the West appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs. And I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Center for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Louisa Lim  00:36

This month, we’re following up on last month’s episode about Chinese scam syndicates, which are now being called a global security crisis. A $3 trillion industry employing 300,000 people in Southeast Asia in a form of modern slavery. And we’re going to hear from inside these scam camps. Our guest is someone who contacted us after hearing the last episode, Neo Lu, who spent seven months in 2022 trapped inside an online labor scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border. Neo, and I understand this is not your real name, that we’re using a pseudonym, and you chose Neo because of the matrix. First of all, thank you so much for reaching out to us. Tell us your story of how you ended up entrapped in this compound guarded by armed men in Myanmar.

Neo Lu  01:35

Oh, it’s my honor to be invited to the podcast, and I have to say this, long time listener and first-time caller, I’m afraid. And for my pseudonym, I decided to disclose my real name at this moment, Yihao Lu, and, of course, aka Neo Lu. And, okay, back to your question. I was in Dubai for a while, and I decided to get some job. And it was a job opportunity in Thailand. The title was English and to Chinese translator. So I took the job and did not suspecting or expecting anything out of ordinary, so to speak. And then I went to Thailand. So right after I get out of the airport, I was loaded into a van and then travelled half day to the border town. And it was my last moment, if I was aware what I was about to face to rescue myself, but I missed that opportunity to spend the night in that hotel at the border town. Then the second morning, I was trafficked into Burma, alongside with two other individuals, one is another Chinese national, and another is Kenya female.

Louisa Lim  03:03

What was the point at which you realized that you were kind of trapped?

Neo Lu  03:07

It was the moment the SUV which were, you know, transporting three of us to some really rural area, you know, just some derelict and not populated [area]. And the moment that driver, you know, pull over, stopped at the roadside and asking us, you know, not asking us, but more like a signaling us, because the driver cannot speak English. Or maybe he can speak English, but he chose not to. But signaling us to get out of the vehicle. And once I get out of the vehicle, I spotted it was, it was just some rural area. I was panicking at the moment. What had I gotten myself into?

Graeme Smith  04:00

A long way from Dubai. I mean, in, could you maybe describe what the compound looked like, to us? I mean, one thing that strikes me reading your account is sort of the obvious criminality. I mean, there’s, there’s drugs on offer, there’s kind of, you know, built-in brothels. I mean, what was the compound like? Is it like anything you’d ever seen before?

Neo Lu 04:19

It looks like some, some shabby, shabby industrial zone in China. I had, you know, visited, you know, because back in China, I was working with the supply chain, so to speak. I was working for a medical device manufacturer, supplying some NASDAQ-listed medical tycoon in US. So, I was visiting lots of industrial compounds. So, the Dongmei camp, so to speak, the Dongmei camp, which was in which was the camp enslaved me. It was just like a very low, low, low level, very shabby industrial park with insufficient funds, so to speak.

Louisa Lim  05:03

And talk us through what you had to do once you were there. How did they put you to work?

Neo Lu  05:10

Oh, the first day and the second day were really interesting and intense, I would say, because you see, the first day was literally the afternoon I was waiting in the eight-bed dormitory, just waiting there. And some senior, or let’s say middle level management, came over and asked me to surrender all my electronic devices. And I did. And after that, you know, throughout some conversation, he was trying to learn, or at least fathom my, let’s say education level, or my skills, my skills in typing. And why is, why is that he was doing that? He was going through my, electric, let’s say cell phones, browsing history or chat history to see if I had reached out to any authority, so to speak, or my family, friends, outsiders, to call for help. Okay, and it was the first day. And after the first, let’s say acquaintance, they just took all my electronic devices and leave me in that room because it was a working day to them. And then I believe, you know, behind me, they were just go through all the chat history to see if I do possess the skills of typing and to see if I am eloquent enough to handle this pig butchering scheme or something like that.

Louisa Lim  06:52

Maybe we should just explain what pig butchering is. So, pig butchering, these pig butchering schemes are called that because they rely on scammers. How do you say it, reeling in targets and fattening them up by talking to them over long periods of time before they cheat them?

Neo Lu  07:11

Well, if, if I have the option, I would call it a romance scam. It’s just, you know, establishing, trying to establish a relationship or friendship via the internet, and gain, the trust then just, just cash in whatever way they see fit.

Louisa Lim  07:32

Your scam compound was mainly or all romance scams?

Neo Lu  07:35

This cartel specializing in this Chinese-language based romance scam or pig butchering scam. But other cartel operating in the same compound, the Dongmei camp, I won’t be able to say that. But some of those scammers, or my ex co-workers, my ex co-workers, did share some information with me. They were telling me that one of major cartel organization in the compound is specializing in putting out English scams. But I do not know which type it could be.

Louisa Lim  07:35

So, there’s more than one scam compound, more than one scam group in one compound?

Neo Lu  08:07

Yes, correct.

Graeme Smith  08:10

And your scam? I mean, it was very specific. You were targeting women between the ages of 30 and 50, and usually married women as well. Can you explain why they were the target?

Neo Lu 08:34

The script is targeting some women during that age period, because any underage over that 30-year-old should be less financially stable, which means that they got little to no money to invest [in] those bogus investments. And if we are looking at someone like at 60 years or even older than that, they would not be that tech savvy to follow the instruction of the scammer, to install, to download and install those, those malicious malware, because from time to time, you will encounter some victim that they do possess, some made in China self and they got some backdoors. You know, backdoors security firms installed, banning any application outside of those whitelisted apps installation so the scammer have to hand to hand to guide those victim to bypass those security measures. And it is really difficult for them to ask those senior citizens, senior victim to do that. And by the end of the day, they invest a lot of time in, you know, establishing that relationship.

Louisa Lim  10:06

That basically, old people are too bad at tech to get scammed?

Neo Lu  10:10

Well, I well, I can’t say that but yes, but yes, I’m sorry.

Graeme Smith  10:16

Which is, which is hilarious, because our normal view of scamming is that it is something that old people fall for, but, but, yeah, not in every case.

Neo Lu  10:24

Not in every case. And why female, and especially married and estranged female? Chinese society, or at least the society in China, is quasi-conservative, and the people married for financial causes instead of, you know, just out of love or something like that. So, if we are looking at some elder citizens’ marriage, they are not happy or something like that, because it’s just a financial collaboration, so to speak. Therefore, a charming, a charming prince came to a middle life female’s failed marriage life, and you know, you know what’s going to happen next.

Louisa Lim  10:48

So Neo, you weren’t actually scamming people, were you? You were working as an accountant, tracking the money flows, and I was really interested in the fact that you found that, looking at the statistics, you were able to deduce that one in ten people who the scammers reached out to responded. That seems really high?

Neo Lu  11:41

I would say it’s not high. The ratio of passing through that friend request is not high, or at least not high enough in the eye of the senior member. Because if you are going to use WeChat to send out a friend request, you will hit the quota. Because if you are sending out, let’s say, five requests a day from one WeChat account, Tencent may rule these actions as a suspicious action. They will just ban it, okay, and it will be very expensive for the scam organizers to bear such cost.

Graeme Smith  12:26

And that’s one thing that really interests me about this, is that a lot of the cost and a lot of, I guess, the profit, is the platforms that these women are on in the first place, particularly WeChat and Alipay and the data brokers who are, you know, basically buying the data from these companies. I mean, is part of the problem that these social media platforms sell their users data?

Neo Lu  12:48

Yes, correct. And you are overlooking one thing, which is you have to understand that this WeChat is a Chinese-based platform, okay, but if you are looking at some English-based scam you are not using WeChat. It literally means the cost of running operation will be reduced dramatically. Because, to my understanding, and based on my statistical deduction, the cost-to-profit ratio is around 100 percent to 120 percent, give or take. Yeah. However, when it comes to the English-based scam, I was told by one of the senior member of the organization, the Chinese-based scam was not that costly ten years ago. It was a give or take a 200 percent but again, that’s their words. They are trying to reinvent themselves to invest in the English-based scam because it is cheaper and it is easier to dodge Chinese government’s hunt. Okay? And they were saying the English scam should be, you know, cost-effective or more lucrative, just like the Chinese scam ten years ago.

Louisa Lim  14:08

Let’s talk a bit about the human trafficking side of it. A United Nations report says that more than 120,000 people have been forced to work in Myanmar. And there’s even a Chinese film called No More Bets [孤注一掷] about Chinese people trafficked to work in a scam group in Southeast Asia. And I think we can play a bit of the trailer.

Neo Lu  14:33

Just before you play the trailer, I am, I am in the film too, as well, not in the film itself, but I was in the trailer and in the documentary session.

Louisa Lim  14:47

Okay, let’s listen to a bit of the trailer.

Clip  14:49

想成功，先发疯 If you want to succeed, first go crazy

不顾一切向钱冲 Rush for the cash, ignore all distractions

拼一次富三代 Struggle once, and you’ll be rich for three generations

拼命才能不失败 If you give your all, you will not fail

开工！Start work!

炒股，挖币，网游，电商，博彩。。。美女荷官，在线发牌

Stock trading, crypto mining, online games, e-commerce, online gambling… our beautiful croupiers host online betting

Louisa Lim  15:11

What kind of people were caught up in the scam with you, what kind of people were trafficked and were living in that compound?

Neo Lu  15:19

I had some encounters with those self-claimed victim inside of it. One of them is like in his 20-year-old. His nickname is Adam, Adam, and he was saying he was from some rural area of China. And I would say he is around the 20-year-old, ish, something like that. And he was saying it is his first time to get out of China. And he got no idea why he ended up in this compound.

Graeme Smith  15:57

It’s interesting, because when you arrived there, they made fun of you as the college boy, and the image I have is that they try to get college boys because they’re obviously more articulate and better at scamming. But it sounds like maybe that wasn’t the case.

Neo Lu  16:10

Because, to me, if, if I could get rid of those moral, let’s say standard or moral compass for a while. Let’s just focusing on the business, business gains, so to speak, or at least, I am an employee for my whole life. And from my point of view, doing scam is not really a good job money-wise. Because you see, if I was picturing myself as a bookkeeper, I have to work 100 hours per week, and got one day off per month. Yeah, to earn 10,000 Chinese yuan, one quarter of my current job’s hourly rate, okay, I don’t need to do that. And if I do have the skills what I need to present myself as some sort of salesperson, to be fair, scamming is just like doing sales.

Louisa Lim  16:10

It’s a peculiar setup, isn’t it, though? Because they did pay you, even though they held you captive.

Neo Lu  17:18

I understand there are some good old classic slavery happened in America. I do believe at the time, slavers do pay those slaves salaries. But it doesn’t mean it is not slavery at all. They have to keep the slaves motivated to do their daily job, to do whatever they were told to do. And I believe the salary is just a means to keep them motivated.

Graeme Smith  17:56

And is there a possibility, like, if you really, you know, work wholeheartedly, appear to be transformed into a scammer. Is there any scope for a change in your status, or is it just simply a case of once a slave, always a slave? I mean, can you gain their trust and become literally a proper part of the management?

Neo Lu  18:18

I will say it’s more like if we have the opportunity, because if some middle level or senior level personnel decide to leave or decided to escape, okay. And if and they were succeeding in doing that, then they need to promote someone out of those team to certain levels. But I was told by more than one middle level personnel who are involved, who are directly involved in scamming people. They were telling me if someone could be promoted to middle level, so to speak, it will become… They are definitely considered to be one of themselves, one of them. Because the scam, the lot they are involved with, should be humongous. Okay, there’s no turning back for them, regardless whether they were enslaved in first place, or they, if they voluntarily joined the scam industry in first place. There’s no turning back for them. So therefore, those senior member would know that they will not, let’s say they will not be some undercover or they will not be the one who talk to the cops if shit hits the fan.

Graeme Smith  19:45

Yeah. And so get to get back to the movie. I mean, is it in any way realistic? I know you’re in the trailer and you’re in the documentary, but does it realistically portray the industry? Because reading your accounts, what strikes me is the mundanity of it all. Yeah, I mean, even the boss Xi Ge 喜哥comes across as sort of a little bit sad really, you know, like he’s, he’s just a boring guy worried about profit and loss.

Neo Lu  20:09

Well, well, you have to understand, it is a for-profit film. It is not documentary and I was told by the crew member. Okay, I was told by a crew member, so [the] movie had been sitting for four years not getting clearance to go box office four years, okay? And the version you have watched is censored, is modified. And I would not criticize it for not doing this industry or doing someone like me the victim justice. Because, well, you know the power those bigger powers, those greater powers, are in the play. But let’s, let’s back to something less abstract, some glamorous US dollars, so swashing around things like that. I mean, it varies. Different cartel got different way to incentivize those scammers. For instance, the one I have been with, they will do because you have to understand that is a like, WeWork open space. Yeah, WeWork open space. So, you have, you could see, like, 70 people crammed into one room. And those fans and those ACs are, you know, swashing around, and there is some big loudspeaker playing some cheesy music at the background. And whenever they said, “okay, we are making some gains, we make a mark.” And as they will turn the volume down and stand up say, “Let’s make a congratulation to Mr. Neo. He’s just, his client, his client just make a top up of 20,000 Chinese yuan and…” People (clapping noise).

Louisa Lim  22:12

That’s exactly like real estate sales in China. If you buy an apartment, that’s what happens in the hall. They like ring a bell and everyone cheers.

Neo Lu  22:21

Well, yes, I guess I mean some, and I saw some clips in those Street News Channel. Some, some, some compound would even fire up some flares, firecrackers in celebration of some big scores. In a movie, well, they have to make it dramatic. So, I won’t be able to say if it really happened, but something like that definitely happened in the compound.

Louisa Lim  22:49

I was really interested in the way in which you have brought out a lot of information with you, and quite forensically as well, and including information about money flows. You found that you tracked that in five months, your syndicate had made $4.4 million from 214 victims. Do you know what then happened up the chain to that money?

Neo Lu  23:15

To be fairly honest, I won’t be able to say that, because you see, well, for those low-level scammers, they will be paid in Thailand Baht cash. And for those, for those, uh, middle level and the senior level, they will be paid in USDT, the cryptocurrency.

Graeme Smith  23:38

Just to be clear, that’s Tether you’re talking about there, yeah?

Neo Lu  23:42

Yes, USDT, not a single dime of the real US dollars involved.

Graeme Smith  23:47

Fascinating, yeah, because there was a study done of pig butchering, and it found that more than four fifths of the money from pig butchering scams went into Tether, and that seems to back up what you’re saying.

Neo Lu  23:59

Well, unfortunately, yes, the scammer would direct that victim to top up in some bogus investment application via the assistance of the customer service. So, on one end, the customer service will inform and will change the bogus investment account to the money they topped up and then inform the victim, okay, transaction complete, top up, complete. And on the other hand, the third-party carders will calculate the cost of money laundering. Usually it will, it will be 20 percent of the so-called, the top of the funds will go to the money laundering pocket. And the rest of the value will be converted into USDT and it will be paid to the scam cartel by the end of every working day, which is midnight. My job in the money laundering was just recording those scores, so to speak, to make sure that the money launderer or the carders are not underpaying the cartel. They usually will do some multiple layering to make sure the funds is no longer traceable. Or, they would just ask some driver, it should be a jargon, driver, to cash it out in some ATM machine. Different scam type got a different risk, because the pig butchering risk imposes less risk of victim come to the realization, okay, they got scammed and they are going to call the police: “I had made the transaction. Please freeze the card.” And the risk of getting card frozen will be represented in the cost of money laundering. The higher risk of getting frozen, the higher cost of money laundering, the carder will impose onto the scam cartel.

Louisa Lim  26:17

Okay, so what you’re saying is, as a romance scammer, you scam money from people, and then it goes to a third-party money launderer in China that makes it untraceable. People inside the scam compound are getting paid. They’re getting paid small amounts in Baht or in cryptocurrency called Tether, but still, the bosses are pulling in lots of money. Did you have any indication of what they’re doing with that? Or is that sort of drugs and other things on the side, or what is happening to those millions?

Neo Lu  26:57

Oh, little correction, the scam cartel will be paid in USDT from by the money laundering group, but they are not going to be paid in Thailand Baht. And they could just exchange the USDT to Thailand Baht if the cartel want to do that. So back to the USDT, let’s say distribution or disposition, so to speak. The cartel boss or the senior member of the cartel, they would spend the UDST, the hard earned USDT, on drugs, women and other debaucheries, so to speak. One of the major, let’s say, event, or the benefit, as a senior member is the outing, you know, hang out in other specialized casino outside of Dongmei camp. Okay, they got some trips to the outside casino. They spend money, just have some some fun there. And I was told the one of middle level, okay, team leader level escaped during that occasion, during that outing, yeah. And I told the Chinese police as well, but they did not find that person.

Louisa Lim  28:20

Neo in the file of material that you sent us, there was some really harrowing videos showing you being tortured, and you’re being tortured by someone with an electric stun gun. How did this come about?

Neo Lu  28:37

It’s, again it’s a long story, because at the beginning of incarceration in that torture chamber, I was given the opportunity to say, to say, I am willing to become a scammer instead. At the moment, they are aware that I was reaching out to the New York Times, and they were giving me the opportunity to be a scammer, but I refused. I told them, I want out. I want out. I want to pay the ransom. But of course, they did not label that ransom as ransom. They call it “compensation”.

Louisa Lim  29:16

How much money were they asking for?

Neo Lu  29:18

Well, initially they are not willing to disclose the amount, but once I told them, I just want to leave, they told me half million Chinese yuan. 70,000 US dollars, give or take. And I would mention I would put a note on it, my initial ransom was 30 US dollars back in June 2022.

Louisa Lim  29:45

30,000?

Neo Lu  29:46

Yes, yeah, but they ramped it up to 70,000 US dollars in January 2023.

Louisa Lim  29:54

Why did they torture you? What was the purpose?

Neo Lu  29:57

I believe it, because I had emphasized that I just want out. I just want to, I just want my family to pay the ransom. So, at the very moment I told them I need to pay the ransom, they start torturing. Because I do believe it is more like a SOP to them, to be fairly honest. SOP, standard operation procedure, to them. If any person decided to reach out to outsiders, outside of the compound, for rescue, for release, and especially paying the ransom, they have to pull out some punishment onto them and let the hostage to talk to their to talk to their family, to make it real. And I believe it is the whole purpose of all the torture. But to be fairly honest, just like what you mentioned before, it’s like, it’s just like a day job. It’s so banal to them, it’s, you know, by the moment, I told them, I just want out, they just start torture on the same night.

Louisa Lim  31:08

So they sent those videos to your father?

Neo Lu  31:11

Yes, but before sending them, it was like five days, five days of electric shock and beating up. So, before that, before that, I already suffered a lot of lot, but they were not recorded, and they were not sent. The electric shock is just one-third of the torture the night they recorded, but it was never sending through. So sorry, it’s just the, all the visual material I got. I mean, I wish they could. They did send it through, because it could help me a lot.

Louisa Lim  31:48

What was the purpose of torturing you for five days? If it’s not for a ransom video?

Neo Lu  31:54

They could just let me talk to my family with my utmost, I don’t know, regret, or my utmost genuinety, I know how sure if I should put this way. So, I could tell my family with such urgency, because I don’t really want to be tortured. Nobody wants to get tortured. So, I could just say, tell my family what happened in real time. If I do not get the money, if you did not send the ransom, okay, I will get beaten tomorrow again.

Graeme Smith  32:27

So, you’re sending them messages as you’re being tortured over these five days with increasing urgency?

Neo Lu  32:33

Yes.

Graeme Smith  32:34

After all this had happened after these torture videos, how did you know, how did your release come about? What was the process?

Neo Lu  32:41

I was collecting all those information. Just keep my head down, just like a good, loyal slave working for the cartel. But in the meantime, I was reaching out to my friend, to my family. I believe it was back in November 2022. So, I was talking to my family, if you want to get me out, okay, you have to find some person who got the connections, got the relation with the BGF, [Karen] Border Guard Force of Burma. Otherwise, nothing works. Okay, nothing works. Because if you are going to pay the cartel this sum of money, they do not have any check and balance. They could just resell me to another cartel, another human trafficker, something like that okay? To them, it is simple money. But if you could find someone, keep them in check from the BGF. They could oversee the handover, and they could ensure it could, I could be handed over, I can be released. It was early November, and then I start to talk to New York Times around December 2022 you know, smuggling all those documents out. I did not say the word, but everyone understand what does it mean? I, if I died, then those documents could see the daylight. Yeah, some, some other day, and I could be martyred. But gladly, I did not receive the martyrdom. And then, then the January, okay, it was bad luck. I went a little bit too far to talk to the boss, Brother Joy, and he sent me to the, he sent me to the torture chamber for disrespect. And I, well, I did my homework properly. I did erase all the chat history. Did erase the browser history, something like that. Every time I finished my work, you know, undercover work. But I was realizing I told my family, okay, I told my family, if they did not hear me in some consecutive days, then I asked them to just go to the police, go to the embassy. Go to anyone they can find to report my missing case or something like that. And I always come to realization that they are going to do the work on their end. Therefore, I voluntarily told the cartel on the second day of the torture chamber. I told them, “You know what? I have spoken to New York Times, I have spoken to journalists”, on the second day. And then they give me a couple day more to allow them to think over what happened to me and what they should do about me. And then they come to me, okay. They don’t know about the New York Times. They literally got no idea what the New York Times means. But they say, okay, we will give you the options. Option one, pay the ransom, or, let’s say, to pay the compensation. Option two, be a jolly scammer, because they have big plan for me. Bigger plan for me. They want me to lead some English scam they could establish in the following days of 2023. Because they see my, because they see my potential in my language skills. And I just like what I said. I chose option to… I want out. And then the torture began.

Louisa Lim  36:38

But then your family was able to make contact with someone who you call Dragon, who had links to the Burmese Border Force, and he managed to get you released?

Neo Lu  36:50

Yes, correct.

Graeme Smith  36:51

And did you ever meet this guy, or did sort of his proxies show up?

Neo Lu  36:57

Yes, I had met this person, this Dragon in my home, and he was saying, I am the only person he met. I am the only person who got rescued by him, he met. Because he was making this comment. And I think it is really fair, because those, the other unfortunate personnel who got rescued are not that… are really underprivileged. My status of being the perfect victim, or let’s say that that my effort in trying to be the perfect victim charmed him to visit me. Because he understand many of those unsuspecting souls who got rescued later on. Initially, they do have some thoughts in scamming people, or they did practice some scams during their enslavement. But in my case, as he did some due diligence in the compound, I did not scam anyone. Well, at least, I did not score anything at all. I did not participate in drug taking. And to be fairly honest, I did, I did not even try the marijuana in my days in the UK. So, so you have to understand that part. And I did not drink alcohol, I did not smoke, I did not buy in sex, and I did not gamble anything like that, something like that in the compound. So, I believe it did charm Dragon to rescue me and to visit me afterwards.

Louisa Lim  38:45

And how much did your family end up having to pay, either as compensation, ransom, or to Dragon in order to ensure that you were released?

Neo Lu  38:58

I wouldn’t be using this term pay. It’s more like a gesture of gratitude, because initially, as we all understand that we have to pay the ransom to the cartel because of those two videos, yeah, the torture videos. The BGF, get me out without paying the cartel in the first place. So, once I got released, the money was, the ransom was not paid at all. But by the end of the day, my family decided to show the gratitude to either Dragon or the BGF. And they paid 270,000 Chinese yuan by the end of the day, and the money went to BGF.

Graeme Smith  39:49

And you’re saying that the Karen BGF didn’t have to pay the scammers because these hostage videos had kind of, you know, given them a bad reputation, or wasn’t good for business is that was that the reasoning?

Neo Lu  40:02

Correct. I was told by some sources, the person who directly involved in my human trafficking who bought me from the human trafficker in the… He was sent to the barracks of BGF and being tortured for 30 days or being punished.

Graeme Smith  40:27

And one thing that surprised me, all these you know, the movies and so forth that come out portray the Chinese government as coming to save people. Did the embassy have any role at all in your release?

Neo Lu  40:37

No. The short answer is no. The long one is fucking no. Okay, let’s turn the sassiness level down. In the initial first months of enslavement, I did some research online because I had to survive in that hostile, hostile area. And I do not find any successful cases, you know, conducted by Chinese Embassy in Burma. Or at least, I did not see any any, let’s say, trustworthy or valuable news coverage in Chinese media. And then I turn my eye to English media later on, but that’s another story. Then I reach to a conclusion, which is, well, Chinese Embassy, Chinese police, are not functioning at all in this situation. And I do fear, I do fear if my parents called [the] embassy, all the embassy could do is to tell my family to call the Burmese cop. All they need to do is it’s calling the BGF personnel, whoever is managing that compound. “Oh, one of your guys is reporting to Chinese Embassy claiming that this person is enslaved in your compound. You need to make the problem go away.” And all they need to do is forward that information to the cartel. Okay, this person had called. You have to get it resolved. Either release me, allow me to regain my freedom, or the cartel could just punish me up and sold me to other cartel. And then the military figure, the BGF personnel who is managing Dongmei camp, could just call the Burmese police force, “We had not found any person like that in such compound. No, it’s a false alarm.” And my report could go away easily. And then I will get punished for coming to Chinese cops or Chinese Embassy.

Graeme Smith  43:03

So Yihao, the really interesting thing that you have dug up, I think in your research, I mean forced research, if you want to call it that, is that you have found a Chinese state owned enterprise, quite a well-known one, China Railway 21, was involved in the construction of this, this Dongmei camp. And that is, I think, kind of another step, because this is a very respectable state-owned enterprise that is profiting from building a scam center in in Myanmar. I mean, how did you find that out?

Neo Lu  43:40

Oh, to be fairly honest it was readily available in the public domain. All you need to do is just Google, of course, in Chinese, Dongmei camp, and it will just pop out, pop out in no time. Because it was literally in the promotional material published by Dongmei camp itself and by some state-owned website as well. So, it’s readily available in the public domain.

Graeme Smith  44:13

And the owner of this camp, just to talk about the ultimate beneficiary, is someone we talked about in the last episode, a guy called Broken Tooth. Um, I mean, what, what, how does he benefit from this compound?

Neo Lu  44:25

Wan Kuok-koi and, uh, aka, Broken Tooth. Well, it’s, you know, it’s like bringing back some old memory of, you know, watching some Hong Kong movie in old days by just mentioning the name. Okay, so my understanding, based on the research I have done or the information readily available in the public domain, Wan Kuok-koi established the Dongmei group in Hong Kong. And it got some other associates, some high-level politicians from Malaysia, are very involved in establishing Dong Mei Zone in Myawaddy, Burma, back in 2019 to 2020. And they were investing and drawing financial support from the public, and that’s why they were doing the promotional material online.

Louisa Lim  45:23

It is interesting that that promotional material that you talk about, these companies, they have these very respectable-looking websites, these scam companies, you know, with pictures of groundbreaking ceremonies and sort of tree planting or, you know, that kind of stuff. To what extent do you think these companies are receiving protection from the Chinese state or the Myanmar regime?

Neo Lu  45:52

The China Railway 21st is a state-owned company from China, and on that front, yes, of course, it’s their own company. And if we are talking about Broken Tooth and its Dong Mei Group is which is registered, established in Hong Kong. I will say, I have no idea at this moment. Because, based on the report from the US Treasury in 2020 it gives Broken Tooth some status, but it was not confirmed, but rather denied by the Chinese government. So again, I would put a question mark on it.

Graeme Smith  46:39

And on the Myanmar side?

Neo Lu  46:40

Oh, definitely yes. And I think I did do some due diligence on the Burmese business registry, and I found a company called Dongmei, Dongmei Group, or Dongmei Company, I can’t recall. And the timing and everything is matching to the groundbreaking, and, you know, construction of that. And my understanding is it do receive the support of local BGF forces, just like what I mentioned before. The BGF forces is guarding, was guarding, and is guarding, and they will be guarding Dongmei zone for protecting them from the other military forces in the region. And I believe it is rather evident to call that the Burmese junta government is supporting such atrocity.

Louisa Lim  47:40

It’s, I mean, you seem to be taking a huge risk, to have compiled all this data, and to have contacted the N’w York Times, and to be talking to us, and to be talking so openly about this, you must have, you must have made very powerful enemies. Why are you taking this risk?

Neo Lu  47:59

Well, well, to be fairly honest, you if you take the money, then you take the beating. There’s no other way around. Well, if, let’s say, let’s do a little accounting, if Chinese scams, Burmese military and the Thailand, Thailand backers and the Thailand elite and some of bad actors in China are making big money out of my misery and others’ misery, then they shall get punished. And me, from my personal angle, I want revenge. Simple as that.

Graeme Smith  48:44

Yihao, thanks for joining us.

Neo Lu  48:45

Thank you.

Graeme Smith  48:52

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, bringing you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guest and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang. Our music is by Susie Wilkins, and our cartoons and GIFs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post The Pig Butcher’s Payroll: Inside a Romance Scam appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs. And I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Center for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. And this is a very special show. It is our 100th episode, which is almost impossible to believe. We’ve been going since 2016. We just talked to our man in the studio, he’s now got children, I’ve got children. But we’re all looking wonderful and glamorous. In that time, we’ve done all kinds of things. We won the Australian Podcast Awards back in 2017. We’ve had some incredible episodes. We were among the first to talk to Uyghur communities in Australia about their families in concentration camps. We have been accused of undermining the sovereignty of the Solomon Islands. And we even had an absolutely tragic Chinese food competition that went pear shaped in so many ways… so we won’t be doing that again. But it’s been such a fun ride. And I’d like to take the chance to thank all of our amazing guests, our long-suffering families and everyone who’s listened to our show. We’re really grateful because without you guys listening, we would not be doing this. And there’ll be mugs, by the way for the 100th episode for all the lucky people in the studio here today. But we had a big problem. We didn’t know what this episode was going to be about. And then the subject presented itself.

Clip  01:51

Yaoyuan de dong fang you yi tiao jiang, tade mingzi jiu jiao chang jiang. Yaoyuan de… (遥远的东方有一条江，它的名字就叫长江。遥远的 …)

LOUISA LIM  02:03

That’s the Taiwanese popstar Li Jianfu singing Hou Dejian’s “Descendants of the Dragon.” And in this episode, we’ll be delving deep into the debate about dragons, that most symbolic of all 12 zodiac animals. So, we decided to devote an entire episode to the study of the dragon or loong-ology. We have three dracontine experts to help us out: the Australian sinologist Linda Jaivin, who wrote the Monkey and the Dragon about this very song, James Carter, who’s a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University, and Annie Ren, a postdoctoral fellow of Chinese literature at ANU.

Graeme Smith  02:45

And this year, of course, is the Year of the Dragon. Chinese state media have been going all out trying to rebrand the Chinese dragon as loong (龙), even in the English language, arguing that the loong and the dragon are completely different kinds of creature. One argument that’s been run is that Western dragons are bad agents of chaos, breathing fire, hoarding gold, that kind of thing, whereas Chinese dragons are noble and good. So quick two sentence summary from the guests. Should we agree with Chinese state media and start calling Chinese dragons loong or not? James, you first.

James Carter  03:21

I’ll check the box that says “no”. I think there we should stick with dragons, and I don’t agree with either of their premises about either the Western dragons or the Chinese one. So, I’m firmly in the “no” camp.

Linda Jaivin  03:33

I’m firmly in the ‘no’ camp as well, because of two reasons. One is you can’t dictate how language works in other countries. That’s one thing. Otherwise we’d all be calling Basque Country Euskadi, you know. But the other thing is that Chinese dragons have been agents of chaos. What about the King of the Eastern Sea and so on, the dragons that withhold rain and cause droughts? Or cause floods when people don’t worship them correctly?

Annie Ren  04:00

Yes, and I would also agree with James and Linda. I think it is more logically speaking, you know, dragon came from the ancient Greek, meaning “large serpent”. And definitely in, you know, early Chinese writings, for instance, the oracle bones inscriptions, writings from about 3000 years ago, found on ox bones and turtle’s shells. There’s definitely a way of writing the character loong that resembles a large serpent. So, in that way the translation is, you know, very accurate.

LOUISA LIM  04:28

And let’s, let’s go back to that beginning, the oracle bones 6000 years ago. Annie, can you tell us a bit about those first representation of the dragon and what we can tell from them?

Annie Ren  04:43

Well, I think just intuitively speaking, it’s very likely that you know, the ancient ancestors observed some natural phenomenon such as the lightning. And they were just thinking, oh my god, there must be some terrifying beast in the skies, causing this sort of commotion. And from these early oracle bone inscriptions, you can see that the dragon is being represented as either a “L” in the shape of a snake or an alligator. And based on the fact that, you know, dragons from very early on have become associated with rainmaking rituals. Personally, I think it’s more likely that they’re inspired by alligators because the ancient Chinese raised alligators as pets and also for food, and they use skins of the alligators for war drums, etc.

Graeme Smith  05:35

And Linda, how different do you think Chinese dragons are from Western ones?

Linda Jaivin  05:40

Well, the Chinese don’t battle dragons except Ne Zha 呢咋 did the, another mythological figure. It feels kind of funny to be talking about two imaginary beasts, of course. But how different is this exactly?

Graeme Smith  05:57

It’s all we do at universities, surely?

Linda Jaivin  05:59

And also doesn’t Wales have a dragon on its flag? You know, which symbolises some kind of, which signifies some kind of pride in the beasts. But I think one of the differences, so far as I know, is that the dragon has a female counterpart, which is the fenghuang 凤凰, or the phoenix. And it’s quite interesting the Chinese government doesn’t really like they’re coming after our phoenixes now, they don’t really like that translation. But because the West also has a Phoenix and the Western Phoenix behaves in a different way, again, as the Chinese Phoenix. So they might want all Westerners to start calling the phoenix the fenghuang.

LOUISA LIM  06:42

James, you said that you were against the kind of good dragon, bad dragon dichotomy. Tell us why?

James Carter  06:49

The idea that the dragons are, you know, in the Chinese sense, are munificent and wise and virtuous. I mean, there certainly are dragons that are that way. But there’s plenty of episodes and even in the official histories and from in the Yuan, the Ming, the Qing and back earlier, dragons appear, and occasionally they’re good portents, but oftentimes, they’re very destructive. People die when dragons get involved. People starve to death when a drought is caused by a dragon, or a flood is caused by a dragon, or a lightning storm is caused by a dragon. And there’s examples of dragons appearing as waterspouts that might pick boats up into the air and hurl them across the marsh. And once in a while they set the boats down gently and everybody lives to tell the tale. But other times they’re just left in a, in a wreckage on the fields. So, I think that the idea that they’re good and orderly is a little bit over overblown, doesn’t match up with the examples you see from the past. And then in the western side, I also think that’s kind of overdrawn. I mean, yes, there are certainly lots of dragons that are up to no good. But I think dragons are also revered and sort of feared as examples of power. But if that power can be harnessed properly, they’re shown to be real agents or forces who are trying to impose their will on the territory, there can use dragons in order to do that. I think it was George RR Martin with the Game of Thrones. He made the analogy that he saw dragons as nuclear weapons, that they’re the source of power that were a threat to all of humanity, because they were so powerful. But they’re not either intrinsically good or bad. They’re just things that people are able to control or not control. So in that way, I actually think they line up with the with the Chinese dragon. Which is they’re not necessarily good, they’re not necessarily bad, but depending on how people interact with them, they can be either one.

Graeme Smith  08:40

And contrary to Hou Dejian’s song, Annie, not all Chinese people have always been the ancestors of the dragon. The official historian Sima Qian, way back in 91 BCE, referred to Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, the first emperor as the “ancestral dragon”. How has this sort of imperial association played out over the years?

Annie Ren  09:00

Well, I think just adding to James’ point, you know, the image that we have the dragon as sort of the most powerful creature and Chinese mythology isn’t always like this, you know. Dragon has always been, you know, in the past was just one of the many mythical figures and the ascent of the dragon for me really corresponds with the concentration of power into the hands of one person, that is the Emperor. You know, the heavenly-chosen executor of the mandate. And this we see happening in the Han Dynasty, that’s second century BCE. That’s the first time when we see the China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang being referred to as you know, the ancestral dragon. And the association between the dragon and also the imperial despot comes really to give the founder of the Han Dynasty a legitimacy to rule. So unlike China’s first Emperor, who came from a very noble background, the, you know, the founder of the Han Dynasty Liu Bang 刘邦 came from very humble origins. And that’s why then in those historical accounts, his mother must have been impregnated by a dragon for him, for Liu Bang to have this sort of, you know, legitimacy.

Graeme Smith  10:16

Linda, I can see you wanting to jump in there.

Linda Jaivin  10:18

No, it’s very interesting because the whole point that both of you in raising about Qin Shihuang reminds me about something in the song “Heirs of the Dragon.” I prefer heirs because it’s more of a spiritual descendency. But anyway, in Hou Dejian’s song, he has a line which is “under the dragon’s claws” or “under the dragon’s feet I have” you know, “I’ve grown up under the dragon’s feet.” And Hou Dejian told me that people sing that line with great pride, like, “I have grown up.” And he said, he meant it as a sense of oppression. And that kind of chimes with the idea of Qin Shihuang who was such a despot. It’s the idea of this dragon representing something very big, very powerful, very overwhelming that is China. And it’s not a comfortable feeling to grow up under the claws of a dragon.

Annie Ren  11:10

It’s this, I really want to ask Hou Dejian whether it’s the four-claw dragon or the five-claw dragon. Because in the Ming Dynasty, you know, they officially decided that only the five-claw dragon can represent the, you know, the Emperor. And, you know, if you’re a senior minister, you can still wear clothing with dragons on it. But the dragon only has four claws.

Linda Jaivin  11:32

I think it’s a good question. But I think he actually means it. It’s such, he means the dragon to represent China, which I think is is really interesting. Because for the West, if you look at the number of book titles that have dragon in the title to represent China, including one from 1956 and the Cold War, which I love so much, because we all know red, we all know Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. So, in 1956, somebody wrote a book Red Dragon Over China. And you know, in Australia, somebody wrote a history of Chinese in Australia, Chinese and Australians or Chinese Australians called I think it’s called The Dragon and the Kangaroo. So, it doesn’t necessarily represent power to the popular imagination.

Graeme Smith  12:22

We don’t want to get into dragon titles. My favorite one is “Milking the Dragon.” That’s an actual title of a book chapter that I saw at a conference… Anyway… Louisa, I can see you jumping in.

LOUISA LIM  12:33

Yeah, talking about dragons over China. James, you’ve written about these kinds of spate of dragon sightings, where people said they saw actual dragons. And in 1517 on July the 7th, there are no fewer than nine dragon sightings in the skies over Nanjing. I mean, what’s going on?

James Carter  12:54

I guess I would want to take a step back to from, from where we moderns sit. And so, we had, you know, we started at the beginning of the discussion about how odd it is, to work on, you know, what are the specific details of these two, obviously, mythical creatures. And I guess, I guess I’m enough of a romantic to step back and want to say like, well, are they mythical creatures? Like? Yeah, I think they are. But I think we need to, we need to reserve judgment, at least in this sense. Did the people who thought that they saw those dragons, did they really think that they saw something that was not that, could not be otherwise explained by natural phenomenon of one sort or another? And actually, I’m not sure the answer to that question matters very much. So, I think that what’s going on is there’s something that’s inexplicable and it gets assigned a supernatural explanation. I think, whether or not it’s real, I think, what real means can be, can be subject to interpretation. So, is it real in the sense that it really caused a cataclysm, you know, that resulted in the deaths of people or destruction of property? And if a dragon is held responsible for that, was the dragon real? Well, maybe not in the sense that we can have a specimen that we want to put in a museum somewhere or maybe in a zoo. But was it real in the sense that people assigned agency to this creature, and they had respect for it, and they had, it was important to their worldview? And one thing that that comes up with oftentimes we associate with climatological or meteorological phenomenon, and I think it’s useful to think about dragons. And when I was writing about that, I was borrowing  from Timothy Brook, who had written about the Ming and the Ming Dynasty in this way. But talking about, you know, it’s at least as important to try to understand how weather and climate influenced everyone’s daily lives as opposed to emperors and ministers. And yet we spend a lot more time focusing on ideology and much less on meteorology. So, there would be these official sightings of dragons that would happen every so often. Sometimes there are a few decades, sometimes every couple of years, all during the late imperial period. But as far as, in terms of official records, the last, the last official dragon sighting was in November of 1905. So not that long before the Qing Dynasty fell. So I think this this correlation of the dragon with China’s imperial passing with China’s past kind of lines up neatly then when you’re talking about Wen Yiduo 闻一多 in the May 4th movement looking back to the dragon as being the symbol of something that came and maybe something we should move on from.

LOUISA LIM  15:27

I’m really curious about what makes it official? Is it that an official has seen it? Or is it kind of there’s more than one witness? Or how did they decide?

James Carter  15:39

That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. I think it becomes official in the fact that it gets into the official histories. But clearly, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that there are more sightings reported than actually make it into those final records. So yeah, what the vetting process, I’m sure that one of one of your listeners will be able to tell us what the vetting process is for evaluating a dragon sighting? The folks from Guinness probably go out there and assess it.

Graeme Smith  16:04

And my guess is it probably popped up in a county gazetteer because you find all kinds of crazy things in these county gazetteers, including stuff about sorcery and witchcraft. So, it wouldn’t have been out of place there.

LOUISA LIM  16:14

I just love the idea that the imperial ledgers had a column for official dragon sightings.

Graeme Smith  16:21

Every county gazetteer has a column for witchcraft. It’s there. Like you know, we burned this many witches back in the 40s kind of thing. It’s in pretty well all of them.

LOUISA LIM  16:30

I wanted to ask Linda about that other big moment when Chinese intellectuals were undergoing tumult, and the dragon was huge. And that was of course 1989. When Hou Dejian’s song became a kind of unofficial anthem in Tiananmen Square and for the movement. Did he change the song for that?

Linda Jaivin  16:53

He did. He didn’t change the dragon claw bit. But it did have a part, originally, there was a lyric and since then it’s been sung, still sung that way. And it’s basically black hair. It’s black eyes, black hair, yellow skin, forever and ever the heir of the dragon. And he said after meeting Wu’er Kaixi and some other Uighurs, he realized that, you know, that he had been very racialist in writing that, very kind of essentialist, Han essentialist. And he thought that China and the heirs of the dragon really should be all of the people who live under the dragon. And that would include the Uighurs and others who don’t conform to that, who don’t necessarily have black hair and black eyes and yellow skin. So, he changed that. But he still kept the dragon-y bit.

LOUISA LIM  17:50

So just tell us a bit about that change?

Linda Jaivin  17:52

So, after he realized this was a bit racialist, he changed it to whether or not you are willing forever and ever, you are an heir of the dragon, and that’s even more kind of oppressive. It really, it doesn’t have much positive energy does it?

Annie Ren  18:10

That sentiment, I think, really echoes with Wen Yiduo’s original totem, dragon totem theory. And again, Wen Yiduo’s use of totem is highly idiosyncratic, to, to say the least. But, you know, his theory is that, you know, the dragon totem started with a tribe, the Huaxia 华夏 tribe, which is the prototype of the modern day Han, Han Chinese race. And that tribe has a snake as its totem, and when the snake tribe conquered all the other tribes, it assimilated their totem. Therefore, the snake got to have a stag’s horn or sculpt some scales. So, you know, that’s exactly what, Linda, you were talking about with Hou Dejian’s lyrics. It doesn’t make it any better.

Linda Jaivin  18:58

It’s also interesting, how did the dragon conquer the phoenix? Because wasn’t the phoenix more of a totem of the South? Also, the Phoenix is quite interesting. It has something over the dragon which is it originally came from a male and a female element put together. And the dragon is just, you know, it’s just a boy.

Graeme Smith  19:16

And Linda, in the lead up for the show. We had this generational chasm with our producer, who was saying oh, you have to use the Wang Lee Hom version because there’s of course a much more well known version now which has been a remake of the same song and done by the nephew of Li Jianfu for the first, the person who first performed it. We’ll just have a quick listen to this song which is a lot more high octane.

Clip  19:34

Yao yuan de dong fang you yi tiao jiang, ta de mingzi jiu jiao chang jiang. Yao yuan de …

Graeme Smith  19:47

So Linda, is this a re-imagining of the original and if so, in what way?

Linda Jaivin  19:51

Every version except for Hou Dejian’s own has been a reimagining. Hou Dejian sung it originally in coffee shops and music venues in Taiwan. He was part of the campus folk music of the 70s and early 80s. And when he sang it, he sang it in a way that conveyed a kind of, a kind of a thoughtful mournfulness, you know. And then Li Jianfu bought the rights and Hou Dejian was a poor student. He had no money, he sold the world rights forever and ever for something like 120 US dollars. And it sold like, I don’t know, billions, you know, of copies in the end. But he didn’t own the rights anymore. So that was, it’s probably the worst deal ever done in an industry that’s known for very bad deals for composers and creators. But it was kind of his fault. He turned it over. Li Jianfu sang it a lot more heroically. I would describe his version as more heroic. And then the version that we just heard, is a bit more like hip. And, you know, there’s rap versions, there’s all these different people who have tried to reimagine it. But what always interested me and interested Hou Dejian as well, was when it was taken up in demonstrations. I remember in Hong Kong, I was living there and the Japanese revised their textbooks with regard to how they wrote about the invasion of China, which wasn’t an invasion. “I think the Chinese invited them” or something like that, you know, it was, it was a bit of a fudging of the reality. And people all over the Chinese world were, you know, demonstrating. And there were these huge demonstrations in Victoria Park in Hong Kong, and people would belt out “Heirs of the Dragon” as if it was, you know, it was an anthem, it was pride. It was sung in such a kind of, you know, again, a heroic way, a marching song. It was very, it was really interesting to see all these different variations. And Hou Dejian was fascinated by them as well.

Graeme Smith  21:56

James, I mean, Xi Jinping has been talking an awful lot about dragons, particularly this year, and in the speech of Chinese New Year, he branded them, quote, “The totem of the Chinese nation” calling them “strong, fearless, and benevolent, and embodying…” And I’m going to quote here because he really can’t improve on the original quote, “the Chinese nation’s spirit of ceaselessly pursuing self-improvement, hard work and enterprise for 5000 years. But it also encapsulates the determination and aspiration of hundreds of millions of Chinese people to build China into a strong country and realize national rejuvenation,” end quote. So, what next, James, we’re going to see Xi, haha, trying to piggyback on imagery, do you think, of the Chinese dragon?

James Carter  22:37

I think that for dragons, they’ve got lots of different powers, like we’ve talked about. They can breathe fire, and they can fly, and they’ve got terrible claws, and they’ve got lots of other powers. But maybe their most important power here is as a cliche, it’s extremely potent. So, I think that when Xi Jinping is leaning into this imagery, he’s really trying to distract in some ways from what China is grappling with, which is contemporary challenges at home. When I mean, to restate what’s been said many times, dealing with the economic slowdown, they’re dealing with, you know, political challenges that were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, trying to deal with an increasingly complex world and their place in it. Dragon is a dragon, simple. A dragon is powerful. Everybody can identify with a dragon. I just had an event not that long ago, where I met with some officials from the Chinese Consulate, and I was indeed gifted with a with a dragon. So I mean, this is a potent image that I think absolutely, I mean, any politician would be foolish not to embrace an image quite so photogenic and easy to relate to as a dragon. So absolutely. And I think that the, the rebranding of it as loong I mean, I think that’s a bit of a… I don’t, I’m a little puzzled by it. It seems, I don’t think that people in the West have a negative association with the dragon. I really don’t and so I think it was kind of an odd way for Xi Jinping to spend some political capital in the West. But domestically, the dragon is a potent symbol and they’d be, would be foolish not to embrace it and, and indeed, they are embracing it.

LOUISA LIM  24:09

I was just gonna ask Linda how successful the dragon is, really, as a distraction from all those problems?

Linda Jaivin  24:16

I don’t imagine it’s terribly good as a distraction. With you know, we don’t know how high youth unemployment is. But the last we heard it was, what, over 20%? I don’t know how many young Chinese people are gonna go well, we’ve got the dragon who needs a job? You know?

Annie Ren  24:36

This year’s theme for the annual Spring Gala is long xing dada guojia xin xin 龙行龘龘 国家欣欣so “the dragon takes flight and the nation prospers”. And the character they used for taking flight is just one character of a dragon on top of, you know, two smaller dragons. And people were taking that as sort of as this sort of reference to the state of China now. This like one dragon of other you know, heirs of the dragon, and I found that to be quite an interesting reading of the theme.

Linda Jaivin  25:05

Or perhaps it’s the three-dragon policy now?

Annie Ren  25:08

You mean the three-children policy? Yes.

Linda Jaivin  25:11

As opposed to the three-dragon problem coming to you on Netflix soon.

LOUISA LIM  25:14

I suppose it’s time for me to come clean and say the I’m kind of a massive dragon fan. And I actually spent the last weekend in Bendigo, which is, for James’s benefit, it’s a sort of rural town about two hours from Melbourne, where they have the world’s longest imperial dragon. And they have this massive Easter Parade because the dragon came with the gold miners, the Chinese gold miners in the 19th century. And they have this big Easter parade where all the dragon dancers and lion dancers from around the country congregate. And it’s literally two full days of massive dragon dances. I’ll play you a little bit of sound from that. Bendigo, this rural town in Australia, commissioned this brand-new dragon to be made in Hong Kong. It’s 175 meters long, that’s like five swimming pools. When you’re standing there, it took two full minutes to go past. And I just kind of really was struck by the fact, perhaps this is a question for all of you. Maybe Linda you start. By the fact that with Chinese traditions like that being eroded in China, could there be an argument to be made that the real custodians of the dragon dance, and these Chinese traditions may not actually even be in China anymore?

Linda Jaivin  26:48

Well, that’s a really interesting proposition. I don’t know if you ever read, I think was Lynn Pan’s book on Chinatowns. She talks about Chinatowns as this place where tradition becomes ossified. And so, you have, you know, generations who move to a place whether it’s Australia, or Canada, or the US or wherever, and they bring with them, their culture, their traditions, and so on. And culture and tradition is a living thing. But they’re stopped there. Back in China, things are always evolving. And the Chinatowns become this sort of frozen moment in time, keeping and preserving traditions in the moment when the particular generations came. It’s a really interesting way to look at how these things are preserved, because you can’t preserve culture, culture is a living thing. And obviously, in Bendigo, they’re also improving and, and revising this culture by commissioning the world’s longest dragon. So that’s an innovation, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

LOUISA LIM  28:00

And then another innovation they have for the Bendigo dragon is for the new dragon, the massive one, women are allowed to carry it as well. And in previous dragons, all the dragon carriers had to be male, but now you see this whole, you know, mix of people carrying the dragons. And yeah, I think you have thought about the relationship between women and dragons and dragon ladies a bit?

Annie Ren  28:24

Oh, yes. Just very briefly, I’ve been going through, you know, pre-modern Chinese literature to see how dragon women or you know, dragon princesses, were being depicted. But unfortunately, they still represent male fantasy of an ideal woman. So and those sort of, starting from the Tang Dynasty, for instance, you find sort of encounters between a poor scholar and a dragon princess with, you know, all the wealth of a father and a very devoted wife. And sometimes would, you know, just hand over custody of their children. So, despite that, there’s some, you know, beautiful illustrations or depictions of dragon princess. Unfortunately, they still represent the male gaze.

Graeme Smith  29:12

And Louisa, wasn’t there a Falun Gong dragon there as well? I’m kind of curious as to how, did they try and muddy the waters a bit about who owns the dragon?

LOUISA LIM  29:21

Well, there was a massive Falun Gong contingent, not just a dragon, there was a marching band, which was about two or three hundred people. And then there were Falun Gong people wearing you know, women wearing traditional uniforms with women wearing traditional dress with dragons, with fans, doing fan dancing. And then there was the Falun Gong dragon. So although the Falun Gong dragon, I have to say was not as athletic as some of the other dragons.

Graeme Smith  29:49

That’s very disappointing. All those exercises and qi gong, you’d think they’d be bounding out.

LOUISA LIM  29:55

But I mean, you know, I would say they weren’t just trying to claim ownership to the dragon, but also to everything else as well, you know, the whole sort of cultural heritage of China.

Linda Jaivin  30:07

Actually of a piece with the Falun Gong thing. Once an Aboriginal friend of mine said, “Hey, I’ve got a ticket to something in Chinatown.”

Graeme Smith  30:15

Shen Yun?

Linda Jaivin  30.17

Yeah, I didn’t know this is like, a long time ago, I had no idea. And she said, Have you ever heard of this thing and she couldn’t, she couldn’t pronounce it. She didn’t know what it was called. Anyway, we go off to Chinatown. And we left it at the interval because it was so bad. But the funny thing about it was I was looking at it and going, Oh, my God, just like we’re talking about Chinatown’s in this preservation, this freezing of culture. I loved how you, the Freudian slip of the uniform. Because that’s basically how the approach to the costume is in these things. And it was, it was so weird. It’s like they’ve, like the Communist Party, they’re so much a reflection, one of the other. They each claim ownership of the culture, of the tradition. And in the end, they kind of converge in their, you know, this is like this positive thing. And everybody dances with fans in this way. And they, they wear, you know, the men who were presenting the show, wear lipstick and rouge, you know. Oh, this, this sort of thing, it was very interesting, because the aesthetic is still that sort of top-down aesthetic. Whereas if you look at things like in folk art, and you look at the dragons that are created in folk art, they’re so interesting and quirky, and they vary from place to place. It’s, it’s wonderful, you know, there’s this kind of living culture, and then there’s the top-down culture, whether it comes from the top-down of the Falun Gong people or the top-down of, you know, Xi Jinping. Have you noticed that a lot of the Chinese propaganda at the moment has the has a cartoon dragon that’s really cute? It’s a funny thing, you know, this kind of flattening out of interesting, vibrant, imaginary creatures.

LOUISA LIM  32:00

And, James, what about in in the US? What kind of, are you seeing these kinds of new era dragon dances in Chinese communities there?

James Carter  32:10

I don’t know, I haven’t, I haven’t seen any with this new year. So I just haven’t had the opportunity. But um, but what struck me one of the things that Linda was talking about when she talked earlier about the about how the party is making use of some of these symbols. But the top-down aspect of it. So one of the things that makes all these cultural traditions so alive and so and so influential is that they are organic and they change and they develop and they move. And that is really problematic for any sort of political structure that’s trying to control them. It makes for this very brittle approach to cultural production. I think that that really is that is at odds with what, with what the Party is trying to accomplish. So I’m kind of torn by how to answer the question. Rather, I do think these these Chinatowns are, you know, are they ossifying some of these traditions so that they become sort of moments out of time, and they preserve a culture that’s not changing and evolving. Or are they places that where this culture is evolving and changing? Because it’s free of some of the political restrictions or political directives that are that are present in other places? But I’d be curious to see how it develops. Probably both, yeah. Oh, that would make that would make sense. And that’s part of the that’s part of the challenge, right? The party doesn’t want it to be both wants it to be one, whatever, that one thing. They don’t want it to be both.

Linda Jaivin  33:27

And that one thing has to have a lot of positive energy.

LOUISA LIM  33:30

I mean, I’m wondering what you foresee for the future? Will we have subversive dragons or will the end of the year of the dragon mean the kind of end of the… or the downplaying as a dragon as this as this sort of distraction, this symbol?

Linda Jaivin  33:48

Well, it’s quite interesting. The Year of the Dragon, there’s a sort of a simplistic understanding, oh, you should have a child during this year, blah, blah, blah. But as Geremie Barmé has written about, they can be quite dangerous years. And 1988, which was a year of incredible social and ferment and economic insecurity and all sorts of things were going on in 1988. That was a year of the dragon. And that led to 1989.

Annie Ren  34:19

And don’t forget 1976, the year Mao died and that, you know, destructive Tangshan earthquake.

Linda Jaivin  34:26

And of course the Pacification of Tibet and the Korean War. Great dragon years, you know.

Graeme Smith  34:34

Landlord purges in 1952, let’s keep going. James, do you want to add something about where you where you see the dragon going?

James Carter  34:43

For anybody who takes a even a passing interest in astrology whether it’s Western or Chinese know you can you can almost always fit whatever you need to fit into the astrological sign. So I think that the party is going to try to make the most of Year of the Dragon they’ll take their swing. And if things work out, well then they’ll take credit for it and the dragon will get some legs, so to speak. And if it doesn’t, I think we’ll move on to, we’ll move on to the next animal. And I think it’ll just be another attempt. So, I think it really it, it is it’s purely secondary, we don’t want to let the we don’t want to let the tail wag the dog or the dragon. I think when we talk about what the party is going to do with, it’ll really just depend on what happens. Because just despite what I said earlier, dragons don’t actually have a lot of power. Which if I’m struck down leaving the studio, then we’ll know that I shouldn’t have said that.

Annie Ren  35:32

I think I’ll be fine with a dragon that’s more inclusive and you know, less of a national, ethno-nationalistic symbol, dragon that you know, symbolises, you know, female empowerment, you know, gives give us some more imagination. It doesn’t always have to be, you know, connected to either Xi Jinping or you know, emperors of the past. If we can have, reinvent the dragon that way, then you know, I’ll be more comfortable with it as a symbol.

LOUISA LIM  36:03

I would like to add that at the Bendigo parade there was actually a trans LGBTQIA+ dragon.

Annie Ren  36:11

That’s great.

Graeme Smith  36:12

Was it a rainbow dragon?

LOUISA LIM  36:14

It had the trans colors on its head, and the body was was rainbow, LGBTQIA. And it was, you know, carried by the community. So again, I think not an ossification of the tradition, but definitely an evolution. And again, like the Falun Gong dragon, I mean surely an evolution in a way that the Chinese state would definitely not approve.

James Carter  36:39

You know, and one thing, one thing I would add on the symbolism too, is that I mean. For whatever Xi Jinping and some of the Party newspapers are saying about how the Western dragon is, is, is all about terror, destruction and chaos and bad and the Chinese dragon is benevolent and wise and good and peaceful. I think they’re pretty satisfied to have a symbol that is such a, so potent and powerful. I mean, that’s, they wouldn’t be picking a symbol that they, at this particular time, that they thought it was going to be, could be pushed around, for instance. And dragons can’t be pushed around, I think they’re, they’re pretty happy to have that understood.

Linda Jaivin  36:44

And just think back for a moment to the whole idea of everybody now has to say, loong, nobody can say, dragon. It’s just such a strange concept of how language works, you know, that you can say, to people in other cultures, you can’t use the word you’ve been using, you have to use this word from now on, you know. And you have to spell it this way.

Annie Ren  37:36

Can I just add to that, for me, I think it’s just a form of political control. It’s something that Confucius or George Orwell would immediately recognize, because, you know, Confucius famously said that, you know, the proper way to govern, is to rectify the name, to zheng ming 正名. And for George Orwell, of course, you know, controlling the language is a form of thought control. And we’ve definitely been seeing a lot of that, you know. Also, with the state media’s insistence of using terms, like, replacing terms like Tibet or Inner Mongolia with the Chinese transliteration, Xizang 西藏 or Neimeng 内蒙. It’s just the same, same thing, you know, part of cultural confidence, wenhua zixin 文化自信.

Linda Jaivin  38:15

And part of discourse power, or their attempts to exercise discourse power.

LOUISA LIM  38:20

I could absolutely talk about dragons for a full other hour. But I know, but I very much enjoyed this conversation. I just wanted to check if anybody else has anything that we didn’t talk about dragons that we should have.

James Carter  38:35

I don’t think, I think we’ve touched on it. But somehow I’ve circled around, I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on it exactly. But the Chinese, the Chinese state, the Party in particular, has been striving after a soft power win, you know, forever. I mean, they’re driven to distraction when like k-pop takes off, or when anime is so influential. It’s like, what, where do we get our k-pop? Where do we get our anime, which makes them crazy. And so it’s interesting that the dragon has a lot of cultural valence in the West. I mean, look at and look at Game of Thrones and with House of the Dragon, right, as the prequel. And so dragons have a lot of traction there. So it’s kind of an own goal, I think to then say, well, you have this, this image that’s very powerful, is associated with China. It’s really popular now. But we’re going to take away the word and we’re gonna change it into something that is invariably going to be unpronounceable by most of the people who are trying to say it. So I think it just kind of proves the point.

Graeme Smith  39:32

James, Annie, and Linda, thanks for joining us.

Linda Jaivin  39:34

Thank you.

Annie Ren  39:36

Pleasure.

Graeme Smith  39:37

Louisa, thanks for putting up with me for 100 episodes. May we do 100 more.

LOUISA LIM  39:44

Here’s to the next 100.

Graeme Smith  39:45

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, bringing you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. many thanks to our guests, James Carter, Annie Ren and Linda Jaivin and my co-host Louisa Lim. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, our social media and transcripts are by Juliette Baxter. Our theme tune is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Here Be Dragons: LRP Turns 100 appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. And a quick note, one of our guests, Dorothy Wickham disappears about halfway through this episode. That’s not because she was offended. It’s just down to the dodgy internet in the Solomon Islands, so don’t be perturbed.

Louisa Lim  00:50

Across the Solomon Islands, Huawei mobile phone towers are sprouting like shoots after spring rain. There’s new sports facilities, including a 10,000 seat stadium. There’s a huge gold mine and a controversial security pact. These are the gifts that Beijing has rained down on the Pacific country since it switched allegiances from Taiwan to China five years ago. The Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare appears to be delighted, declaring on the campaign trail for next month’s elections that China could be the answer to not all but most of the country’s challenges. Other MPs are less impressed, with one opposition MP pushing to scrap the security deal and switch back to Taiwan.

Graeme Smith  01:32

Today we’re hearing the inside story of China’s Pacific play. How has the switch gone? And how and why are some Pacific countries resisting Beijing’s largesse? To hear that point of view we’ll talk to Jessica Marinaccio, a former staffer in the Tuvalu embassy in Taiwan, now an assistant professor of Asia Pacific Studies at California State University. But we’re starting in the Solomons with journalist Dorothy Wickham, the co-founder of the Melanesian News Network. Dorothy, after the Solomons changed allegiance to China, you wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called Can you blame poor countries like mine for turning to China? Once the switch happened, how quickly did the money begin to flow into the Solomon Islands?

Dorothy Wickham  02:12

Oh, straight away. Actually, it was already starting to trickle in even before the switch. You can tell there were a lot of movements. A lot of our members of parliament and prominent people were travelling to Beijing. I had actually found out six months before because I accidentally found out there was a delegation of people travelling to Beijing, even before the switch was made public and I was wondering why they were going there. But I didn’t really think that it was a diplomatic issue. I thought it was more trade and business at the time. So, I must be losing my touch! Anyway, that’s what happened. And we switched. Oh, my goodness. Anyway, I think, as you know, Solomon Islands has been through a lot of a lot of issues. We’ve been through, you know, ethnic crisis, we’ve had riots. And the impact on that is that it’s slowed our economy or pulled it back. We’ve gone back nearly 10, 20 years backwards, in terms of our business sector, and just our infrastructure development. And so that’s why I think that some of these politicians who are in power now are frustrated by the slowness and the fact that they can’t, they can’t push it as fast as they can because of the lack of funds. And I think Solomon Islanders, ordinary Solomon Islanders, also have that sense of urgency, wanting to get things going and moving. And I think the internet has given this you say, this sense of us falling way behind. Because they can see what’s happening around the region, and even the world, now through the internet. Before most Solomon Islanders are oblivious to this, that we didn’t have the good roads, the good buildings that maybe Fiji or Papua New Guinea or Vanuatu had. Solomon Islanders realised that we have really fallen behind. Hence the frustration and anger, you know, leaning towards now accepting China’s presence here. Because they see the infrastructure and the fast-paced movement of the business sector since China’s entered the market here. And I always say to some, to people who are critical of us, I’m saying you have to realise this is our economic reality. People are making their choices and basing their perspectives on the economic reality. We can’t tell them not to accept something. When they see this, whatever it is, as their way out of the situation they’re in.

Louisa Lim  04:46

Jess, I wanted to ask you, I mean, that economic reality is definitely part of the equation when it comes to Tuvalu, right? China offered to build a whole new artificial island, $400 million worth of artificial islands. And yet Tuvalu chose to stay with Taiwan whose offerings were much more humble, you know, piggeries, agricultural projects, things like that. Why did [Tuvalu] not switch?

Jessica Marinaccio  05:16

Well, I think just in looking at it, especially after the recent election, when almost immediately, like after thousands of people, of reporters are asking, is Tuvalu going to switch, what’s going to happen? You know, phone calls every single day. And then you see that the new prime minister almost immediately, they released that they’re going to stay with Taiwan. And I think just from some of my observations, if you look at what happens, like I understand, definitely, from the economic perspective, why countries would switch. But if you look at from the journalistic perspective, when countries switch in the Pacific, often they are really dragged through the mud, from an international media perspective. And I think that Tuvalu kind of, some of those ideas, it knows very well. Like it knows it’ll be portrayed in a way, as money hungry, or there’ll be these very negative ways in which the country is portrayed. And Tuvalu, I worked on the foreign policy for Tuvalu, and they specifically put in all these Tuvaluan values, and the importance of culture, of thinking about being a good neighbour, of being loyal. And so, these really play into the necessity of staying with Taiwan. So, I think from a reputational standpoint, and also from this idea of kind of looking at Tuvaluan values. There is a lot in there that suggests that Tuvalu should stay with Taiwan, even if it might not be the most economically beneficial thing to do. And especially just seeing that Tuvalu has witnessed Nauru switching, Kiribati switching, Solomon Islands switching. And even in Taiwan, you see how those students, right, the scholarship students from Solomons, from Kiribati, they’re basically like kicked out, you know, when the ties will end. And there’s terrible things written about some of these students in Taiwan. And just not, I think now they’re starting to stop Nauru. They’re allowing those students to stay. But before one of the things that would happen, kind of the consequences was you lose everything that you’re getting from Taiwan. And so that would affect individual people. And you just see how negatively some of these countries would be written about in Taiwan and other parts of the world. And I think that Tuvalu has seen that right through some of its diplomatic action. And so, there’s some of that thought process also goes into thinking about switching or not.

Graeme Smith  07:15

And this is maybe a question for both of you, because before a country switches, there is no Chinese Embassy there. And in the case of Tuvalu, there’s only two embassies there anyway. Australia and, and Taiwan. I mean, how is the switch engineered? Like who’s there on the ground representing China and trying to make things happen? And how do they, you know, make these offers of like, in the case of Tuvalu, $400 million worth of islands? Or in the case of Solomons’ half a billion dollars’ worth of aid? I mean, how do these offers get made? Who’s doing this?

Jessica Marinaccio  07:46

I’m not really sure exactly how the offers are made. I know, I’ve heard people talking about being approached at the UN, right? There are diplomats for Tuvalu that are abroad, being approached in Fiji. I think that people are on record kind of saying that that’s where they are approached at these international meetings. But one of the things that’s really interesting to me, and I was talking about this recently at a conference, is that if you look at how kind of international aid structures work in the Pacific. There are a lot of methods through which China kind of gets pulled into countries that are not its diplomatic allies. So, one example is that, if you look at the ADB, the Asian Development Bank, the way that they do a lot of their tendering for their big projects in the Pacific is a cost-based, not cost-quality tendering, but cost-based tendering. And as soon as you say that you know that the country that will win most of these tenders is going to be China, and companies from China. So, until recently, when Australia kind of stopped this from happening, there was a Chinese company CCECC that was in Tuvalu completing various boat harbours in this massive project that ADB was funding because they had the lowest bid. And that is really interesting to me that, you know, there’s so much about the China threat. And yet international structures, or these regional organisations are the ones that are kind of pulling China into countries and giving them the access that they might not have, if they weren’t able to come up with these really low-cost bids. And so also very interesting that recently, that company CCECC, which switched out for an Australian company, that also something very interesting that happened recently. So, I think that maybe people started taking notice of some of the issues that that might generate, if you’re thinking from an international relations standpoint. So, I think that’s very interesting how you see China’s still in these countries where you’re expecting that they’re not going to be.

Graeme Smith  09:32

And, Dorothy, I mean, how was CCECC involved in the switch in Solomons as well?

Dorothy Wickham  09:38

In our case, I think it would be the same. But we already had, you know, the Solomon Islands has a big Chinese business sector. So, there were already some players in the country who were working, I think, on certain government members of parliament to facilitate the switch. And then when it happened, you sort of saw who they were when the delegations started to travel to China, because they were the ones who are accompanying them to China on these trips.

Louisa Lim  10:06

Dorothy, I remember you wrote this great piece for The Guardian about how you went on a look and learn media tour to China. And that was just after the switch. And in the piece, you warned that the Solomon political leaders might not be able to deal with China, that the Solomons would be too fragile and weak. I mean, how has China changed the culture, the political culture of the Solomon Islands in the last five years?

Dorothy Wickham  10:32

Well, I think, I don’t think we’re changed, I think things are moving at a faster pace than ordinary Solomon Islanders need to understand. I think this is where, where we need to ensure that Solomon Islanders, ordinary Solomon Islanders understand, the issues of development, economics, and all these other issues that they’ll have to face. Because, here in this country, indigenous people own more than 80 percent of the land. So, if you wanted to go into a mining deal, a fishing deal, a logging deal, or any business outside of a town boundary, then you’re dealing with indigenous landowners. Now, whether our indigenous landowners understand enough to be protected, that is the issue. I don’t think it’s fair to say that we are the only country doing business with China, Australia does too. Australia buys a lot of its exports, a lot of its citrus to China. It has one of the biggest Chinese ports in Darwin. You know, New Zealand was the first country in the Oceania to sign, to become a diplomatic partner to China. I think the thing that we need to focus on here is, are we ready to handle these people? Are our people ready? And I’ve always said, and I also will keep repeating, that our government needs to focus on education. We need to educate our people so that they’re strong enough, intellectually capable enough to determine their destiny, whatever it is, or whoever the diplomatic partner is, in terms of how we handle our relationships. I’m going to be blunt here. If you look at it, is it not the way Australia played on Bougainville, with the Bougainville issue? Of course, the Australian government backed an Australian mining company, against the indigenous people. And then you also see the mainland of PNG with the mining operations there. So, this is what I’m, what I’m kept saying, this is economic reality we talking about, yeah, yeah. Australia’s gonna make its decisions based on its economic reality. That’s why the Pacific is not happy with Australia in terms of climate change issues and negotiations. Because Australia is not going to just suddenly stop just because the Pacific wants it to, because it has to also look at its economic reality. And the Pacific itself. Whether it’s Solomon, it’s Fiji, it’s PNG, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, wherever it is. We all have to deal with our economic reality. But the thing is, and the question is, are our people ready enough, understand enough to handle these relationships? That’s where me, as a Solomon Islander, and as a journalist, I’m concerned about that my people are not ready. If, if ordinary Solomon Islanders are not ready, I don’t think our politicians are ready, either.

Graeme Smith  13:17

So, Dorothy, can I ask you a follow-up question? Because one thing we hear a lot in Australia is there’s there’s sort of this almost cartoonish thing that somehow the Solomons went bad when China arrived. And that, you know, China captured all the elites, and that things just kind of changed overnight. But I mean, can you maybe talk us through how does elite capture actually work in the Solomon Islands? How does an MP become beholden, if you like, to business interests?

Dorothy Wickham  13:43

I think when they say elite capture, I think they’re talking politicians. But if we’re talking elite, educated, elite, business-wise, there’s no capture. These people are living their lives and doing it according to what they want to do. They’ve got the education to do it, and they got the money to do it, to choose their destiny. While the politicians are swaying that way, because they need the Chinese money to ensure that development gets into their areas and also into their pockets.

Graeme Smith  14:08

And I mean how does the money get into their pockets, if you like? Because it seems to be quite a complicated process in the Solomon Islands and something that in a way other donors can’t really do?

Dorothy Wickham  14:20

Well, let’s just say if you give aid to a country, and it’s managed by the government, it depends on how the government distributes the funds. So, over the last 20 years, I’ve seen Australia really tighten up the screw on the way its funds are managed inside the ministry. So, they actually put Australian consultants into the ministries to ensure that the funding that they give actually goes where they want it to go. And New Zealand and you see other countries do it. But this is not happening with Chinese aid, it goes into the government system, and the government decides what it does with it. And so that’s when it can get you know, people misusing it.

Louisa Lim  14:59

And, I mean, Jess, what is the situation like in Tuvalu? Is the pressure from below that people are seeing this money flowing into other Pacific countries and saying, well, what about us? We, you know, we would like to have schools and sports facilities and things like that.

Jessica Marinaccio  15:16

Yeah, so I mean, my feeling, especially from what happened with the election. So, if we see how the election kind of panned out, and how the government was formed. I think, at least at the government level, the representatives from most of the islands are not so much feeling the pressure that they need to switch to any, to another country, or they need to try to get more funding specifically from China. Because the way that this government formed out, there are so many people who are in the government and very few in the opposition. And one of the people who ended up in the opposition Seve Paeniu, the Minister of Finance, was the person who openly called before the election for there to be a review of whether Tuvalu would stay with Taiwan or go with China. And the fact that he got isolated, when he was the Minister of Finance, he got isolated outside of the government. Many of the people who are in the government now were in the government, when he was Minister of Finance. I think that says a lot about how people on the ground and people who are voting for these different politicians probably feel and the politicians themselves. That, you know, that way of calling very openly for this review of the relationship was not, people didn’t really think that this was a good move on his part. Or they didn’t think that this was something they really wanted to be airing out in front of other countries that they were possibly thinking about switching to Taiwan. And so just from the election itself, I think, and from thinking about what people might be asking politicians, for definitely health, education, all of these issues are really forefront in people’s mind. But I think also there, because of the way Tuvalu is kind of mapped out geographically, I don’t think people are thinking so much about money coming in for new hospitals or money coming in necessarily for new schools, as much as finding pathways where people can gain education outside of the country. Or they can sustainably gain health care outside of the country. I’m just seeing how most people when they do have very serious medical conditions have to, have to leave Tuvalu for care. And so, I think in some of that, there may be, there may be some fear of switching to China, because people may not necessarily trust the medical facilities there. Whereas maybe Taiwan is seen as a more secure partner to send people to, and of course, Australia and New Zealand. So, these are the countries that I think Tuvalu really wants to foster that stronger relationship with to make it easier to refer people out of the country. Because I’ve seen what happens when people get stuck in Tuvalu. We saw this during COVID, when everything was locked down. It’s really, really dire when people are not able to leave. And so, I think really building up those partnerships means that Tuvalu might be looking more at strong partnerships with Australia and New Zealand, rather than maybe these partnerships with China that would lend more money coming into the country.

Graeme Smith  17:53

Isn’t that interesting? I mean, one thing that no one talks about much is that Taiwan has these other ways this sort of soft ways of trying to persuade Pacific countries that they should stay on board and you’ve written about this thing called Austronesian diplomacy. Can you maybe explain to our listeners what that, what that is and how Taiwan uses it?

Jessica Marinaccio  18:12

Sure. So Austronesian diplomacy, the Austronesian language group is this language group that covers most of the Pacific. It goes from Taiwan, that’s where some people think the language group may have come from. It covers Rapanui, all the way to the east. It goes to Madagascar, all the way to the west. It covers most of islands, Southeast Asia, and most of the Pacific. So, the idea here is that indigenous peoples in all of these places speak similar languages. So, you know, when people are counting five in Tuvalu, is lima. And it’s the same in, for indigenous groups within Taiwan. So, Taiwan has this thing, the indigenous peoples who right, did not originally migrate into Taiwan, when the KMT migrated over. They were there for a really long time before that. And that is something that differentiates Taiwan from an identity perspective from China. And it also ties Taiwan into the Pacific. So, there’s been a lot of things that have been done, especially under DPP governments, the more independence-focused governments in Taiwan, to try to really propagate or to publicise that idea that there are similarities between Taiwan as an ocean country, as a Pacific country, with indigenous people who are similar to people in the Pacific. But sometimes it really does get a little bit overplayed, where you’ll have presidents who are Han Chinese, going into Pacific countries and saying, “Oh, we’re all ocean peoples and our Austronesian culture,” which I’m not really a part of, but still, I’m going to claim that as part of how we’re going to make this relationship. And so that’s something that Taiwan has been using, and people started to call it Austronesian diplomacy. So, you saw Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁, who was president in the 2000s. He did this amazingly, like he was so hyperbolic and just going and telling all these countries how similar they were and wearing sulu in Fiji and doing all of these things. Tsai Ing-wen 蔡英文, the most recent president before Lai Ching-te 賴清德, she actually was, she is part indigenous. So, she kind of had more cachet when she was going out there. But it’s really, it’s really interesting to look at these diplomatic forums because sometimes they don’t quite work out in the Pacific as people planned. Because a lot of Pacific nations that have alliances with Taiwan are not settler colonies, they don’t have majority who are non-indigenous and a minority who are indigenous. So, some of these ideas of kind of indigenous ties or connections or resistance don’t really make so much sense from the perspective of some of the Pacific countries that Taiwan uses this diplomatic forum on.

Louisa Lim  20:35

It seems that it’s really not been that successful, this Austronesian diplomacy. I mean, Taiwan has been losing its Pacific allies fast, with Nauru switching this year. And now only three Pacific countries, and all of them so tiny, right? Palau, the Marshalls and Tuvalu. They’re the only ones left that recognise Taiwan. Do you think Taiwan just can’t compete with that kind of steamroller Chinese aid and economic development?

Jessica Marinaccio  21:03

Well, I think from the perspective of official relations, that’s the case. But if you think about Austronesian diplomacy, or any of Taiwan’s diplomacy in the Pacific from the unofficial perspective, it’s doing such a good job. Like Austronesian diplomacy, it’s not super attractive for countries like Tuvalu, but to countries like New Zealand and to states like Hawaii. Those places that have similar structures to Taiwan, where they have a minority indigenous people, and majority who are Europeans, or came in from another country, colonisers, it works really well. There were like very strong ties between Guam and Taiwan, Taiwan and New Zealand, Taiwan and Hawaii. And I think in some ways, these are Taiwan’s real targets, right? The places that are linked up into the United States, the places that are places like New Zealand that have a lot more diplomatic power, maybe than some of the other Pacific countries. Because if you think over the past 30, 40 years, Taiwan has done so much work to build up unofficial recognition. It’s basically recognised by the US without having that official consent, but they do have, you know, security agreements and other things. And recently, you can see there are more and more delegations from countries like Lithuania and parts of Eastern Europe that come into Taiwan, and basically say that, “Oh, we support Taiwan. We’re with China, but we support Taiwan.” So, the unofficial game that Taiwan has been playing, I think really outweighs the losses that it has had from those official allies. And any of the missteps that they have with things like indigenous diplomacy, from the official allies, is more than made up for from what they’re gaining unofficially, but just people don’t really focus on that as much. But I think just from an unofficial perspective, you can see how more and more countries think of Taiwan as their partner, even if they don’t officially sign any agreements to that effect.

Graeme Smith  22:48

And Jess, you spent a lot of time with with Taiwanese foreign affairs officials. And one thing we uncovered during the Nauru switch was that when Nauru was switched, China kind of hoped for this warm thing from the netizens saying, hooray, we’ve got another ally back from Taiwan. But instead, most Chinese netizens were making fun of Nauru and calling it a weird country and an empire of poop digging. And, you know, they kind of looked at it, like this is the third smallest country in the world. How can we get excited about the third smallest country in the world? I mean, how does Taiwanese foreign affairs, how did they see their allies, like, and how does the Taiwanese public view these these remaining allies?

Jessica Marinaccio  23:26

So that is what’s really interesting, because when you look and I won’t say it’s all, of course, of the Taiwanese population. But when you look at, because I did something that was such a, almost just took up all my time. But I just look for any instance, in newspapers with the word Tuvalu showed up, or Pacific allies and man, you find some really horrible things that are written about Taiwan’s Pacific allies: they’re a waste of money. There are a lot of articles that even look at them as if they’re kind of like a jilted lovers scenario. That, “Oh, we give these allies so much of our time and our money. And then what did they do? They just dumped us when they find somebody better.” And of course, that’s going to happen. Why does the government waste money on them? There’s racialized things, you know, people referring to skin colour, people referring to size all the time, how small these countries are, what’s the point? What are they going to do for us? Even if they speak for us at the UN, what does that matter? Because what power do they have at the UN? Oh, again and again. And so that, I’m not surprised at all that people are not excited that Nauru was brought back. I think that this fight is such a fight that’s at the diplomatic level, where it seems so important to the government. And then people on the ground are like, well, what is what is this matter? Right, I think it made it made a lot more sense in the 70s and the 80s when the countries that were being dropped, were like the United States, and people saw what an impact it had. But now because Taiwan is down to so few allies. And I think a lot of the Taiwanese population for a long time has already thought that this like what is the point of this? Especially as Taiwan has done well with the unofficial diplomacy. And I think that that’s really hard for the Pacific countries because they just get so stereotyped. There’s attention on them in Taiwan that they wouldn’t get in other countries because they are those small countries, quote, unquote. But then people know them because they are allies. And then they get ideas about them, because they’re allies, like, oh, if it’s our ally, they must be small. If it’s our ally, they must be poor. I hear that again, and again. Man, I kind of wish they weren’t an ally, because then you wouldn’t know anything about them. And you know, it’d be clean slate for understanding the country. So, a lot of Pacific nations have to do a lot of work within Taiwan to show the culture. And to show that there’s a lot going on there, size is not as important as seeing how rich the history and culture of places has been. But yeah, really understand that from a Chinese perspective, right, from the population’s perspective, getting Nauru back, people would just think that this is, it’s meaningless, right. And often people will see the amount of money that’s spent and they’ll think, well, why did we do that? Right? It’s just very tokenistic and symbolic. So, I think it has a pretty negative impact on these specific countries and how they’re seen within both Taiwan and now obviously, China as well.

Louisa Lim  26:03

I was really interested in the fact that you raised the importance of the international image of Tuvalu and said that was one of the reasons why Tuvalu didn’t switch. I mean, look at Nauru, has actually switched, I think four times. Recognising Taiwan until 2002, then China for three years, then Taiwan for almost 20 years, and then back to China. I think there is this tendency to paint that as kind of being very fickle and money driven. But from the point of view of Pacific countries, is that just realpolitik? How do they see the fact that they’re being painted, you know, when I guess their bargaining chip is very small, and they’re using it, but as well as they can? And yet they get painted in such ways? How does that go down in the Pacific?

Jessica Marinaccio  26:55

Well, I think that it has a real impact. I mean, clearly, people will still make the decisions that they want to make in different governments like Nauru switched so many times. And if you go back and look at the articles that were written, when Nauru switched each time. It’s like the mouse that roared, and you know, all of these things that are very, that might be about Russia, because they’ve also had other diplomatic switches. But you know, just some of the things that are written are so belittling of these countries. So, when you look back at them, I think, to this point, today, there is a real impact in people seeing how countries are portrayed. And especially, it depends what kind of diplomatic game you’re trying to play. So, the current prime minister of Tuvalu, he was the former Deputy Secretary General for the Pacific Islands Forum, for PIF. He also was the head of the western and central Pacific Fisheries Commission. So, I think that he has a really good idea of kind of what the feeling is regionally and internationally and how different countries are viewed when they take certain actions. And definitely, he was very tight-lipped about whether he was, what his views on Taiwan was. I know, somebody told me they tried to call him like 20 times, and just didn’t pick up and they thought, oh, well, what’s wrong with this guy? I’m like, well, he, he knows, right? He’s not even in the prime minister seat yet. So, he’s not going to talk to you until he’s confirmed. And then he’ll get to, you know, say what’s on his mind. But, so I think from that perspective, there’s probably a lot of thought going into reputationally how Tuvalu is looking as this new government is coming into play, especially because they’re really focused on climate change and funding. And if you stay with Taiwan, although Taiwan itself can’t offer a lot. Its partners like the US and Australia certainly can, right? So, there is something to say for the leveraging of thinking, okay, if I stay with Taiwan, and there is some threat that people are seeing that maybe we might go with China. Australia and the US may come in with offers to kind of bolster whatever Taiwan is doing. Because the US and Australia very much do want, you know, Tuvalu to stay with Taiwan. If we go with China, we’ll get more money from China. But will that really help us? Will it be more than what the US and Australia possibly could offer? So, I think there’s a lot of different calculations that are going on. But some of them I think, certainly, we’ve just seen so many, so much accumulation of this bad press for countries when they switch to China. And definitely Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Nauru. Nauru was so fresh, I think as well, just looking at how it got written about more recently. That I think, that definitely has an impact on how people think about whether you can use that leverage. If you want to use that leverage, I think the idea is you have to be really sure. Right? We really want to use it now. Do you? Maybe just maybe hold it off till another day, take that hit only once. Don’t take it multiple times as you switch back and forth.

Louisa Lim  29:35

I mean, how much longer do you think those three countries Palau, the Marshalls and Tuvalu, how much longer do you think they will hold out against the sort of Chinese enticements?

Jessica Marinaccio  29:46

Well, I think Palau and the Marshalls, they may, I think they’ll stay pretty long because some of the issue there, are some of the reason there that they’re able to stay with Taiwan, without a lot of threat or a lot of a lot of guessing about whether they’re going to go or not, is because both of them are former colonies of the US, they are Compact of Free Association countries. And so, I think that there is a lot that is going on between them in the United States that is kind of making them stay with Taiwan or feel that that’s a secure position. For Tuvalu, I mean, I really think just seeing that, this instance, with this Prime Minister, that they so quickly said that they were staying with Taiwan when they probably could have dangled it out for a few months. And maybe really scared everybody, into getting the US and Australia to giving them more money. The fact that they just immediately are like, no, we’re not switching. I think it would really take a major shift in the government. So probably not for the next four years. Definitely. And it would really be if there was like the, this whole government team now, many of whom did win re-election. A lot of them to lose re-election, I think to kind of see people potentially shift. So, I think for these three, of course, this is always a very, very dangerous question to try to answer in the affirmative or the negative, because you ultimately end up looking like an idiot when someone finds the clip. But I think for these three, it seems, it seems to me, of course, tomorrow, I’ll hear news, and then I’ll be embarrassed. But it seems to me that they seem pretty firm. And I, yeah, I think it would just for Tuvalu, it’d definitely take a change in government. I think Palau and the Marshall Islands, it’s more about the, the Compact of Free Association itself, and kind of what the United States is guaranteeing as part of these wider ideas of staying in this relationship with Taiwan.

Louisa Lim  30:21

So, when you look at the Pacific from the outside, we’re seeing that kind of net of Chinese influence is really increasing. Do you think that that will sort of reshape the way the power politics within the Pacific plays out? How will that impact Tuvalu?

Jessica Marinaccio  31:49

I think, well, because we did see that there was that attempt by China to sign a security agreement or sign an agreement with all of its allies, that then the Federated States of Micronesia kind of put the kibosh on that by sending the information to everybody. If that sort of agreement were signed, if there was something that was joint between China and all of its allies, I think that’s when you start to see pressure on the countries that are not allied with China. Because in most cases, I would say that probably if things grew organically, countries like Tuvalu would just start interacting with China, despite having ties with Taiwan, because we kind of see that in other parts of the world as well. Most countries have some relationship with both at some level. But I think within the Pacific, China really does not have any motivation to compromise, right? So, if they do get an agreement like that with all of the other countries, then it would really, they’d have some pressure to start putting on Tuvalu saying, well, or Marshalls and Palau. That, you know, you’re not with these countries, you’re not with us. And so, you can’t be part of these bigger agreements that are going on. And so, in some ways that could form an architecture that leaves out the Taiwan allies. And that I think, would put a lot of pressure because regionalism, right, is so important. That if these countries started to get left out, even though you still have the Pacific Islands Forum, it would just be like this entire other structure that you weren’t benefiting from. Because there are other ones, like Japan has something like this, that they do, the PALM meetings that they have, where you have all the Pacific countries plus Japan. And so, this would be something where it’s like all the Chinese allies plus China, and you’re leaving out some of the countries, and only three of them. So, I could see there would be a lot of pressure if something like that was to take hold. And I think it’s only because a lot of countries, despite having relations with China still view it with such suspicion, that they haven’t been able to get that kind of written agreement set yet. But if they do, and when they do, I think that’s when you might start to see some shifts as well. Because that would really I think, be the pressure that might be needed to change how some countries are operating because they would be left out of decision-making by the rest of the group, vis-a-vis China.

Louisa Lim  32:03

I noticed that you said “yet”. They haven’t done it, yet?

Jessica Marinaccio  33:56

Yeah, I mean, I think if just from what I’ve seen, if China’s really, they’re intent on something, probably there’s going to be a way to get it done. It just, because there’s so many leaders involved. And I do know that, you know, you see there are certain leaders that like yeah, we know we’re with China, but they still have misgivings about it. And so last time, it only takes one country to start leaking information and sending documents around in letters that they’re not approving of this to ruin the whole thing. So, I feel like that could probably still happen a couple more times before most people are on board with an agreement like this, because it is quite wide-reaching. And people do still hear all the rumours about what might be going on in other countries. They’re selling their ports; they’re selling their islands. And I think that makes leaders quite wary about signing agreements without having a lot of verification and checking that’s going on.

Graeme Smith  34:46

And when you talk to your friends in the Taiwanese foreign service, is there any thought about what happens when there’s no allies left? You know, what happens then?

Jessica Marinaccio  34:56

But I think this is like the brilliant thing about the unofficial diplomacy. Because, and what a lot of people do write sometimes in these Taiwanese newspapers, is do they need official allies? I mean, does it really matter if you have the US saying they’re going to support you? If you have all these countries that have relations with China, but still are visiting you to anger China. Nancy Pelosi is coming and visiting your country and risking a war. Does it really matter in the end, and I think a lot of people think that maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you could go down to zero, but you still have enough support behind you from people who are legitimately scared of China, and would go to bat for you, we hope. That is those, although that recognition from the perspective of maybe just having statehood or being independent, that’s important. But when you go down to zero, and the 12 allies that you have now don’t really have this very strong international voice that maybe that doesn’t, it wouldn’t be a huge game changer for the status of Taiwan right now. And people have been kind of writing about this since they had 20 allies. So, I think we’re now, we’re down to 12. It’s just kind of people waiting to see who’s going to be last and really if it’s going to have an impact. But I don’t know if it will have a major impact.

Graeme Smith  36:10

Thank you, Jess. You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, bringing you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Jessica Marinaccio and Dorothy Wickham, and to my co-host Louisa Lim. Editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, our social media and transcripts are by Juliette Baxter. Our theme tune is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Hold My Popcorn: Diplomatic War in the Pacific Theatre appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Louisa Lim (00:36)

Stand up comedy is becoming serious business in China, both from an economic point of view and a political one. In 2016, a stand up show called Roast Convention began airing. Its first season got two billion views. It seemed like stand up was the new hot thing. But in May 2023, a comedian called Li Haoshi 李昊石 made a joke about his two dogs and a squirrel, which satirized the slogan used by President Xi Jinping. The club was fined $2 million. And Li was canceled.

Graeme Smith (01:11)

No joke but this week, we’re joined by three stand up Chinese comedians to talk about their business. Barbie is based in London, and she’s a founding member of a stand-up collective called 50 Shades of Feminism. We’re also joined by Elena who’s also a member of that collective, and He Huang who’s based here in Australia. First up, He Huang 黄鹤you were on this Australian show called Australia’s Got Talent on Channel Seven, one of the commercial networks. Maybe we’ll have a listen to that clip to get us started.

He Huang  (01:41)

As you can tell from my outfit, that I was made in China. Yes. I left China about three years ago because I feel pathetic. Yes, people are really judgmental. If you’re like me, over the age of 27, not dating or not married in China, you will be called leftover ladies. I know it is brutal. But I love leftovers. Come on who doesn’t love Chinese leftovers? I know, thank you. We are yummy and cheap. That is my Tinder bio. Chinese leftover, yummy. Just take me home and eat me.

Graeme Smith  (02:35)

Now the judges went absolutely, absolutely mad for you. Do you think it excepts audience expectations, or does it confound audience expectations when a Chinese woman talks publicly about sex?

He Huang  (02:50)

I mean, it’s not my first time doing this. I think it’s fine. And nobody tells me no. And even not my parents, I’m fine.

Graeme Smith  (02:58)

What do the parents have to say?  Are they on board? Are they? Do they just keep it to themselves?

He Huang  (03:06)

I don’t think they understand. I don’t think talking sex is a part of Chinese tradition in the family. They don’t understand English. That’s fine. But I think my family are very supportive of me doing comedy now.

Graeme Smith  (03:20)

Was that always the way, like when you first started out, were they kind of, what are you doing?

He Huang  (03:24)

No, I think they just saw it as a hobby. Yeah, it was a hobby. Yeah, and then become serious. So they just get confused. Yeah, but I grew up with the family, parents very encouraging. So that’s why I do this kind of things. It’s like they encouraged me from early in my childhood to try different stuff. And I think they didn’t stop me and then they just didn’t expect it to be this big. Now, they’re still thinking, wow, why are you doing this? Are there there’s nothing they can do to stop me.

Louisa Lim  (03:59)

I just want to know whether you guys are also sort of confounding, subverting expectation with your comedy? Maybe Elena?

Elena  (04:09)

Yeah, I think actually my family, they don’t really know and doing a stand-up comedy shows right now. I send some pictures to my mom, but I think she might thought like this is kind of like TED talk or something. And yeah, so actually when I was like a little girl I was described to be very obedient, like quiet and shy. So yeah, so this is probably, if they know what I’m doing right now, and if they know I’m also like talking about my dating experience, in public, that might be like, very shocking.

Louisa Lim  (04:47)

And what about you Barbie?

Barbie  (04:50)

Well, I do find most things when we talk about sex is a little bit about sexualization of women body. Every heterosexual man in the world would like to hear a lady talking about sex in front of them, right? But my audience is ladies and nonbinary; we don’t welcome heterosexual men. So， I personally don’t feel comfortable talking about sex. Because and also I’ve gone to other comedian’s, comedy shows and they talk about sex. And I feel like there are too much about penis and too little about vagina.

Louisa Lim  (05:28)

I agree! I agree! It’s really rare that you hear anyone talking about vulvas or vaginas in public.

Barbie  (05:35)

Yeah. And if I talk about sex, I wouldn’t talk about Chinese men, they are not very good at licking vagina, that kind of thing. And when my audience is, ladies and nonbinary, only, I would feel more comfortable. Yeah. And I believe the topic we’re talking about is a little bit more political, and also about sharing our experience about periods. I remember, one of us was talking about, you know, this period cup where some ladies might be useful, might be using them when they’re on period. And she’s sharing this experience how difficult it is to…

Louisa Lim  (06:16)

I think we call it a moon cup. Moon cup, yeah you insert it and it collects the blood, right?

Barbie  (06:23)

Yeah, because we are doing a comedy show in Mandarin, because we feel like it would it would empower ourselves the most. So yeah, she’s talking about how difficult it is to get rid of it. When she’s on hike, when she’s hiking. Yeah, and she’s pretty struggling to get it out. Our topic is more about ourselves and the importance, the importance is about ourselves, it’s not to please the audience. Yeah. And my parents have no idea what I’m doing.

Graeme Smith  (06:52)

And I mean, one of the most famous comedy moments in Chinese history and on a sort of a feminist spectrum would be Yang Li 杨笠when she appeared on this show called Rock and Roast, and asked the question that women have been asking for millennia, is how do these incredibly average guys have such immense self-confidence? I’ll just quickly play that clip. I’m sure you all know it.

Clip  (07:18)

Nanren bu guang meihao, hai tebie shenmi. Jiu shi ni yongyuan ye cai bu tou ta na xiao naoguali daodi zai xiang yi xie shenme. Jiu shi ta mingming kanqilai name putong. Danshi ta que keyi name zixin. 男人不光美好，还特别神秘，就是你永远也猜不透他那小脑瓜里到底在想一些什么。 就是他明明看起来那么普通，他却可以那么自信。

Louisa Lim  (07:35)

Maybe we can just explain what she was saying. I mean, she was saying why is it that men, putong, just so… average, they think of themselves as being so special.

Graeme Smith  (07:47)

I mean, this, to give a bit more background to this clip, provoked a huge backlash from male netizens. And it even led to one of her companies stopping sponsoring her. Intel dropped her after all the netizens said, this is terrible, you know, we’ll never buy a computer from you guys again.

Elena  (08:02)

And this year, she was actually receiving death threats, because she talked about this stuff. And it’s just crazy.

He Huang  (08:09)

I think she’s the Chinese version of Hannah Gadsby. When Nanette came out, she got all the death threats as well, as a female comic, who identify gay and not, you know, going with the male patriarchy. And I think she was talking about that on the podcast, how she gets a lot of death threats. Like the men are too young, these situation. But just like the sheer amount, sheer volume, of death threats she gets, because China is such a big country, right? But it’s definitely much more overwhelming than Hannah Gadsby.

Graeme Smith  (08:48)

Elena, I know you’ve said that you see stand up comedy as a form of rebellion both against the state and against society. Can you maybe explain why that is?

Elena  (08:58)

Yeah I actually a think a lot about it, because, you know, girls in China, especially; actually not only in China, in the whole East Asian society. We are obeying, guai 乖 in Chinese, is like, being obeying and listening to others and be caring. And that’s the social expectation for women. Like from my own experience as a child, as like a little girl, I was expected to be clever and smart and like an extrovert. And sometimes, so I found it’s quite interesting to draw the line. Like you should be quiet, but not too shy. You should be entertaining, to the adults, when you are a child, that you should be a funny and cute little child, but not too rebellious. So, everything is like this. There is a standard setup for us. And then you cannot jump out of the standard, and standup comedy is actually totally out of the standards. Because we are telling our own stories, our own feelings, and we are not telling them to please the audience for you. So, in other sense, if we’re children we are not saying things or performing things to please adults. Like as adults, like in the children’s world, is like the ruling party, like in the adult’s world. So, like the hierarchy is quite similar. And standup comedy is actually really rebellious to me because we jump out of the expectations for us.

Louisa Lim  (10:34)

I just want to go back to that moment that Graeme just played. And I think one of you, He Huang, you said it was like Hannah Gadsby. And Barbie, you said you guys were doing workshops around this.

Barbie  (10:49)

The reason that we established this thing is because I saw some clips from a New York comedy club called Nuzi zhuyi 女子主意. And I think, oh, this is great. And that’s why I’ve established this, and after the first show, and I contact them say, oh, we are not really professional. And we want to have more knowledge about this. And they are very friendly. And we co-hosted this workshop online. And also they’ve got some scripts and some handout, something like lecture notes about how to perform stand-up comedian show, like talk show. And in this piece of work, in this kind of lecture notes, there’s a piece of work from Yang Li: like men, so well, men are generally so ordinary and so confident. Yeah, and they were saying there’s a structure of a piece, of like a sentence or a line, in comedy. And the topic is… could be something like gender equality, or man’s ignorance. And her attitude is like, she’s fed up with it. And eventually the line is like, he’s so like, men is so ordinary and so confident. And we all share, your little ladies in China, would have similar feeling with us. It’s about honesty, being honest, and speak out our own feelings.

Louisa Lim  (12:17)

It strikes me that you’re doing comedy to quite different audiences. That Elena and Barbie are really targeting an audience of, because you are doing it in Mandarin, for Chinese speakers overseas. Whilst He Huang you’re doing it in English, aren’t you, in Australia and elsewhere? I mean, you know, how does your audience react He Huang? What kind of jokes or stories do you tell?

He Huang  (12:41)

I think my perspective might be a little bit different from Barbie. I think my priority still is to be a comedian first, which means I have to make a joke first. Not everything can be made into a joke. If you are talking about techniques or writing a joke, a lot of the things we experienced, depend on the audience. There’s one famous things as misery only shared and it’s very relatable. And then that’s where your audience can laugh, because you have this shared emotion. I think a lot of my stuff because my background being Chinese, being a woman, and not Chinese Australian, actually Chinese from China. So, a lot of the stuff I know cannot be expressed in English. And then just because the setup is gonna be so long, they need to find those emotions can drive us together. So, I think that’s where I tweak my jokes about, so it’s not only about sex or women, it’s other stuff. Like my general upset about my family and cultural difference. Though because I do full-time comedy now, so I don’t really have a job. My job is doing comedy. So a little bit about that, traveling and stuff. And yeah, I think that’s the general topic I’m going for, for English audience.

Elena  (14:11)

Yeah, so my takeaway about the backlash because I know He [Huang] is also getting a lot of backlash online after her jokes, during the COVID period. I think it is a similar situation as Yang Li, because you just can’t take away from it. It’s very easy for Chinese to get triggered. And that’s why I think, that’s why me and Barbie, is like our community club is, so far, it’s still very small. And our audience, as a target group, is also very small and we are all female and Chinese. And I think to a very big, great extent, we are also sharing the same political views. So that’s why it is safe place for us to talk about whatever we want. And if we are doing something bigger like He is doing right now. And if we are putting our videos online or having more audience, we will trigger a lot of people as well. And that’s when we cannot just speak up, like us right now. So, I think it’s a backlash just, yeah. It’s targeting the more famous stand-up comedian.

Louisa Lim  (15:29)

Do you want to talk a bit about your experience, talking about COVID and what happened?

He Huang  (15:35)

Not only about the COVID things, like the whole experience, I think, make me grow. I will have my special taping next year. So, you will see my whole comment about that for an hour. So, it’ll be fun. But the whole thing, I think you’d like, to simply put in a way, first, I learned about online triggering, like online comments, like the hostility against female comedian. And it’s not uncommon. That’s what I learned, especially for people of color. And then you are female, it’s a lot of hate on the internet. If you are just a minority and the female comedians, you just get automatically, do attract a lot of people saying you’re not funny, you’re just using this to get, you know, online publicity. And another thing I realized, because I didn’t, I’m not an influencer, to start with the whole, you know, building up my online profile, like a lot of my other friends. So, they experienced a lot of that. I learned from them, like how they cope with it, like they’re minority female comedians as well. They get a lot of hatred from their own community as well. Especially the conservative communities. And another thing I learned is yes, I think Chinese become more and more extreme, especially the online content, and then comments. And because I know a lot of my friends around my friends’ circle, they are Chinese, they have nothing against me for those clips. They are just, you know, the silent majority. So, whatever is going on the internet is extreme. And it’s pathetic. And it’s very, very dangerous now. So, I when I offer an experience, I learned about all this, I think I feel better. But when I first got those online hate comments, I was confused and hurt. But now I am just like, if you want to hurt me, I’m that kind of comedian. If you wanted to heckle me, I will make sure you’re crossed, I will just go back harder. I used to hold back a little bit. And now I don’t want to hold it back anymore. Like okay, if you think this is the worst you can get, I can go harder than you thought. That’s how I think comedians, like female comedians have to do to deal with this. Unfortunately, it’s like a patriarchal society, like the majority of people think men they’ll have the bigger saying. Being a female comic that you have to be really harsh to comment back. You cannot be soft on them. Sorry, and this and that. And then I think that’s the one thing. Yeah, I learned and deal with those comments.

Graeme Smith  (18:24)

Maybe just to explain a bit more about the model that that you guys are doing with the collective and what you’re inspired by. I saw this amazing clip from a comedy group in New York that was parodying Xinwen Lianbo 新闻联播, and I’m possibly traumatized because I watched way too much Xinwen Lianbo when I was learning Chinese. But one of the funniest skits I’ve ever come across is this parody newsreader routine where they talk about the state of women in China using the whole Xinwen Lianbo language.

Louisa Lim  (18:55)

And Xinwen Lianbo, can you just explain Xinwen Lianbo is?

Graeme Smith  (18:58)

Xinwen Lianbo is like the nightly news in China. This sort of dreadfully boring, half an hour of what the leaders have done today. Or these days what Xi Jinping has done today. I’ll just quickly play that clip.

Clip  (19:12)

Zai guo nei gang guoqude chun jie dang dian ying [liu lang di qui] zuo wei guochan kehuan da pian huode le juda de piaofang huibao he haoping. Zhe yi bu fan wutuobang juzuo miaohui le zai 2049 nian zhong guo de nv sheng diwei jiao yi bai nian qian you da fu du xiahua. Cong guoqude “fu nv neng ding ban pian bian tian” dao jiang lai de funv suiran neng shangtian ye zhi neng shang yi hui‘r tian. 在国内刚过去的春季档电影《流浪地球》作为国产科幻大片获得了巨大票房回报和好评。这一部反乌托邦巨作描绘了在2049年中国的女生地位较一百年前有大幅的下滑。从过去的‘妇女能顶半片半天’到将来的妇女虽然能上天也只能上一会儿天。

Graeme Smith  (19:37)

So in that they’re parodying sort of official state praise for this movie called Wandering Earth 2 and talking about the status of women and how, how far it’s gonna fall in the future. But this kind of comedy obviously couldn’t be done in China. I mean, how much does this model free you up, I guess, to discuss pretty well everything?

Barbie  (19:58)

The reason I founded 50 Shades of feminism because I saw this, like something like the clip you just showed, the clip from Nvzi zhuyi and I don’t know, you know, this podcast Chinese podcast run by Yuan Li. She’s got this bu ming bai bo ke 不明白博客 on the internet. Yeah, so Yuan Li went to New York and listen to this show and recorded an hour’s podcast for the comedy shows. And I’m a big fan of this lady called Nancy, I felt like my style is similar to Nancy’s style. Yeah, and some of the clips are really hilarious. And everyone’s got different styles. And actually, our performance is pretty similar to Nvzi zhuyi now. You know, everyone’s got different topic and everyone’s in different style. And some, some performances are pretty moving, and some of them are so hilarious you just don’t know probably when they are writing out their script, they didn’t expect people would laugh about this part. There are plenty for the audience to laugh about maybe the other part. So it’s just chaotically fun. So yeah, those that want to see the clips of the comedy shows on Instagram by Nvzi zhuyi. I feel like this is the type of comedy show I want to do, it’s something, it’s like holding a hosting a party for other ladies without misogyny in it. And as also a safe space.

Graeme Smith  (21:21)

Elena?

Elena  (21:21)

Yeah, I also think these kinds of collectives and communities are very important for a diasporic Chinese overseas, because nowadays, as a space for us to express ourselves is extremely limited. You know, even online or, we are writing some comments or like a posting something, we need to use a signs or a substitute for some words, to avoid the censorship. So having a space when I go overseas, without censorship, and surveillance, and we can actually say whatever we want, like onstage in public is super important for us. And I think it’s almost impossible within China right now. And we actually have this privilege to do it abroad. And I think it’s very empowering.

Graeme Smith  (22:11)

This collective is one of many that sprung up after the white paper protests last year. I mean, what sort of influence are you having back in China, given that the one thing an autocracy fears is being laughed at and being made to look absurd? I mean, do you think your comedy is influenced – having an influence – back in China?

Elena  (22:28)

Actually, I don’t think so. Because our collectives are still very small, and it’s only based in London. And I think beyond our friends don’t, it’s actually not many people know about us. And so I think it’s actually good for us because it’s safer. But I think stand up comedy, like as a whole, whole thing, actually definitely has some influence over Chinese. Because, even like onstage, like in the shows, television shows about stand up comedies in China, they are still have some political, political views in very subtle ways. So it is definitely influencing some people.

Louisa Lim  (23:13)

I have a question about the sort of fragility of audiences and maybe for you, He Huang, about the fragility of male audiences. I mean, do you think it’s getting worse and why?

He Huang  (23:26)

If you say, come to my show, like my solo show, mostly are, I have a lot of female audience in the crowd, like LGBT group. A lot of my fans are like that. For males, I think if I do regular gigs, they are fine, but I don’t think they are really showing they’re upset. I think online you can see there’s a lot of marginalized, male perspective, and then they kind of get out, my friends around me maybe, because of self selection stuff, they are pretty nice and thoughtful. Like comedy has become much better in terms of you hanging out in the greenroom or open mic, or doing random gigs. The male comics are much more well behaved than before. It was much worse. And but audience wise too, I don’t think they changed but they know what to say, what not to say. Maybe they just vent it out on the internet. But there is, you can say, that more and more women are becoming outspoken. And I think it’s any sense, any kind of change of the order is gonna create some chaos and the panic. That’s what I’m thinking. And especially I don’t think a lot of male doesn’t like to see a strong female, especially Asian. We’re supposed to do your nails, give you my fudge and talking about it, about you on the stage. I think that a lot of white male, I can tell like they don’t feel comfortable, but I don’t give a little fuck about that. So that’s yeah, I never give a fuck about the audience, like in terms of how they think, why am I to care about if they laugh or not.

Louisa Lim  (25:16)

I mean, it is a real problem, isn’t it? This kind of Suzie Wong idea that not just white men, but in general, you know, the West, the stereotype of how Chinese women should behave. How have you dealt with that?

He Huang  (25:33)

Um, I think I’m blessed on that front because I don’t really care. It’s not wired in my brain. I don’t really care how other people think of me. But I do know other female comics. I know all they got bullied, like online bullying. And it’s, it’s really still a hostile environment for female comics to do anything. Like if a male comics is ugly but funny, he can get so many like praise, and he can get, one thing is like if you are a little bit funnier male comic, your partner or your, just so many girls going after you. But if your funny but strong and your persona on the stage is strong, there’s no like, you’re still the partners who you are getting is really bad, like the quality of our dating or mating kind of choice is very limited. So that says a lot about this dynamic between female comics being strong and funny, and male comics being just a little bit funny. And they will get so much like ladies or choices and praise. That’s where they are used to. That’s why you see so many. I was like, Chinese guys are like a white straight white guy. Like you’re so average yet so confident. They’re almost the same. The vibe, not the look.

Elena  (26:59)

Yeah, I just want to add a little bit about the fragile thing about men and also the backlash, I think within China, I think the men’s fragility is actually also influenced by the state narratives. Because the state is kind of creating this stereotype for women and when they are like feminists acting and speaking up, they are calling us to be like the extreme feminists, you know, like the jin qi ji duan nv quan 近期极端女权 like, it was actually said, posted by a state account on Weibo. And it was like, it’s just crazy. And they’re like, men are just, they’re excited about it. It’s a thing, a state that is standing up for them and backing them up. So, they have more reasons to show backlash towards feminists and any women’s movement or awakening.

He Huang  (27:57)

It’s also a part of the so-called Asian traditional family values, like how the Confucian parents values the son, because, that’s, they carry their last name. Because I’m the eldest in my family, my dad is the eldest son. So my mom is always upset about my grandpa, because she thinks my grandpa thinks I’m not a son. That’s why they have the constant fight between them. And I think there’s the, like, that kind of societal value play to being a guy or a boy in your family, just get automatically. Like, my cousin is shit. But he gets a lot of love. For being how shit. Yeah, it’s just, it’s, that’s why you have ordinary guys and being confident, because they’re getting fed with all the false information. And then they have, they’re living in the vacuum, like how good they are, but then they’re not. But they’re not. And also the worst situations because China, placed so much emphasis on education, you know, to cram kind of school exams and education. So all the men are literally doing nothing outside of school, but they still think they’re the best. They don’t know how to fix the household if something goes wrong. They don’t know, they don’t have a hobby outside of school. It’s so pathetic. And they don’t even have like emotional education about how to express themselves, how to date other girls, how to respect because none of those kids were educated at school or at home, that that’s where you can see a generation of monsters and who think there are very extraordinary, growing up in China. That’s why it’s, it’s like, I don’t know, it’s very sad and true of this gender dynamic in China and I can tell, I can know why. But I just I just grew up in nineties, so my generation, I think it’s less surreal because we still have those kinds of interesting, extra, like outside of that. Outside of classrooms kind of education and then a little bit, you know, gender education, I think. Yes, I think my generation is alright. But it’s, like, become one weak stream, like well protected, you cannot do this, just study, just study, you’re the best at the best. Don’t do anything, become fat, and you’re the best. I’m like, I’m just like, surprised by how when I go back to China, this kind of like how, like little women expect Chinese men to do? Like, I’m just so amazed.

Louisa Lim  (30:33)

It is a very narrow path that Chinese women have to tread, isn’t it? Because you have to be clever, but not too clever. Funny, but not too funny.

He Huang  (30:41)

Yeah, you have to tread the line. Oh my god, it feels like a comedian too. You have to be funny, but don’t let the audience know. But you have to be taking control of the stage, but don’t let the audience know. It’s like that kind of life they have to deal with, but then they keep telling themselves, I’m, we’re ordinary, like, you’re not. Like, actually, you’re really much better than my dad. But they don’t think that way. They were like, oh, we need to do something, like, we need to take care of you and your dad and your family, met your dad’s family and this and that. Just the view, standing from a Western perspective, it’s a lot to ask. To all the Chinese, especially my mom’s generation, or they just get used to it.

Elena  (31:25)

Chinese women are constantly gaslighted since our childhood, and I just found out when I came to UK. And I was so devastated. Because I found out how I was treated, over the years in China. Yeah, just sad.

Louisa Lim  (31:42)

Talk about that. What do you mean, when you say gaslighted?

Elena  (31:45)

I think it’s the tradition of women, and especially girls, are always discouraged. And we’re always told that we are not good enough. And the way actually, but it’s very tricky, because we are the only-child generation. So actually, in the surface, it seems like we already have gender equality, because each family can only have one child. So even if you are having girl, you can only expect the girl to be the best. But when we are expected to be very good at school and at work and everything. But at a certain age where I expect you to enjoy the domestic life and have families and have children. And the all the expectations and the all the efforts you put into for your life before, they are just diminished. All they asked for you now is to be a good mother, be a good wife. That’s why I think the gender equality was still on the surface, like in China, and we never had a real gender equality. It was like women are still, how do you say that? Like it’s a subjective position. Because we are always belonging to something. And we’re always under some kind of hierarchies we are supposed to please the ruling hierarchies. We are supposed to please the men and we are never allowed to have ourselves. And yeah, and I think stand-up comedians are actually breaking this standard. Because we are entertaining ourselves. And we’re not entertaining for the audience. We’re not entertaining for the men.

Graeme Smith  (33:25)

And I mean, one thing I’m really struck by is, when we were having this sort of chat about the show during the week, one of our crew pointed out that Chinese men are incredibly ordinary, but they’re also these white guys in China who go there, and the nickname for them is LBH, loser back home. And then they go to China and suddenly they’re in this paradise, where you know, women are throwing themselves at them and behaving in a totally different way to what they’re used to back home. I mean is is that a subject for parody in any of your shows? Because it just seems to me that this is almost another level of putong, of ordinary.

Elena  (34:05)

Yeah, I think that’s because Chinese are extremely racist. It’s actually very bad. But I think all white guys are getting a lot of more than what they deserved in China. Because we think like it’s the Western world and like the Western civilization is better than us. So, when white people come to our country, we think they are also yeah, we kind of look up to them. And yeah, I think it’s just not right.

He Huang  (34:36)

Yeah, I agree with you. That’s originally I was watching this trend on Tiktok called Passport Bro. I’m not sure you guys heard about it or not?

Graeme Smith  (34:47)

No, please explain.

He Huang  (34:50)

Well, you can just search on Tik Tok. It’s a lot of discussion. I think it triggers a lot of feminism talk in the West as well. So basically because of COVID, but before that people don’t know, but because of COVID, you get a lot of like a nomadic workforce, they can work anywhere in the world. And some of those like less, what it’s called, less achieved or like a younger generation of Westerners that go to Asia now. And then they’re finding those Asian woman are very subservient and then very obedient and then they do house chores. And compared to those so called empowered Western women, so they prefer them and then they feel like they’re treated as a god. And then they can, they didn’t know the passport, their passport can be tickets to the males. So they are promoting this kind of idea in the west on Tik Tok like Passport Bros and let’s together go to Thailand or the Philippines to get a wife and their woman much better and then they’re so cute or so hot and then they do the house chores. So there’s this discussion in the West about how Western women just hate, this kind of guys, like it’s all you’re just bringing the patriarchy and racism to the Asian countries. But they didn’t know this, this kind of phenomena exist for a long time. I think it’s less worse in China, much worse in the South Asian country, Southeast Asian country like Thailand, it’s insane. To see how those yeah, I just don’t I just don’t feel comfortable whenever I see that kind of like super fat white guy, old with a small tiny petite Southeast Asian girl as their girlfriend or wife walking together. I’m like ew, that’s disgusting. But in China, I don’t like foreigners in China. I don’t know. Like I never be friends with them when I grew up there and then see them at uni, I just don’t think. I think it’s like the Western country has so much emphasis to learn English when we go to study overseas. And then the Chinese government on the one hand is so hypocritical like oh my god we hate the Western countries and another hand they don’t have higher standard for the entries of the foreigners to learn Chinese. A lot of the foreigners I know they don’t even speak Chinese when they live in China for like decades.

Graeme Smith  (37:19)

I’m curious about Chinese male comedians because the reaction to Yang Li was just so extraordinary and you had this law professor coming out and saying of Yang Li, “Yeah, we might be ordinary but without makeup you’re probably really ugly.” I mean this is a law professor. Are there any Chinese male comedians bucking the trend and saying yeah, we Chinese men are pretty ordinary and sending themselves up. Are there is that happening at all?

Elena  (37:48)

I can’t remember any.

He Huang  (37:50)

I doubt it will happen because there’s no gender education. I think that’s a problem in China. They, the man, does not raise to respect women, to know there’s a boundary. We don’t even like, I grew up we don’t have sex education. I’m not sure how you guys you because you look younger than me?

Elena  (38:08)

No, we never had it even biology class though.

He Huang  (38:10)

Yeah, so it’s that kind of idea if you don’t raise to respect woman and you always fed with the information you are the best, I doubt they will do anything that think they’re not the best.

Barbie  (38:22)

I agree with you like the the men China they’re pretty rubbish and shit. But even for the men here, I mean, you know, I had this conversation with my mom. And yeah, my mom was I also you think in Britain is a lot better than it is in China? I was like, well, the whole world is covered by a net of penis and some some area it’s got more density of penis and some area, it’s got less density, but still not perfect. So if I just look at the gender pay gap and the best place is Iceland and the gender pay, that pay gap in there is still 0.9, so it’s still not perfect. And myself and also my friends they have experienced sexual harassment here and street harassment. And if you go to the police of police station to report it, it’s just so much hassle, just so much hassle to get it done and most of my friends and colleagues who had experienced sexual harassment at work, they ended up leaving the company no matter how it was treated. I’m just against the whole patriarchy and there’s no country for women.

He Huang  (39:27)

I agree with you, gender like landscapes like this.

Elena  (39:30)

Yeah, I was had a friend saying that going back to Asia and staying UK is like making a choice between sexism and racism. And yeah that is so true.

Graeme Smith  (39:43)

Now just a final question because this is how Louisa loves to finish an episode. Is looking forward, say five, ten years, like where do you see the stand-up comedy scene, both among the diaspora and also back in China, like do you think after the crackdown standup can survive in China?

Elena  (39:59)

I actually, I’m not very positive on this. I think as long as like, as the political environment in China stays like this, we cannot have a freedom of speech and anything like the freedom of creation and art. And yeah, that is so sad. And I think the surveillance and the censorship will just get worse and worse. And probably we can only count on the overseas stand-up comedians, and the communities. Yes, because at least we have some external freedom here. And I hope probably in the future years, like ordinary people, Chinese people can perform and they can go watch stand-up comedians, in Chinese, in our mother languages, if not in China in like other countries. Because our mother language is so important to us, because we feel more comfortable experiencing, in our mother tongue sometimes. So, I don’t want us to lose this opportunity because of the state’s censorship and the surveillance. And yeah, that’s, that is just my hope.

He Huang  (41:12)

I don’t know, it’s already really bad now. Just see how worse it can go. Look at the entertainment industry now in China, it’s just like, you cannot create anything critical. Even you know, Ghost is banned. LGBT thing like the mention of it is banned, a lot of things are banned. That’s the reason I got out of China too, three years ago, it’s not because I’m leftover. I mean, part of this reason. But the most important thing, because do you feel. Because I left China to the US to study, 2013. And then I did my uni in Beijing. So, it was like, very open when I was there. So, it’s so different when I got back, 2018. And just to see how suffocating the environment is already, and, and I don’t think that’s the environment, even though like I’m not a political comedian. But the idea of censorship on comedy, it’s just detrimental to the performance, the format itself. That was like, there’s, there’s no way this gonna be good for comedy. Yeah, and I was right about it. Now, I just don’t know how worse it can go. And it is really sad to see a country full of creatives, but cannot create anymore. So, I mean, but you know, it’s a beauty about people who are really passionate about it, we always find a way to express it, you know, we have you guys doing that in London, in New York City. That’s this is a big movement, you can start doing all this diaspora work for Chinese and Chinese, we have, and then we give a lot of space to people who are in Taiwan to create a lot of stuff. Because now all the freedom and all the creatives with the monies goes to Taiwan, they’re creating a lot of good stuff right now on Netflix, independently. So, I think, as a big, you know, cultural identity, I mean, Chinese being speak, that kind of language it still can go somewhere, but just not sure, in about five years will be that much of work in China, which is really sad. Yeah.

Graeme Smith  (43:32)

Barbie, you look like you have a final word there.

Barbie  (43:34)

Yeah. This or That. I’m still not sure because there are so many, so much, so many uncertainties in China say, one year ago. Well, one or two years ago who would know white paper revolution would happen? And also, to be honest, three of us, Elena, Huang He and me, we are pretty privileged, to be honest. And most people in China, they are, they work really hard. They don’t have time to even to look at Weibo, like Chinese Twitter, and even the audience of the stand-up comedy is pretty privileged. We can’t really do everything, but we can do small things. Maybe someone who came into our comedy show will go to Huang He’s gigs and they are inspired and maybe go back to China and do things secretly. But I hope they are safe doing things secretly, like some kind of secret comedy show in a basement of, I don’t know if a secret gay bar, or lesbian bar.

He Huang  (44:37)

Yeah, there’s still English stand up in China. I went back two months ago, but it’s very, very controlled. But you know, as I say, like, white paper revolution movement, nobody thought about that and also see how the economy can get. I don’t know what, where, or when is the, what triggers could be the turning point?

Graeme Smith  (44:58)

Alright, we might leave it there in a slightly depressing place. Thank you so much for joining us. That was a really amazing conversation.

He Huang  (45:07)

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Elena  (45:09)

Thank you so much for having us.

Graeme Smith  (45:16)

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing Beltway. Many thanks to our guests and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, our music is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post The Feminists have Stood Up: Gender and Comedy in China appeared first on The China Story.

Graeme Smith: Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lin, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Louisa Lim: It’s been called the Age of Malaise with young people in China advocating lying flat as the economy slows down dramatically. The unemployment rate for urban youth aged 16 to 24 hit 21.3 per cent in June, and then the government stopped releasing numbers. So, this week, we’re talking about Gen Z in China and their existential crisis.

Graeme Smith: We’re joined by two brilliant guests based in China. Steven Sun Zhao is a Gen Z writer at Chaoyang Trap, which explores contemporary China through marginal cultures. Yaling Jiang is the founder of Aperture China, a China-focused research and strategy consultancy, and also the producer of a Substack called Following the Yuan.

Louisa Lim: So last month, there was this quite unusual street party celebrating Halloween in Shanghai, which is of course not a normal holiday. Yaling you were at that party dressed as a recycling bin. Tell us about it. Do you think it was just a party? Or was it symbolic of something deeper and bigger?

Yaling Jiang: I think it was symbolic of something bigger, probably not in the way the media, and especially foreign media interprets it. I don’t see it as a sign of defiance, but maybe just for self-expression, because people need to find an outlet for self-expression, I see that actually cross different aspects of life, for example, the ones who would probably be in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. They’re now opening bars and restaurants in Hong Kong and Shanghai, I actually know someone like that. And they will probably be cafe owners instead of joining more movements. So, I think especially in the consumerism-oriented city, like Shanghai, people usually find ways in consumer culture to express themselves, which is, I think, healthy, and also on the larger context, safe.

Graeme Smith: And can I ask, why did you dress as a recycling bin?

Yaling Jiang: So, I’m also pretty old compared to Steven, I’m, um, I’m a millennial. So, I can’t say that understand Gen Z that much, which is why I’m planning to do a report on them next year. But I from my history of participating Halloween, I find that only wear I only wear a uniform once. And it will kind of just bury, it’ll be buried in my closet. So, this year, I really wanted to find something that I can maybe reuse in the future. So, when I see this recycling bin on Taobao, I just think that ‘Oh, even if I don’t use it this year, I can save it for my children’s class or something.’ I don’t even have children yet. But I’m already thinking that far.

Graeme Smith: And in terms of this expressing themselves through consumption, did you see any outfits that you thought, that’s really clever, or that’s a bit subversive, that impressed you?

Yaling Jiang: I think the really impressive outfits usually go was their performances. I saw this girl, I think it’s very, it’s a very China’s specific gen, as we say, or like insider joke. So, I think this girl was trying to imitate this famous thing or Na Ying. But instead of Na Ying, which is translated to a single ‘There-Ying’, she called herself Zhe-Ying which is ‘Here Ying’ and she would just repeat all the like, I think, the famous conversations or the comments of Na Ying through reality shows, and she was really, really popular. People were taking pictures of her and with her, and she became like a sensation on Xiaohongshu [小红书 social media platform with similarities to Instagram] later on.

Louisa Lim: So, Steven, you count yourself as Gen Z, even though you were born in the US, but you went through school in China, and now you‘re at Stanford. What are the things that you think mark out your generation from those who came before?

Steven Sun Zhao: With regard to the Halloween sort of celebrations, and in particular, I do agree with Yaling that its mainly a sort of expression of individuality. And you know, it’s a very particular kind of individuality, I like I feel like a previous generations, perhaps the individual is oftentimes expressed through certain status symbols like, you know, you how used to see like a lot of LV and like Gucci and that sort of thing. That used to be seen as something very desirable. I think our generation is sort of that sort of thing is seen as not as sophisticated anymore. Or even, you know, in some cases, it’s a little boorish. And, you know, for Halloween, I felt like people were much more focused on expressing not some material thing, but rather their own thoughts, ideas, or things that they’re interested in. And yeah, I generally agree with the idea that it’s not inherently political. I think most people there are just there to express themselves rather than send some political message. At the same time, people who are politically inclined, they will always take this sort of opportunity, where individuality is allowed to be expressed to sort of kind of push their own ideas, right? So, you had the person who dressed up as Lu Xun…

Louisa Lim: Lu Xun, the famous author?

Steven Sun Zhao: Yes, yeah, the famous author and who he once wanted to be a doctor to sort of, you know, help his country modernize, but then he, in his opinion, right, the main issue of China was not necessarily technological, or medicine or whatever, but some, you know, some kind of political or psychological issue. And so yeah, you had someone who dressed up as that, and…

Louisa Lim: That’s a pretty learned Halloween outfit, isn’t it? It’s like going as Dickens or something. Kafka, I don’t know?

Steven Sun Zhao: I would say that most people in China are also quite familiar are like definitely familiar with Lu Xun, right, and sort of his whole story, because that’s something you learn at least in Beijing that’s something you learned in middle school, probably for the whole country, actually. It’s a bit subtle, but at the same time, it’s it is something a lot of people get, then obviously, with the da bai [大白], the people dressed up as the COVID sort of security, or the COVID testers, right, that’s something that everyone would get, because you saw them just everywhere. So yeah, I think even if not everyone takes, even if most people participating aren’t interested in political, this sort of thing will always have some kind of political connotation because of the space it provides to certain actors to sort of express more say, subversive messaging.

Graeme Smith: And Yaling, you identify as a millennial, growing up in the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao era, rather than in the Xi Jinping era. I mean, how do you think the millennial generation differs from Gen Z? You know, having a sort of a marketing perspective on this?

Yaling Jiang: I think I would just see you maybe tell you a bit about how I think my generation was raised up. I think we had a more international upbringing, although we didn’t like really travel. Like when I was younger we didn’t travel that much. But we are always we were always consuming international content from the US, from Japan, it was on national TV. And I think when, as far as I remember, like the economy was always on the rise. So, we would always assume that every tomorrow is better than yesterday. Yeah, I think the Gen Z generation, I think one really big marketing trend we’ve witnessed is the Guo Chao trend, which has gone through three phases already. And I think it started when the Gen Z generation came into society, graduated and started finding work in society. Because during their formative years, Xi took the helm, I think it was one of the Xi’s priorities that we resonate with Chinese culture so that we can also resonate with a party, with a state more. So, this generation grew up without probably without watching Japanese cartoons, American TV shows. They grew up with Chinese cartoons. They were taught to love their traditional culture, love their country. And as they return, when they enter into adulthood, when they have the spending power to buy things, they tend to choose Chinese brands.

Louisa Lim: And I think some people translate Guo Chao as China chic. I don’t know if that’s an accurate translation because it’s not really just about fashion, is it? But Steven, how do you think, does that description resonate with you and the people that you went to school with?

Steven Sun Zhao: I think there is some truth to it. But I actually think in large part it’s because we some of us, kind of I think we take a lot of the internationalist stuff for granted because by the time that we are growing up the novelty has worn off when it comes to Japanese anime, or like American television shows. People watch those things still, but it’s not some huge, like world-breaking sort of, ‘Oh, I haven’t ever seen something like this before’ sort of thing, it’s just something you grew up around normally. And so, I think a lot of it is just the novelty of that has worn off. And, and so people are kind of turning to alternatives. People are kind of maybe, you know, looking more inwards for Chinese things, you know, honestly, because when you talk about Chinese consumer products, right, there are a lot of them that are actually quite decent right now, or at least good value. And that, you know, comes with growth slowing down. And, you know, you don’t have that sort of breakneck sort of change that you had before. I think some people growing up were definitely like fairly nationalist or, you know, they don’t like they don’t think of the outside world as well as the previous generation. I think that’s definitely true. I’m not really sure how true that is that how about how much that holds across a macro level across the entirety of Gen Z?

Graeme Smith: And what do you make of the Guo Chao trend? Like, I mean, how how, how do you interpret that?

Steven Sun Zhao: I mean, like, I have like some like what my phone case here is like decently Guo Chao-ish, it’s a dragon thing…

Louisa Lim: It’s very red. It’s a red phone case with sort of Chinese style dragons and clouds. It’s very pretty.

Steven Sun Zhao: Exactly. I’m very much not like, I’m not an asset nationalist at all, right? So, I think for most people, it’s just that Chinese brand products are not it’s not just cheap, shoddy, made in China, things that like weird manufactured goods they had in the past, like Chinese, a lot of Chinese goods, are, you know, they’re decently priced or decent quality. And very importantly, they’re sort of more tailored to Chinese consumer tastes, as opposed to say, a lot of I don’t know, European or Japanese or American products, which will be naturally more catered towards the tastes of other countries. So, I think, in my opinion, a large reason for the phenomena is just the fact that like, Chinese manufacturers and firms have grown and they’re kind of able to better target domestic audiences than, say, international firms. But yeah, there’s certainly also a certain trend of you know, buying China-made you have the whole guo chan [国产made in China] thing. Like I certainly think that like some people buy Huawei products because it’s Chinese made, right? And that’s also not unique to China. Obviously, in America, you have like buy, buy American made, you know, buy American cars, that sort of thing. So, I do think that maybe that is impetus for some things. But in my opinion, I think the sort of economic logic behind these Chinese products are just a better fit for me is probably the main thing driving Guo Chao here.

Yaling Jiang: Yeah, I think I definitely do agree. What made it really big, I think is the policy push and which relates back to my point of how Xi Jinping sees it as a really important tool to push forward his agenda. So, the Propaganda Department and the regulator that’s in charge of TV and film, started making and sponsoring a lot more shows about Chinese culture. There’ll be competitions on national TV for young students to learn about calligraphy to learn about gu shi (古诗 classical poetry), chengyu (成语idioms), which is something I feel like the millennial has kind of stayed away from because we don’t think that’s cool. And at this point in 2023, I think Guo Chao has already in infiltrated into everyone’s everyday life, from what people eat, to what they drink, to how they travel. And the other day I just bought a Guo Chao fried chicken at Fresh Po, which is hilarious, which is crazy to me. How can a fried chicken be Guo Chao? But I think it just how they made it, they made it into like a lu chicken first and then fried it. So they marinate it in some Chinese spices and then fried it that I think symbolizes how people have different interpretation of Guo Chao now, and I really very much agree with what Steven said about how the Chinese companies have upgraded their supply chains, their research and development, their packaging, their marketing. I think that all happened during the first and second phases of Guo Chao, because before COVID, we also saw consumption upgrade. I think that’s what that’s when companies realized that they need to make changes to stack up with the foreign competitors. And these days, yeah, I think everything that’s made in China, designed in China, Chinese brand, Chinese technique, Chinese spices, everything can be called Guo Chao.

Graeme Smith: One phenomenon you’ve written about Yaling that I hadn’t really come across much before is this idea of full-time children, which might be both a Gen Z and a Millennial thing, because there’s people in their 30s, who are what you call full-time children. Can you maybe explain this phenomenon and what you think’s behind it?

Yaling Jiang: Yes, full-time children. I don’t think it’s a widespread phenomenon. But these people tend to also vlog and blog about their lives. So, I think what they are doing really speak to a generation, for example, I’m also in my 30s, and when I go home, I’m also kind of full-time children, which means that my parents would take care of every aspect of my life. And I don’t have to worry about food, I don’t have to worry about paying rent, I can just be happily kind of ever, ever after. And I don’t have to find a job. My job is full time children, as long as I make my parents happy, who I can see as my investors and as my boss, in that sense, I can, I don’t need to make any changes in my life, basically.

Louisa Lim: Steven, I wanted to ask you about another trend that was emerging. I saw I think earlier this year, there was a whole set of people taking graduation photos, which are kind of slumped as if they were dead, you know, over park benches or lying down and some people were calling it more dead than alive. That whole kind of zombie thing? Do you have friends that were doing that, or talking about that? And why do you think that got big?

Steven Sun Zhao: Yeah, I do think this is just sort of the latest instance of a general trend of people, you know, lying flat or letting it ride. It definitely differentiates Gen Z in a sense, where people are a little tired of the whole, you always have to be sort of racing and competing. And you need to be accomplishing something either for yourself or for the country or whatever. Like people are sort of tired of that. That sentiment started before the lockdown and the ensuing slowdown because of that, frankly, so very young people are tired not because of the slowdown, although that might have exacerbated it, but it was really a reaction to actually the sort of breakneck growth and these really intense working conditions that ensued along with that. So as an example, when I was in high school in senior year, I think so this was during COVID. But it was before… at that time, everyone thought China was doing a great job with COVID like everything was pretty much normal as compared to the rest of the world where things were in chaos. Supposedly, according to the state media, right? Bilibili [哔哩哔哩], the Chinese video-streaming platform, they came out with a video called hou lang [后浪], it was like this very positive video about the youth and how the youth are like, pushing the country forward. And they’re, they’re doing all these spectacular things and they’re, you know, they’re really going to change the future. And like a lot of reaction to that was actually very negative. Like a lot of the youth are like, no like, I’m not doing this. Why are you making me do all this for you? For what reason? I’m tired. Like, stop with the shit. Like when I was in high school even before you know, the idea that China was like really slowing down became commonplace, I think was a common sentiment among youth that things were moving too fast. And you know, as an individual, you don’t have much time to actually do things that you want or that you’re interested in, and instead you’re just forced into this race of kind of working all the time and you don’t know what exactly that’s for. So yeah, I think the that whole college graduation like sort of lying down, slumping down dead sort of thing is just the latest example of kind of this disillusionment with a previous sort of go-go era of just working hard. And, you know, you don’t know exactly what that’s for.

Louisa Lim: So Yaling, how do you see it? Is it angst? Or is it something deeper and darker, and in a way more worrying for the government?

Yaling Jiang: I think, yeah, I think for the government, they must be worrying. Because we have a saying PUA which is, which doesn’t translate well. So, it symbolizes, it’s an acronym for pickup artists, but it’s now also widely used in common in the workplace. So, use PUA in a sentence, ‘My boss is constantly PUAing me’, it means that my boss gives me so much bullshit. I don’t want to listen to his bullshit anymore. So…

Steven Sun Zhao: It kind of means like gaslighting…

Yaling Jiang: Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. I feel like it’s a big problem for the people who are making the rules for China, for the government and for the capitalists. Because it will like it probably in the previous generations will be working so hard to provide for our family, we wouldn’t, we would put our personal health and personal wellbeing as a lower priority. But now we don’t want to do that anymore. Because over the years, we’ve seen so many cases, we young people die actually at our jobs and work and sorry, why professionals die at their jobs, it’s really, really worrying.

Louisa Lim: Because of this culture of overwork?

Yaling Jiang: I think so. Yes, yes. So, this generation, and also I think the millennial generation, we are now seeking a work-life balance. And also I think that’s connected to the rise of various sports culture, and the many fun things we can do. It’s not like we don’t have anything else to do outside work, we are so busy with our lives, we can go cycling, we can go to the outdoors, that has to thank to the development of infrastructure, and also the incoming of different things, foreign culture and the foreign consumerism culture that supports this kind of mindset. So, I think that the work-life balance is one framework frameworks that we can look at this. And the second one I want to talk about is that how this generation, especially the Gen Z generation, are more willing to defy traditional norms in relationships and workplaces, and they are also more willing to defy stigma. I think they’re doing a lot, they’re doing that a lot better than millennials, I think, especially in workplaces. There’s another saying that that’s called a ling ling hou zhengdun zhichang (00后整顿职场), as in the people who are born after 2000 they are rewriting the rules of workplace. We kind of see that as a joke, but it has some truth. Like they, if you tell them to do overtime, there’ll be like why would I want to do that? Those are for people who are inefficient at work. And there were some really funny videos of how the young how the young Chinese Gen Z’s are buying mixue bingcheng (蜜雪冰城) or milk teas for their bosses during meetings when the boss asked them to set up like coffee or tea. And it’s really funny to see how like a man in his 50s and 60s slurping milk tea with boba because that’s what his Gen Z employees like.

Graeme Smith: Instead of the sort of lovely green tea that was imagining he was gonna get…

Yaling Jiang: Yeah.

Graeme Smith: I mean, Steven one way that Gen Z is different measurably from the millennials is that there’s just a lot more guys than women, thanks to the one child policy. And some of the Gen Z years you have like 116 men for 100 women. And you immersed yourself in for this wonderful article about Chinese incels, where you, it must have been extremely painful. Where you spent a lot of time looking at this site called Hupu, or hoops, which when you were at high school was just this NBA fan site that was one of your favorite places to go to, but now is one of the most notorious and toxic places on the Chinese internet. When you say incels, I mean, how are Chinese incels different to say US incels that we might be more familiar with?

Steven Sun Zhao: ‘Zhinan ai’ [直男癌] in Chinese, or straight male cancers, right? So, I don’t think straight male cancers are really organizing or kind of doing anything, I feel like, their whole thing is that they’re quite impotent, and not able to do anything. Although actually now that you mentioned this, they’ve gotten into like these very nasty spats with like, online celebrity fandoms. And, you know, sometimes they’ll bombard like these online survey fandom websites, and like, like brigade them and just like spam hate messages and that sort of thing. And then the online celebrity fandoms they will brigade Hupu and they will spam like these basketball boards, like that kind of things also. So, you have like these, I guess, sort of on this sort of online organizing, necessarily a thing. Straight male cancer guys, um, I don’t know, I don’t think there’s much of a force really beyond that. It’s like a very hopeless group of people who if we’re going to connect it to a broader, like socio economic context, I feel they have been quite left out by this whole reform and opening up thing where a lot of people have prospered, but not them. And so, I think there’s definitely resentment about that.

Louisa Lim: And Yaling, what about Gen Z women? It seems that Chinese women are becoming a lot more assertive, a lot less, a lot more reluctant to get married and to hitch themselves up to men who, you know, will require them to do a lot of housework and childbearing. They’re actually rejecting, a lot of women are kind of beginning to reject those norms at a time when the Communist Party itself is kind of pressing that homemaker role on women. I mean, how do you read what’s going on?

Yaling Jiang: I think there’s definitely a conflict between the official message and between what people really want. I think the women, including the millennial woman, who were raised in the city, they really don’t hear they are they refuse to hear whatever that comes out from the government. They are doing what they want, they are setting their own standard and their own examples for their peers, for example, this is something that actually my mom told me like, she actually suggested that I should do this. Later on in life if I cannot find a man. She was like, ‘Oh, why don’t you just go abroad buy a semen and have a baby that way, like my dad and I will help raise the baby in our hometown.’ I’m like that, that is something I haven’t heard. But I think she’s saying that because of the influence of social media. They were role models of this generation, these role models don’t live by the government’s standards. They don’t, they don’t live by the traditional standard. They are writing their own rules, whether to have a baby that looks mixed, because the semen’s from other countries, or there’ll be people who freeze their eggs in other countries, or they are, say, as the members of LGBTQ societies, they are, it’s still thriving, but kind of underneath the surface. So, they’ll also be relationships like that. But it’s just not something that’s readable or apparent in mainstream media.

Graeme Smith: One thing we’ve we’ve talked about in previous episodes is this idea of intergenerational trauma. And I’m kind of curious as to what you’ve seen, either in your own lives or with your classmates, because a lot of millennials and Gen Z would have been raised by grandparents who would have seen and maybe even done quite horrific things during the Cultural Revolution. Do you think there is any influence of intergenerational trauma on your generations?

Yaling Jiang: Intergenerational trauma as in my grandparents have passed on those memories to me?

Graeme Smith: Yeah, either, not necessarily consciously, but just through the way they raised you say, through the way they might raise you to, you know, avoid the sorts of things that happened in their lives?

Yaling Jiang: I think not surprisingly, they’ve never discussed anything about the Cultural Revolution, or the Tian’anmen incident while I was growing up. It’s yeah, it kind of speaks to what Louisa wrote about in her books. I think they only started to have that conversation, actually, during COVID. Because I think it also brought back a lot of memories for them. So, they started having discussions, or kind of just retelling stories from the past, from the Cultural Revolution from the Great Leap. And I also start asking them a lot of questions like the similarities of how people were starving. Yeah, I don’t think it’s trauma, I think it’s something that we need to preserve and remember otherwise, because of this internalized fear of not discussing politics with your family members in order to protect them, their memories will just be gone once they die. So, I don’t think it’s intergenerational trauma, I think I would very much like to hear more and preserve them in my own terms.

Louisa Lim: I’m just listening to what you guys have said, in a way, the picture that you’re painting is sort of almost contradictory that you have this generation that are idealists and individuals and rule breakers, but at the same time, they’re also sort of despondent about the future and lying flat and full-time children. But I do notice one thread that seems to run through it is that both of you keep talking time and time again about social media, and the influence of it and online influencers and it almost seems like this is a generation whose reality is almost more virtual than real. I don’t know if that’s too much of a stretch, but I wanted to try this idea on you.

Yaling Jiang: I think social media is only going to play a bigger role in changing society. In terms of technology and the platforms people use, people nowadays get their information, their news from social media, they get news from the trending lists, platforms like Weibo, Douyin, Baidu. And these days, all the platforms all have a trending list. Meaning that you can just go on maybe have, like 30 minutes to scroll down the news, and you pick what’s interesting to you. Another reason that’s kind of feeding into this phenomenon, I think, is the kind of empowerment of self-media these days, everyone can be a media platform. I think that’s also probably due to China’s censorship that only things state-owned companies can run media companies. But these days, there are so many independent voices, although they may not have like diverse views. But there are so many Chinese platforms, there are at least six to eight mainstream Chinese platforms. I think the two, these two main changes in infrastructure, are enabling people to express themselves also record every little moment of their lives. But that also means that social media is now playing such a big role in people’s lives, everyone has a lot of power. If they are unhappy about the brand or about the service, they actually will threaten the owner that I’m gonna take you to Douyin. They don’t trust the government to solve this issue for them. But they trust the social media, because they know that media attraction and eyeballs in China will solve the problem for them.

Graeme Smith: Steven, do you have any thoughts?

Steven Sun Zhao: I really liked the point that Louisa made about this contradiction, you have between the idealism and then the despondence of say Gen Z, you know, I can kind of reconcile them in the sense that the despondence arises from this inability to, to fulfill your idealism, right? Like you have all of these kind of goals. Or maybe you don’t even have goals, right? But you want, because you don’t even get the chance to think of what you’d like to do because you’re so busy and caught up with everything else. The despondence arises from the, you have the sort of hope to just be yourself and do what you want and then you have reality, which is just, well, you have to work this job, you have to work long hours, you have all these responsibilities. You have to, and then you have to get married, and you have to buy a house, if you’re a guy, right? You have to buy a house and a car before you do that, and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, the despondence sort of arises from the kind of big contradictions you have between the economic reality of what is going on now and then the kind of new idealism that I suppose Gen Z has. And with regards to social media, I know I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say like, social media is kind of big at this, because it’s such a good way for you to vicariously sort of live different lives, right? You know, you might not be able to actually say, I don’t know, drive around the country and visit all these different cool places. Or you might have not have the chance to actually go to like a small village and live like a very idyllic life, but you can watch someone else do that on social media, right? And there is some kind of vicarious satisfaction through that. And then just the sheer size of Chinese social media means that, you know, if you’re looking for that sort of thing, like you almost certainly will find some kind of content that you think speaks to you. So, I do think social media is big about that about providing a simulated reality that functions as some kind of escapism for people. And I also think that that’s the social media is probably the most obvious example of that, but it’s not just restricted to that. So, there’s like this thing, it has been built for a while now. But there’s this kind of resort place built when I was in high school maybe called, in Chinese it’s called Anaya [in Qinhuangdao]. I’m not sure, I think English is called Aurania, or something. It’s like from Sanskrit, but it’s like this this resort not too far from Beijing, it’s in Hebei, along the coast. And then it’s like this really pretty little resort thing. But what makes it distinct is that it also markets itself as this big sort of place for yourself to this big, artistic sort of community. Like you have music festivals, you have art. You have like plays and whatnot there. And it was like very, very popular for some time because of this going on. And like a lot of Gen Z people were saying, ‘Oh, I really want to go there,’ not necessarily because it’s just not just because it’s a beach resort, although it is, but because like, I really want to be able to kind of live that, like experience that sort of creative, bustling community for some time, right? But like, I went there, and it’s just when you talk about real, like artistic scenes, right, like, like New York, with the Bohemian thing, or even like 798, before it was kind of controlled. Like, it’s always a grassroots movement, where you have a bunch of artists kind of partnering up together, and there’s trying to figure out some way to make the ends meet and just produce what they want. But Anaya is like it was, it’s like this big real estate project by this big developer, and they just kind of forced the whole, oh, we’re gonna bring big music festivals, and that sort of thing here. So, when you go there, it’s just like, oh, this is very commercial, actually. So that’s just like this huge case of simulated reality, right? Whereas people want some kind of escapism through art and music. And it’s provided in the form of like this big, commercial real estate project. So yeah, I feel like people are really just trying to search for any kind of conduit for finding some other kind of meaning. And then you have a lot of commercial entities trying to profit off that, I suppose, which is obviously natural.

Graeme Smith: So Steven, I think just to broaden this out, maybe one way that Gen Z is a little bit different to their predecessors, is that things aren’t getting better and they’re aware that they’re the ones being exploited on the altar of market capitalism, that there’s this movement called the jiucai (韭菜), the chives who are just harvested over and over again, maybe thinking back to your classmates from Beijing, how are people looking to escape this? Like, what’s the most common strategy to, if you like, get out of the race? We’ve heard a lot about lying flat, but that seems a bit simplistic. So how are people dealing with this reality that they’re the exploited class?

Steven Sun Zhao: Well, I mean, as a disclaimer, right, like I went to, like a prestigious high school and like, I grew up in a very privileged environment in Beijing, where most of my classmates were, you know, quite well off. So they’re not exactly the ones being exploited, to be honest.

Graeme Smith: So that was the Beijing no. 4 High School, which is like, kind of where the elite went, yeah?

Louisa Lim: Isn’t that where Bo Xilai went?

Steven Sun Zhao: I believe so. A lot of a lot of big wigs sort of party officials and their children go to Beijing No. 4 High School. The most common refrain is just to kind of drop out of the rat race, right? Like if they can’t, if they can’t sort of dangle the carrot in front of you and the stick of course, in order to make you keep on working harder than there’s no jiucai [chives] for them to cut, right? If you just decide that I don’t really care, then they can exploit you that much. So, I feel like that’s the most common response, or no, that’s the second most common, the most common response is just you kind of suck it up. And you’re like, yeah, I’m being exploited. What can I do? I do feel like the most common response is just this is how things are. There’s not much I can do besides just sort of get by and then sort of by enjoying like, the little things.

Louisa Lim: And finally Yaling, how do you see things playing out? Do you think Gen Z will kind of fall into line? Or are we going to see sort of bigger social changes as this generation of kind of, you know, almost hippies and dropouts, as they age up?

Yaling Jiang: Right. I think before I answer your question, I’d like to, I think to set out the principal mindset of how I usually see Chinese people and how I explain this to brands and companies. China is so vast, I think the trends we are seeing, the funny vloggers or those who I mean, yeah, the funny vloggers who we are seeing they only represent a very small group of people, I think the mass majority, if they decide to stay in China, which I think most of them do, they will just have a normal life. They’ll continue on the path that their parents have. And they will go on the traditional route, of graduating from school, find a good job, getting married before 30. Buy a house, I think that will still be the main story for the majority of this generation. But the interesting things you are seeing, I think they do represent very few people and they do represent some people’s aspirations, but I don’t think they define how this generation will go. So, to answer your question, what was there going to be big social movements? I don’t think so. But there may be some random events like the white paper revolution that we cannot predict and foresee. So, I can only say that much, but I cannot predict when that’s going to happen.

Graeme Smith: Fantastic. I think that’s a good place to end. Yaling, Steven, thanks very much.

Steven Sun Zhao: Yeah. Thank you.

Yaling Jiang: Thank you both.

Graeme Smith: You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing Beltway. Many thanks to our guests and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, our music is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Full Time Children or Half Dead: China’s Gen Z Goes to Ground appeared first on The China Story.

Tania Branigan: It’s always been a subject that’s been immensely politically sensitive, of course, it’s not been completely taboo there in the way that something like the massacre in 1989 of the pro-democracy protesters. But it’s certainly been something that’s been very policed from almost immediately after it happened. What I realized more and more, though, as I was writing the book is how much personal trauma has played a part in that story, too. And so it is very much about the unwillingness or even the inability of people to talk about that time. So often people would tell me, even within their families that they knew that something terrible had happened, but nobody would tell them what it was, for example.

Louisa Lim: Xu Bin in your work, you’re concentrating on the sent-down youth, those city youths who were sent to the countryside, and sometimes they spent a decade there living and working with farmers. And it really seems from your telling that it’s kind of the opposite, that there’s actually been a boom in memory. And memories of the sent-down program, why do you think there’s been that difference in treatment and the way that the fact that it has been remembered when the Cultural Revolution really hasn’t been remembered?

Xu Bin: There are several reasons, I believe one is that there’s overlapping between the Cultural Revolution and the sent-down program. So, it’s not entirely the same movement because before the Cultural Revolution the sent-down program had already started. And the second reason is that, you know, in some of the interviews, I compare the sent-down program to the so-called Lost Cause ideology in American South after the Civil War. The South claims that, well the war was lost, right, but the causes are good. So, we are pursuing the good causes. So, for the Chinese government it is pretty much the same. There are some useful elements for the Chinese government there in the sent-down program, for example, to construct the frontiers, to sacrifice your best years for the country’s higher purposes, and to contribute to this agenda, and so on. So, the Chinese government still wanted to use these kinds of ideological elements. And also, particularly, one big factor is that President Xi Jinping himself was one of the zhi qing 知青 (educated youth). And also you see, publishers have several books about his years in the countryside, seven years in Shaanxi Province. So, every leader needs mythical past and the sent-down years [are] actually President Xi Jinping’s mythic past. So that kind of a sort of a crevice from this historical memory is there, and then it began to boom. And also it started in the 1980s and continue to boom, very quickly. And the reason for the 1980s boom is a little bit different from now, because that was the time when even the Chinese Communist Party was trying to reflect on some of the problems in the Cultural Revolution. And then the sent-down youth memories actually emerged from that kind of a reflection.

Tania Branigan: It’s interesting as well, isn’t it, how they’ve managed to detach what happened to that experience of being in the countryside from the causes of it and from the surrounding context, and depoliticize it in that sense so it becomes a story, as you say, about honest toil and sacrificing for the country without reflecting on the sort of very pragmatic reasons why they wanted to clear 17 million young people out of the cities following the wars, really, between the Red Guards.

Xu Bin: Yeah, exactly. I think that one of the ways for them to do that is to promote it in a narrative that is about the people but not the event. You can talk about the people, their spirit, and their work ethic and things like that, and then praise the people, particularly praise the highest leader without talking about the event without evaluating whether the event is good or not, because you’re part of the Cultural Revolution, heavy overlap and things like that.

Louisa Lim: So, Tania why do you think people kind of fell into line with that? Is it that the past was just too painful to remember?

Tania Branigan: Yes, I think for a lot of people, they just wanted to draw that line underneath it and leave it behind. I mean, what’s interesting about the people that I spoke to in Red Memory, that they’re all people who chose to remember or perhaps who couldn’t help remembering, when everybody else wanted to forget, but I think that instinct to try and move on was immense. And then, of course, Chinese society was changing at such an extraordinary rate, there did seem to be almost something perverse about looking back, when everybody was saying, look, there’s this bright future ahead of us, we’re all going to charge ahead. So, it was easier, it was less painful, people were having to live with these incredible contradictions in terms of going back into workplaces with people who had persecuted them or who had persecuted their spouse, for example. So, to simply draw a line under that seemed, in some ways, easier or necessary, I think. And then, of course, it was difficult to talk about. And if the Cultural Revolution taught people anything, it was that speaking out and voicing your true feelings was incredibly dangerous. So why would you return to those things? All that said, of course, as you said, there has in some ways been a return to memory in recent years, as people have got older, particularly with the sent-down youth, we’ve seen this grassroots nostalgia movement, but also a lot of people who either wanted to come to terms with their past or perhaps more often, who were quite nostalgic about the Cultural Revolution, and who saw it as standing for a sort of purer time with more meaning and less corruption. And so, it became a sort of a reflection on the present day as well.

Graeme Smith: I’m really finding it interesting what you said Xu Bin about Xi Jinping being sort of the model sent-down youth, but his experiences seem to be totally atypical. I mean, their accounts say, basically, unlike all the other people who were sent down who were devastated about being torn apart from their families, he was smiling on the train, he was delighted to be going to the countryside because he’d had such an awful time in Beijing, of being kidnapped, having his own mother denounce him. And, you know, he had all those things that you associate with sent-down youth: the cave house, there’s the hard toil and all that kind of stuff, but what do other sent-down youth make of his experience, given it is such an outlier?

Xu Bin: Yeah, that’s a very good question. So, in the book, I talk a variety of ways people actually reacted to a President Xi’s sent-down experience. Many of them were very proud of Xi Jinping, regarding him as one of their representatives or the representative of their experience, particularly they agreed [with] the official narrative, which is mainly a character-building narrative, which means that, you know, we build our character in the suffering, in the difficulties, and then now we’re back! We are actually the backbone of the society, and things like that. So, this kind of suffering-to-success narrative had its audience, [it] resonated with a lot of people. As you can imagine, probably the winners in this generation, those people who have higher social economic status or official ranks probably would agree more to this kind of idea. But also, I have interviewees who basically are still suffering from the past. In other words, for example, the pension problem, hukou [户口 household registration] problem and also medical insurance problem. They’re petitioning the Shanghai government. Every Wednesday morning they’re lining up outside the laodong ju 劳动局 the Labor Bureau in Jiangsu Zhong Lu 江苏中路 in Shanghai and trying to solve all these problems. They probably don’t buy this kind of a narrative, but still some of them agree to the ‘suffering for the success’ [narrative], just unfortunately I’m not one of them. So, there are a variety of reactions to Xi’s mythic narrative about his past and also agree that he’s just such an atypical case, and in terms of outcome, he was recommended to Tsinghua University, one of the very, very lucky ones who can enter not only college [but] such an elite college at the time, and then later became the most powerful person in China.

Graeme Smith: And there’s some wonderful details in your book. But one thing that really stays with me are the strategies that were used to make reluctant parents send their children down to the countryside. Can you maybe share with us some of those strategies that were used?

Xu Bin: Oh, yeah, there are quite a lot of strategies. Some of them are pretty theatrical. So, they actually send a whole team to your door and to celebrate your kids going down, and put up a poster, a red poster to say, ‘Oh, this is just such a revolutionary family, sending their kid down to the countryside voluntarily.’ Actually, the family didn’t do that. So, it’s more like creating a pressure on the people who are reluctant to go down to the countryside.

Louisa Lim: That’s such a shaming strategy, isn’t it?

Xu Bin: Yeah, it’s a shaming strategy. But it’s a very comical sort of shaming strategy. That actually happened in a lot of places. And also I would recommend another book by Emily Honig and Zhao Xiaojian [Across the Great Divide: The Sent-Down Youth Movement in Mao’s China, 1968–1980]. And they recorded many, many details of these strategies. And also, there are some differences in terms of the socioeconomic status and class, for example, the red families, the workers, the poor peasant chusheng [出生 born to] family background families, they dared to resist this kind of campaign, because the chusheng, the family background, protected them from further political persecution. Of course, at the end of the day, everyone should go down, but they are able to resist to some extent and can vocally air their grievances.

Louisa Lim: I’m interested in that whole aspect of suffering and how people have rationalized that. Xu Bin you talk about this sort of suffering for success. Tania, in your interviews with people, did people who have suffered either because of their own actions, or because of other people’s actions, how did they then go about rationalizing what had happened to them or what they had done to others?

Tania Branigan: I think what’s so striking is the fact that when you got to the end of the Cultural Revolution, for some of those who had suffered immensely, it was actually almost a trauma in itself to be rehabilitated. Because people need to find some sort of meaning and sense in their experience of the world. And so, some people had somehow convinced themselves, you know, I wasn’t a good enough person, I wasn’t a true enough believer, yes, I’ve been punished but that’s because it’s gone wrong. And then suddenly, to be told, actually, you didn’t do anything wrong was almost another trauma. So, I think that really tells us how deep rooted the need to find meaning is and so many people now look back, I think, particularly as they’re getting older, just trying to make sense of that experience. And they do it in a variety of ways. So, for some of them, it really is about delving deep, talking to others, trying to think about what it was about themselves and their environment that made them susceptible to these influences. For other people, they have stopped at the point at which they say, I did something terrible, it was the atmosphere of the time, we were all indoctrinated, there wasn’t really anything you could do about it. So, it is a really wide range of responses, and certainly again, for people who suffered, I think a lot of people would really ascribe it to the system of the time. And certainly for them, part of the point of remembering it was trying to ensure that you couldn’t go back to that time. But when I spoke, for example, to Red Guard sort of veterans in Chongqing, where the factional fighting became particularly grim, it was really sort of striking that you would speak to the same people about the same events and they had these profoundly different accounts of what happened and why they played that role in it. And for some people, it was very much an argument about why you need reforms within China and liberalisation and people thinking for themselves above all. And then for other people it was about why you really need just a very calm status quo, and it’s much better to keep the Party in charge because you just want to a very calm overall situation, so there’s a hugely divergent range of responses, which is one of the fascinating things. And also one of the troubling things in some sense.

Graeme Smith: There’s a real range of characters in your book. There’s even some quite amusing characters. There’s a female Mao impersonator, there’s a Lin Biao impersonator who forms quite an attachment to you, but possibly the most disturbing character in the whole book is this lawyer from a small town in Anhui who takes you to his mother’s grave. Could you maybe share that story with us, because for me, that was possibly the most disturbing part of the whole book.

Tania Branigan: So, Zhang Hongbing was 17 when he denounced his mother for criticizing Chairman Mao. And she was executed very shortly after, as he had known she would be. He and his father went to the authorities. He has since come forward to talk about his guilt and about how he has carried this burden his whole life, as of course you would. When you talk to him, he has a very specific explanation, which is simply that the indoctrination of the time was such that when his mother criticized Mao, he just didn’t see his mother, he saw a monster, he saw someone who was an enemy and so it was his duty, above all. And what struck me about his story, in his experiences was perhaps something slightly different, which was that he was a very young boy who’d been through a series of traumas, ranging from his brother being sent away when the Great Famine struck. So, the family had already been disrupted. And then with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, his grandmother who’d been living with them was sent away. His father was persecuted, his sister was a very enthusiastic Red Guard, but ended up dying in the big meningitis outbreak that spread among many of the Red Guards who’d taken these packed trains up to the huge rallies in Beijing. And then on top of all this, his mother had then been hounded and was taken away from their home and held for a couple of years. And it seemed to me that you had a teenager who must have been profoundly distressed and disturbed by all of those events and it’s really impossible to understand what happened if you don’t also factor these things in. But that’s obviously not his explanation. What I wanted to do with this book was to try and talk about people’s understandings of their situation and what they had done and examine that, scrutinize that, but not in any way judge people for what they did, because I think, for any of us to sit in judgment on the decisions people made at that time would be profoundly wrong. And foolish, in a sense, because the political pressures, the political dangers of the time, the series of horrific events that China as a whole and so many families had been through, I think all of that left society in a very battered and vulnerable place, and I think very susceptible to political forces and to these mass campaigns.

Louisa Lim: Xu Bin I was going to ask, what Tania has just presented [to] us as a kind of very holistic, a very sympathetic attitude, but do you think the people you were talking to see things in that kind of very sympathetic non-judgmental kind of way themselves?

Xu Bin: I will say some of them do have this kind of attitude. More common is a self-congratulatory sort of attitude, to celebrate their achievements to say like, ‘We are the strongest generation in Chinese history, and we are the important people.’ The reason for that kind of pompous attitude was really the prevalent narrative that is ‘people but not event’ which was encouraged by the state and even by companies which actually want to make money from this population, aging population. Health products, retirement homes and so on and so forth. So, try everything to praise them to say, ‘You guys are just you know, a very, very special generation and then come to buy our products.’ That kind of thing.

Louisa Lim: This is like a marketing strategy, basically?

Xu Bin: It is. It is a very good marketing strategy. I was on a trip with a group of zhi qing [知青educated youth] who revisit their sent-down place, of course many of them…

Louisa Lim: …and when you say zhi qing, you’re referring to that generation, the former generation who were sent down to the countryside?

Xu Bin: Yeah, the sent-down youth. So, when I was on a trip to revisit their sent-down place, I see the local governments sent a sort of envoy to receive them. And the local real estate companies actually send people to sort of promote their condos and then arrange a bus for them to visit a condos to see well, such a beautiful place in the scenery and air and everything. Buy our condos for your retirement and things like that. So, this kind of a pompous attitude was promoted and encouraged by the state, by the market, and by zhi qing themselves. So, I rarely saw people or heard people talking about their deeds, talking about responsibility as Tania’s book actually demonstrates, and only one person among my interviewees said that he actually beat his teacher in school. And then he apologized for that.

Louisa Lim: And this is one person out of more than 100 interviews, right?

Xu Bin: 100 interviews. That’s right. And other people, I pressed them to answer the question, what do you do in the first several years of the Cultural Revolution, they will say, like, ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything’, or ‘I just came out there’, or ‘I just forget, I participated in some activities’. And then I asked them, ‘What kind of activities did you participate in?’ And they were like, ‘Okay, we have just, you know, some revolutionary activities, or we’re just following big kids and observing their stuff’. And then when I further ask the tough questions, and they just refuse and change topics, and then that kind of attitude, you can see there. So overall, I think, every generation has a generational label. In other words, what kind of labels put on yourselves is a choice from the memory perspective, not really, from the past, we all know, for many of the people in that generation, Red Guards and the sent-down youth are just two sides of the same coin. They’re the same group of people. Before being sent down, they’re probably the perpetrators in their schools. After being sent down, they’re probably the victims of this wrong policy. Now, when they’re looking back, they’re emphasizing this sort of victim part and then they turn themselves from victims to heroes, ignoring their being perpetrator, or at least, some unsavory past, attached to them. So, they don’t mention that. So, this is how memory is constructed from their personal and historical past, which as actually is more like an extension of what Tania just said, it’s really about a guilt problem.

Graeme Smith: Possibly my oldest friend in China is one of these sent-down youth. And when I reflect on her life and the life of people in China today, you can have a rural life and an urban life. And they’re almost on completely separate tracks, they’re in completely different worlds. But she met her husband in the countryside, a man that in any other era, she would not have met, except possibly for this guy to fill up the tank in her, fill up her car or something like that. There’s no way these social classes would meet today. And yet these two totally different people, this uneducated guy from the countryside, and this woman from a very privileged family in Guangdong, came together and formed a family. Do any of them reflect on that, that this sort of social mixing that is not possible now was part of their lives?

Xu Bin: Yeah, when they look back, and some of them regretted about this kind of marriage, because you know, the huge gap between this class status and also its kind of a reversal of the class system from the Mao years to the post-Mao years. Because in the Mao years it’s all about politics, right? And then the workers and poor peasants at the top, while in the post-Mao years, it is quite the opposite, the poor peasants and workers at the bottom. So that created quite a lot of problem for those couples who married in the countryside between the person who [was] from the urban area but has problematic family background, and with the person who [was] from the countryside, poor family, but have very good privileged political class background and then that changed after the post-Mao years. So, it created a lot of problems with those kind of marriages.

Louisa Lim: And Tania how do you find that the people you interviewed rationalize their behavior? I mean, this is very chilling moment when one of your interviewees says, ‘It was people being barbaric to each other. That was all.’ I mean, how did you interpret their attempts to make meaning?

Tania Branigan: Her reaction was that the attempts to justify it and make sense of it as a political movement, for somebody, from someone who at that time would have been at the top of the pile, you know, she just thought that was completely spurious, that there was no real political or sort of moral justification for anything that happened beyond cruelty. And I guess we know that human nature is capable of extraordinarily wonderful things and extraordinarily terrible things and it’s the context that really determines what happens in so many cases. That you have a country which, as I said, had been through this series of profound traumas, that you had people who felt vulnerable, that you had a moment of turmoil. And then because you had this intense propaganda and Mao being not only revered, but so ever present as a sort of moral force in your immediate life, that particularly sort of for young people reared in this atmosphere of struggle, sacrifice, of the nation being under threat, it seems to me in some ways profoundly unsurprising that they would rise up on his demand. So above all, it’s the political context, of course, which makes this happen. It clearly is Mao’s desire to assert his power which sets all this in motion. But we know that anywhere in the world, if you have a mass campaign, if you draw people in all sorts of other motives will come into play. So beyond political zealotry, you had personal grudges within families, where you sometimes had children turning on their parents, you might have children who very much resented their parents’ domineering behavior, for example, that you had people who were jealous of others within the workplace, even on a very sort of petty level. One of the things that’s striking about one of the very good studies that’s been done on mass killings in the countryside is the role that this rather sort of banal ambition seems to have played in putting things into motion. So, you had people, essentially, who saw no way of moving up the Party hierarchy except that, of course, if you remove somebody above you, suddenly new opportunities began to open up. So in any movement, whatever the things that begin it, I think once a lot of people are involved, all sorts of other motives creep in. And in terms of how people understand it themselves, I mean, one of the things that struck me was that often the people who were most thoughtful, and most willing to talk in depth about their guilt and their culpability. Other people who really didn’t do anything, very terrible by the standards of the time. But of course, that’s not really surprising when you think about it, because it’s one thing to come to terms with perhaps, denouncing a teacher who survived and then made it through the Cultural Revolution. It’s quite another to admit that you beat somebody to death. And so in a sense, I suppose it’s entirely predictable, that people who perhaps did less are more able to really get to grips with what they did.

Graeme Smith: Can we maybe reflect a little bit on intergenerational trauma and suffering and in many ways, you seem to come to quite different takes depending on who you’re looking at. So, Xu Bin in your book you say the children of the sent-down youth almost have no interest in what their parents experienced at all. Whereas Tania you write about this sort of almost epigenetic passing on of trauma of this sort of violent trauma to the next generation. How did these things exist side by side, because there’s a fair bit of overlap between the groups you’re looking at?

Tania Branigan: I think it exists beneath the surface, largely, because this is one of the things that often the instances where you see this trauma playing out, are these families where nothing has been said. And so the story that stays with me is that of the young boy who seemed like a very nice, well behaved young man. And then suddenly at university [he] writes this very graphic account of attacking and killing one of his tutors. And eventually, the family ends up seeing a psychotherapist and the boy learns for the first time that his father watched his own father, so the boy’s grandfather, being murdered by Red Guards. And at no point in their lives has the father ever spoken about this. But what he has done is bring this boy up with an acute sense of caution, of repression of all emotion, that you must not let anybody see any of your emotions, you certainly can’t let them see your anger in any way. And he does all of this, of course, because he wants to save his son from this horrific inheritance of trauma, and yet, in some way, these things get passed down. And a lot of the work on transgenerational trauma was originally done with the children of Holocaust survivors. And what we’ve seen certainly from there is that even in the third generation, in grandchildren, we are seeing these effects play out in some way. I mean, if you’re a parent whose experience of the world is that the world is fundamentally unsafe, and that nobody can be trusted, it is very hard to send your children out into the world with anything other than a complete sort of shell of impenetrable self-protection, I suppose. Having said all of that, it was striking, certainly talking to a younger psychotherapist, that she said she felt that through the generations, although it persisted, it also diminished in the sense that the children and the grandchildren were more able to step away from the subject or to step outside it, to consider it, perhaps to have therapy and so forth. Whereas for many of that first generation, it was simply too dangerous and too painful to speak about it at all. And one interesting thing actually is that in her case, she said she started working with survivors of the Cultural Revolution. And she didn’t really know why. And then after she started doing this work she discovered that her grandparents had suffered in the Cultural Revolution as well, and nobody else had ever told her. But there’s this sense I think you so often have with family secrets that people don’t know what it is that’s there, they don’t even necessarily consciously know that there’s something there, and yet it’s in some way present in their lives and playing out in the choices they make.

Louisa Lim: I mean, Xu Bin, how do you see it? Because of course the trauma goes back long before the Cultural Revolution, this sort of generation after generation of sort of traumatic events. When you talked to the sent-down youth, and they described how their children have had no interest in their experience. Do you think they believe their children had kind of dodged the trauma? Or how do you think they see it?

Xu Bin: I think it depends on which part of this population you’re talking to. From most people from that generation the traumatic experience was just a very small percentage of people who actually experienced that, at the time during the Cultural Revolution. So, the traumas were mainly their parents. In other words, this Red Guard / sent-down youth generation’s parents, and they committed suicide, they were reported by their own children, and so on and so forth. That story is that in Tania’s book. And their children or their grandchildren are the people who suffered the most in the Cultural Revolution, so they’re like two generations away. And the second is that most of the people who were sent down did not actually experience a lot of the traumatic events. They heard the things, they saw things, but many of the things didn’t happen to them. So, for them, they’re kind of easy about their past, and even bragging about their past in the countryside, and use their sort of eating bitterness spirit in the countryside to educate their children and their children got fed up and didn’t really want to listen to that kind of things anymore. And particularly, one thing that I wrote in the book is that the sent-down youth, or the Red Guard generation’s cultural repertoire was inherited from the Mao years, which is outdated, which is not really liked by anyone today, but they stick to that because they have no alternatives. So, playing the same song, singing the same song and dancing the same dance, and all the time it became really repetitive, and then the children didn’t really want to hear that anymore. So generally, the cultural influence of this generation has been diminishing since the Cultural Revolution. And one thing that their children didn’t say, didn’t say explicitly, but it’s mainly from other intellectual’s comments on this generation is that, ‘You bragged about your experience. And you believe you’re heroes, you’re good people, but you are Red Guards. How do you deal with this dilemma?’ So that actually occurred in the 1990s, when quite a lot of literary critics are talking about the so called shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学, the trauma or scar literature, and you only talk about your good side, your dramatic side. And you’re not talking about the things that you did in schools. And you’re not even talking about the peasants in the countryside, who lived that kind of life for hundreds of years, and you only lived there for seven years or ten years.

Graeme Smith: In my time in Anhui I came across a few people who had been sent down, but through lack of family connections or things that had happened, never went back. And they really still, you know, decades later stood out in the countryside as being not from round here. Is that a widespread thing? Or is that just a really rare case?

Xu Bin: It’s a very rare case, statistically only, like, under five percent of the people who still live in the countryside. But there’s a sizable population of the sent-down youth who didn’t get a chance to go back to their home cities, let’s say Shanghai. But they went back, got the urban hukou, household registration in the city of their sent-down province, let’s say you were sent down to Heilongjiang province, and then you marry someone, or you got a job in the SOE, state-owned enterprise in Harbin, and then you’ve got a Harbin urban hukou. And then you retired from [your] Harbin danwei [单位 work unit] and then you returned to Shanghai; that trajectory was pretty common. And these people encounter quite a lot of problems after they retired, because the pensions and insurance they got was in Heilongjiang or in Xinjiang, in Anhui, which are significantly lower than those in Shanghai, but they want to return to Shanghai to reunite with their families. So, after they arrived in Shanghai they all of a sudden they found that the money is not good enough. And then they decided to petition the government to say, ‘You actually sent me down, I was forced to go down, was reluctant to go and then had to go’, or some people use more heroic narratives to say like, ‘We made contributions to the frontier construction, we answered a call from Chairman Mao. And then now you abandoned us’. And one of the comical sort of interactions between the staff of the Labor Bureau and those petitioning sent-down youth was the staff members said, ‘Okay, since Chairman Mao called you down to the countryside and you can, you know, talk to Chairman Mao.’ Which actually was the starting point of sort of a fistfight between the zhi qing and the staff.

Louisa Lim: So, we’re also seeing a lot more talk nowadays. We’re seeing more propaganda with Xi Jinping talking about rural revitalization and telling young people if you can’t find a job, you should learn to eat bitterness, you should go and look in the countryside. How do you, both of you, maybe starting with you Xu Bin, how do you interpret that? Are we going back? Is there a possibility that there might be some kind of new sent-down youth 2.0 coming up?

Xu Bin: I think it is, again, it goes back to what I said [about] the Lost Cause. So, in other words, the event, the sent-down program is a failure. But the government believed that there’s some elements in this failed event, failed campaign [that] are still useful today. And the calls now for the kids to go down to the countryside actually is an effort to salvage these elements from the sent-down program, to solve some of the problems today, for example, the employment problem of the youth that is one of the biggest troubles now for the Chinese government. And the ideological elements are pretty much the same. You need to jingshou duanlian 经受锻炼, experience the toughness and the building of character that’s exactly in the narrative, but I don’t think that’s a very serious plan, because one thing that you cannot force people to go down now, regardless of how hard they have tried. And second, today’s youth are totally different from the youth in the 1960s and the 70s. They like Black Pink, they’re fans of TFBOYS. They watch K-drama. How could you expect those people to answer your call to construct the frontiers, go to rural areas, stay there for seven to ten years, that’s almost impossible. So, this is also more like a reflection of a bigger problem. The current regime is trying to use the resources from the Mao years to solve the current problems. This is a very anachronistic mismatch.

Tania Branigan: No, absolutely. I mean, it just seems to me that, as you say, there was a lot of resistance, even in the 60s to this, but there were a few people who were genuinely idealistic and [it] wore off pretty quickly. But they thought, ‘Okay, we’re gonna go down to the countryside and transform this country’. The idea that you’re going to get your average 20-year-olds sitting in a Starbucks, in a nice big city somewhere to throw down their iPad and pick up their hoe, it just seems to me absolutely laughable. I wonder if perhaps, as well, it’s directed at their parents, in terms of trying to sell a particular kind of story about what China is and how the Party-state will lead it and where you should ascribe the blame if things aren’t working out quite as well as they should.

Graeme Smith: So, in terms of hangovers of language, people often look to make comparisons between Mao and Xi Jinping. And they look at language such as the Great Helmsman and things that are borrowed. But perhaps the most disturbing thing that I’ve seen picked up from the Cultural Revolution would be Xi’s revival of this term, the Fengqiao experience. Can you tell us what the Fengqiao experience is? And how could it possibly be useful today?

Xu Bin: It seems to me that it’s not surprising because Fengqiao experience was basically to mobilize people to watch each other and to struggle [with] each other at the grassroots level. So, which was not actually raised by any of the leaders before Xi, because of the generational experience thing. If you look at Hu Jintao generation, Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao generation and then the Jiang Zemin generation they’re significantly older than Xi. So, they are not the people who really believed in some of the indoctrination in the Mao years, or sometimes they could be the victims, Zhu Rongji himself was a victim in the 1950s. So, they stayed a little bit away from the indoctrination, they were already adults. You know when the Fengqiao was a part of the shehui zhuyi jiaoyu yundong 社会主义教育运动the socialist education movement in the 1960s. While Xi at a time was indoctrinated into that kind of ideology. So that was sort of in his political and cultural repertoire, which was picked up now as a way to solve the problems today, let’s say corruption or you know, lack of participation from the grassroots level, to do self-governing and things like that. Some of the goals sound interesting, people need to govern themselves, and things like that, which could be used as another way for civil society. But it’s not really in his repertoire to build a civil society, his repertoire was mainly from the Mao years. And then it’s again, very, very much depends on how he was indoctrinated into that kind of ideology, which was not surprising. So earlier we talked about that so-called sent-down 2.0, which could also be another case to revive the things that he was educated into, and then to use them to solve the problems today.

Tania Branigan: I think is striking as well, isn’t it that we have seen this sort of revival of this idea of watching your neighbour, both in terms of things like the fact that there’s a hotline to report acts of historical nihilism, but also, particularly with the pandemic years, the number of people from China talking about that sense of your neighbors watching you and reporting on you. I mean, actually something that people talked about in the West as well, of course. But particularly when you hear people sort of talk about their experience of the zero-COVID policies, it’s that sense of your neighbors, essentially, spying on you and being encouraged to spy on you and monitor you again.

Louisa Lim: Actually, it’s already been 60 years since the Cultural Revolution, has the time for a reckoning passed? Given the lack of historical knowledge of what happened even amongst those who were involved with it, and then, even less amongst their children, do you think there can ever be a reckoning in their lifetimes?

Tania Branigan: Well, very possibly not certainly within China, primarily for political and self-protection reasons. But also perhaps, because it’s such a fraught subject and they fear the social consequences, it’s clearly not going to happen as long as the Communist Party is in power, I would have thought. What we have seen, however, if you think of some of the broader debates that we’re seeing is that these things leave a trail which will be followed at some time in future. I remember a psychotherapist saying to me, this is one of the most extraordinary things about some of the interviews that had been recorded with victims of the Cultural Revolution. And he said to me, absolutely seriously, you know in a hundred years someone will find it, somebody will go back. And so, he had that absolute confidence in a sense that there would not be a discussion at any time in the near future, but that there would be one day. It’s the great quote from Lu Xun that I know you used yourself in your book, that blood debts will be have to be repaid. So, I do think it will be returned to at some point in the same way that we are seeing, for example, these discussions of chattel slavery, and the fact that the issue of reparations is back on the agenda in a way that would have seemed sort of impossible, 50 or even perhaps ten years ago. There’s a very long tail to history. I don’t think the Cultural Revolution will disappear in that sense, it will still be felt, and it will be returned to and perhaps I hope, one day, there will be a more open discussion of it. And the extraordinary work that Chinese scholars have done over the years to record and scrutinize and make sense of what happened, I hope will really finally come to its full fruition.

Xu Bin: I agree. So, I think some of the elements from the Cultural Revolution in the Mao years will be rehashed to suit the need of today, but I don’t think there will be a full-fledged revival of the Mao years now because the society is so different. And also I think the dominant ideology heavily relies on nationalism, instead of communism, which is a huge difference in the current administration’s sort of a frame, mental frame that competing with the United States for the world leadership probably is the number one goal, or many of the policies are just, you know, designed to achieve that goal. One Belt One Road, and even the COVID policy. is to compete with the United States, ‘Look how bad the United States have done, how well we have done’, and things like that. So, the nationalism is very big thing today, while the communist ideology has pretty much already died. And so even some of the elements are used, it’s used to suit that need. And if you’re looking official narrative of Xi Jinping, about his sent-down years, so it’s basically if you draw a trajectory it’s from the lower point of his personal life and career to a high point today. Past suffering has been redeemed into success. So that trajectory also is the one in the official narrative about the so-called China dream: China was at the lower point, toughed through all these difficulties, [and it’s] now at a high point. So, the purpose is to show that China has already been at the high point and can compete with the United States instead of doing another revolution. So, this kind of sort of a sense of superiority is there, which is very different from the mentality in the Mao years.

Graeme Smith: So, it sounds like you don’t think there’s going to be any sort of reckoning with the reality of what happened?

Xu Bin: No.

Graeme Smith: Xu Bin, Tania, thanks for joining us.

Xu Bin and Tania: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Graeme Smith: You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests Xu Bin and Tania Branigan, as well as my co-host, Louisa Lim. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. background research by Wing Kuang, our theme music is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Bombard the Past: Exhuming the Cultural Revolution appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Louisa Lim  00:37

China’s reality is more sci-fi than sci-fi. Those are the words of Han Song 韩松, one of China’s earliest science fiction writers. Today we’re looking at the reality of China’s sci-fi boom. The science fiction industry in China reached $12 billion last year. And of course, the crown jewel in that Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem is soon to be on Netflix in a show made by the creators of Game of Thrones.

Clip  01:10

We fear the dark. There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know.

Graeme Smith  01:27

That’s the trailer which has just been released. This month we’re talking all things sci-fi with Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator, as well as a PhD candidate at Yale University. We’re also joined by Han Song’s translator, Michael Berry, who is also a professor of contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Michael, let’s start with that statement of Han Song’s. If you could channel Han Song for a minute, how is China’s reality more sci-fi than sci-fi?

Michael Berry  01:58

You know, I think any Chinese scholar or anyone who has travelled or spent extended periods of time in China over the last several years, will, it will be, you’ll be hard pressed not to be startled by the radical social transformations that are playing out right before your eyes. I often, for years now, I’ve been telling people who know very little about China, when I’m trying to describe it and give them a sense of the pace and the urgency of this transformation. To think about it like cat years, or dog years, which are usually it’s seven cat years for one human year. For a long time, especially. I first went to China in the early 90s. I think 1993. And from that period all the way through, I would say the first decade of the 2000s, that’s really what it felt like. If you went to a city and left and came back a year later, you couldn’t find your way. Entire streets were ripped out, you know, buildings were torn down. Neighbourhoods were reimagined. And it had a very, a sense of dislocation. And I think a lot of people who lived through that or would go to travel through China during that time would really be startled by just the pace of this kind of transformation. And so it really did feel like a science fiction movie playing out before your eyes, the demolition and the reconstruction. And what that also did the people’s sense of values and place and morality, because just as the physical space was transforming, so two, people’s sense of where they belong in the world was also constantly in flux.

Louisa Lim  03:37

And Emily, what do you think? I mean, in terms of young Chinese readers, why do you think sci-fi is kind of speaking to them at this moment?

Emily Jin  03:46

This is actually my first time back in China after two years in America. One major point is that the prevalence of technology of app using, of, you know, facial recognition, all of those things just permeating, you know. I’m in Beijing now. The streets, the malls, wherever you go, not being here at home for quite some time and then coming back, makes me realise how unadapted I am to life in China. Even if it’s just two years, like you’d assume that two years isn’t, you know, too much of a time to be spent away from home. But once you’re kind of in that situation, you realise that you don’t actually know what’s going on. Where are the shops? How do you get groceries, the pace in which online delivery is happening, and you’re home and it’s kind of your parents now teaching you what to do when you’re back in China. It was obviously the same feeling when I travelled, when I last travelled back to Beijing back in 2020. So that was when the pandemic just kind of hit the world. So to put that together, I think technology actually plays such a huge role in everyone’s daily lives in China that you know, still here in the US, we you know, walk around with credit cards and carry little purse. But now, it’s that, from me, to my parents to people that I know, everyone’s just out there with one phone that does everything. It’s like your social life, your, you know, bank account, everything about yourself just kind of confined in this little black box that is a smartphone. And I’ve talked to many friends in my generation, and they were kind of equally as confused as I am being back in China, especially for the summer, because this is, you know, the peak in which a lot of us who were kind of stranded, quote unquote, abroad are coming back to visit. And everyone’s like, Oh, no, I don’t know how to pay. I don’t know where to store my like identity cards and all that. So I think to bring this back a little, the reason why sci-fi is being so popular is because of the sheer amount of technology we’re interacting with on a daily basis, and also at the rate in which that’s evolving. And I think it’s just happening in such a way that no matter if you’re coming in from the outside, like us having lived abroad for most of our lives, adult lives. Or if you’re just you know, having lived in China, all your life, but still having to constantly adjust to the new apps that are coming out, the new kinds of tech that you’re dealing with. I think, science fiction kind of functions as a sort of mental anchor for you to be like, okay, there’s still some kind of imaginary space I can escape into that somewhat prepares me not even like factually, but like more like emotionally for the world I’m living in.

Graeme Smith  06:27

Our sci-fi canon has works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was written way back in 1818, and has sometimes been described as the first work of science fiction.

Clip  06:37

This is the story you’ve heard about, talked about. The spine tingling, blood killing story that stunned your emotions. Frankenstein, don’t touch that.

Louisa Lim  06:51

There’s also Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in 1968 in scenes which appear ever more likely today. How a computer comes to life and becomes murderous.

Clip  07:04

Open the pod bay doors, HAL. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. I don’t know what you’re talking about HAL. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

Graeme Smith  07:27

Michael, what are the antecedents for China’s science fiction writers? What do they draw upon?

Michael Berry  07:32

Oh, you know, it’s a very diverse set of influences. The ones you just quoted are certainly influential for a lot of Chinese writers today. But also earlier, earlier works. Also, local Chinese works, some of the writers, you mentioned, Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, Han Song. They’re very influential for the newer generation. But if we want to break things down, Chinese science fiction has gone through several waves over the years. And there’s been starts and stops. And so I really look at the first start as being the late Qing Dynasty. Where if you look at that historical period, this is where the Meiji Restoration was very successful in Japan. And China was really struggling with how to modernise and how to envision its own future. And one way that they were trying to imagine their future was through the lens of science fiction. And so you have this first explosion of sci-fi during the late Qing. When we get to the May 4 movement, by then it really starts to die down. And you have a long period where there really isn’t a lot happening in science fiction. During the early socialist period in the fifties, there’s a slight blip in terms of a couple of films, a couple novels that are in the science fiction genre. But I would really look at the second major wave after the late Qing being the early reform era. Where after Deng Xiaoping opened up, and you have of course, the Four Modernizations, right, where China overnight was trying to modernise its military, bring in science, technology. And one powerful avatar for that was science fiction. And that’s where you see the second boom, and all of a sudden the creation of science fiction journal, a huge influx of translations of Western science fiction into China coming back for the first time or introduced for the first time. The import of Western science fiction films in the 1980s and 90s. And so you have the 80s as the second wave. And then again, it dies down for a while. And then it’s really not until the 2000s, post 2000s that you get this third wave, the current wave, which we’re currently in the middle of. With the rise of writers like Wang Jinkang 王晋康, Liu Cixin, Han Song, etc, where, it’s probably the biggest wave yet, in terms of its global impact. And so each of those waves had different influences. But I think it’s always been a mishmash of both local and foreign influences. And of course in China you have the very robust wuxia 武侠 or martial arts tradition, especially the more fantastical, mystical side of that. That’s also played into the reimagination of science fiction by borrowing elements of that side by side with elements from the Western canon.

Graeme Smith  10:23

So, Emily, I mean, one work that some people cite as being kind of China’s first work of science fiction is Lao She’s Cat Country (猫城记), which oddly is a book that he himself ended up not liking, because he thought it wasn’t very funny. I mean, do you think that has any influence? Or is it even a science fiction work? Some people say it’s not?

Emily Jin  10:44

Yeah, actually, I’m like, kind of interested in talking about how exactly is the genre of sci-fi defined in China? That, you know, Michael, just now kind of traced the entire history of how this whole idea of Chinese Science Fiction gradually came into shape. And the one thing I’m interested in is talking about, you know, when we mention science fiction, in China, what exactly are we referring to? So, I know that you know, cat city, it has been, in a way canonised into the entire history of Chinese science fiction. But was it actually viewed a sci-fi in a way that, for example, us in the Anglophone world define a sci-fi? Or is it just, you know, to Lao She 老舍, more like an experimental way of metaphorically expressing what he’s been feeling, observing at the time? And I think the same question can actually be extrapolated to talking about the current trend of Chinese sci-fi. In which we are somewhat moving away from the generation of Liu Cixin, which, you know, came under the impact heavily of these, you know, what we call the golden era American, British science fiction writers. You know, the whole Space Odyssey fascination with tech details and all that. We’re moving into a generation, which on one hand, as also Michael said, just now. You know, the opening up of the genre of sci-fi to incorporate elements from wuxia. From also, you know, self-cultivation, as they call it xiuxin 修心, which got popular primarily online. The prominence of internet fiction, online forums of people adding various influences from pop culture, also from their own local folk culture into writing science fiction, into imagining science society, and what it means to, you know, fundamentally be Chinese in a world like this. So I think all of that put together makes us constantly think about how to actually define what we call by Chinese science fiction. So are we you know, a community? Are we a genre? Are we somewhat canonised at this point? Are we not? Are we still exploring? What is our potentiality for change. So like my generation, who are just ready to emerge onto the stage, writing sci-fi, being translated. Of course, coming under the assumption that their work has a higher chance of being translated than, for example, when Han Song and Liu Cixin first started writing. So I think we’re really in this really exciting period. And so if that’s, you know, moving too far away from the question about Lao She. But I think I’m getting very similar feelings towards how are we actually interpreting sci-fi as we move into the near future?

Louisa Lim  13:24

So for those really young writers, a lot of them are kind of writing online, aren’t they? And being discovered not the way that traditional writers were discovered? How do you think that’s changing the genre Emily?

Emily Jin  13:35

Yeah, I think, you know, in the past, our common understanding is that if you want to read Chinese sci-fi, so, Science Fiction World, kehuan shi jie 科幻世界is kind of the big magazine that you go to. So having your stories being accepted by that magazine, marks a certain kind of prestige. It means that you’re officially kind of initiated into this Chinese sci-fi cult, if you can say that. But now, people aren’t going on, you know, popular Internet fic sites. So it’s jinjiang 晋江, or qidian 起点. They’re writing sci-fi in the way that they don’t even need to have an interaction with what we call, you know, the more proper Chinese sci-fi. They don’t have to have read the Three Body Problem to write a sci-fi. They can simply just be fascinated with, you know, I want to write a story that incorporates romance. I want to have these people fall in love with robots. And they’re perfectly fine with doing that. And that is also sci-fi. Except that, you know, the thrill you get from that may not be so much centred on what we do in our reading of sci-fi, which is like, oh, intellectual experiment. It’s all about philosophy, society. But for them, it’s really just, I just want to see a good love story that’s happening between human and a form of nonhuman. And sci-fi seems to be the most convenient place to take these tropes from. So for them, it’s kind of like, really, they’re doing their own thing. And without the burden of having to represent some kind of, I am writing sci-fi for China or for the world. It’s more like I’m writing this simply for myself and a handful of audience that are interested. So that’s where, you know, it’s really just a storytelling. The characterization that matters, instead of having to really come to some major understanding about human technology.

Graeme Smith  15:24

And so are we starting to see, and this might be a question for either of you, crossover with other popular online genres? Are we seeing, for example, boys love sci-fi?

Emily Jin  15:33

Of course, that’s actually a huge thing right now. Boys love, actually to trace back the history, I think China got the tradition largely from Japan, which it became its own little niche genre were largely female, or queer writers describe the romance between two male characters. And that became kind of a way for, especially, you know, younger women to imagine, explore romantic relationships, while coming out of gender confinements. So that kind of started evolving in China for the past two decades. And it’s always been, you know, going strong in China. So now, the entire idea of like, boys love genre fiction plus sci-fi, is quite popular. Because now instead of writing two characters, you know, developing a romance in real life reality, you know, going into work, being at school, they want them to meet each other on a spaceship. Which is fun, and adds the flavour. So, it has been really popular.

Louisa Lim  16:34

And it’s actually really interesting. I mean, I’m just thinking about my students from China. And recently, we did a audio assignment where they had to do an assignment on breaking the binaries. And so many of them did assignments about breaking the binaries between online life and real life, and they were living quite sci-fi existences. You know, there’s one who had an AI boyfriend. And there were people who wrote about how they were Tomb Sweeping virtually. And you know, you know, and all these other kinds of online relationships inside games like Second Life. And I just did feel like, it is almost like a more dystopian world. Or, you know, one step further ahead than what we’re doing in the West, when it comes to this sort of integration of online life and real life. Is it hard for Chinese sci-fi writers to go that much further into the future?

Michael Berry  17:31

You know, that, I mean, that’s a question I’ve asked a few writers. Especially during the COVID period, where our everyday lives because, you know, you know, people, just to leave their house you have to scan a QR code. You have to go get swabbed. And that level of the intervention of technology into people’s everyday lives. And the level to which it penetrated into these everyday activities. It really felt it was, you know, one of the classic cases where reality became much stranger and more bizarre than fiction. And I’m certain that it certainly did pose some challenges to certain writers, and in some cases, preempted certain suppositions that writers had about what the near future might look like. I mean, recently, Chen Qiufan 陈楸帆, he co-authored a book… Stanley Chen, he co-authored a book with Lee Kai-Fu 李開復called AI 2041. It’s a collection of short stories, that imagines what the world looks like in a few decades with the penetration of AI. And I ran into one of the co-authors Stanley a few months ago. And he said, just you know, a year and a half after the book was published, so much of the content was already outdated. Because what had actually happened with the real-life progression of AI complete, was completely, outside the box in terms of what they had imagined when they were writing the book. And I think that’s a great example of how the technological advancements in terms of AI in some cases are even giving our most sophisticated science fiction writers a run for their money in terms of trying to really anticipate where where things are going.

Louisa Lim  19:09

It’s like in America, political satirists, couldn’t deal with the Trump years in China. Sci-fi writers are in trouble. Michael, let me ask you about Han Song’s hospital trilogy, which you translated, and it was published in March. And it seems like a thinly disguised take on Chinese politics. You know, it’s the story of this new age of medicine where hospitals have become cities and patients have to submit to the hospital for this sort of endless ongoing, never-ending treatments. I mean, how was Han Song allowed to write this? Is it the case that sci-fi writers have more leeway for manoeuvre in their sort of imaginary universes than fiction writers, straight fiction writers?

Michael Berry  19:55

Yeah I think that in some sense, it’s still quite remarkable that this trilogy got published in China. It was published originally 2016, three volumes: 2016, 2017, 2018. So one volume per year during that period. So this is already under the flag of Xi Jinping. And it is quite remarkable that it was able to pass the censors, because we all realise that censorship in terms of cultural discourse in China has gotten increasingly stringent over the last couple of years. And I think the way that this was able to get past censorship and to get published, is because on the one hand, he’s using the genre of science fiction, so it’s this alternate space, this alternate reality, he actually never uses the word China in the entire book. And so it’s a very deliberate avoidance of those those terms. And besides science fiction, I also really look at it almost more so as avant garde fiction. It’s very weird. It’s very strange. So much so that I doubt many censors even got through the book. And those who did get through the book, I wonder if they really even got what he was trying to say. It’s very experimental, it’s very contorted in terms of its language. And I think, in some sense, when you were approach the book, you have to go through a process of decoding as a reader to understand what Han Song was really trying to say in a book like this. But it’s a great testament to the power of fiction, that even in a moment where so many books are being banned. Or not even, you know, just being pulled off shelves. That the ingenuity of this writer was able to pull off this grand literary feat to publish not just one but three volumes, where he was saying things that are quite explosive and quite, quite bold, much more than I think, many of his contemporaries.

Graeme Smith  21:52

And so do you think it’s just the censors are not keeping up? Because I mean, if you think of time travel dramas are banned. Hospital dramas are now banned. Also an effect this, in many ways, was a combination of those two genres, two of the most sensitive genres in Chinese censorship. Do you think possibly in the future, they might go, oh, hang on? What’s this story really about?

Michael Berry  22:14

I mean, that’s part of it. Also, I think, you know, literature doesn’t have the power that it once held. I mean, Han Song, although he’s very well known in science fiction communities, he’s not a bestselling writer. And the type of fiction that he’s writing is very niche, you know, like I said, experimental, dark, weird, strange. It’s not, you know, for your Tom Clancy, or Stephen King market, it’s something very, very different. And I think because of that, because it is a relatively small market, he’s able to get away with more. Also, because of his day job. Han Song leads, leads something of a double life. He is a reporter and an editor and head of the translation newsroom at Xinhua news, you know, the big state media conglomerate in China. And so by day, he’s part of the system. And then at night, he puts on his cape and writes these strange, fantastical stories, horrific stories, where he assumes a very different identity. But I also suspect that his good standing in terms of his day job also maybe helps him in terms of getting some of these works past the stringent censorship standards.

Graeme Smith  23:23

His day job probably helps him gather material too, I guess?

Michael Berry  23:27

Yes and he’s talked about, he’s been very open about that, about how his experiences. Not one as someone who deals with chronic illness and has spent a lot of time in hospitals, but also living through these kinds of bureaucracies of the state system, in his professional life. Have really been a direct inspiration for a lot of this fiction.

Louisa Lim  23:47

I feel like my experience at an Australian university might qualify me to write bureaucracy lit. But maybe there’s no audience for that. Emily, what about those younger sci-fi writers? Do they struggle with censorship? Or are they doing stuff or using platforms where they can kind of bypass it?

Emily Jin  24:06

I view this rather as an action-reaction loop, in a sense, because people talk about censorship in China and publishing, especially as if, it’s something that it’s just kind of impossible to get past. That, in many ways, that itself, especially to the outside world also becomes somewhat of its own, you know, yet another overblown myth about China, that people kind of hyper focus on in many ways. But I think just my knowledge of the younger generation of people, I think, we are definitely born in a generation where we learn how to write things smartly. You know, how to play these kinds of fascinating language puns, ouse, incorporate thoughts into metaphors. So I think that’s actually a direction in which the language that the generation is, the younger generation, is using is really evolving. It’s a combination of having read books by writers who are already being careful about what they’re writing, growing up, and also a large influence coming from the internet community. Because that’s usually where the censorship hits on a day-to-day basis. So if they’re using, you know, social media, they have to be savvy about what keywords cannot appear. Not even just in a narrow political sense, but like porn, for example. If you’re hinting at, you know, these people are doing something obscene, there’s a chance of the entire kind of article being censored. And just very weird censorship, like pops up here and there, that can also get pretty absurd. And once again, that’s a combination of human censors plus AI censors. So it’s become some kind of an interesting ecosystem in the sense that it’s not really that you are confined in a box in which you just kind of can’t get out, hard walls. But it’s more like you get to leak out from all directions, you can kind of move around the cracks, but then appear as if you are doing it, like sneakily. talking in metaphors has been has become a skill in which everyone slowly got adapted to. And in a way, in a pretty like neutral way, I guess that is also contributing to the way that these like avant garde fiction, or how this new generation is really exploring literary creation in general. So this is kind of like, once again, you see a combination of, you know, human society procedures, things that are purely human, combined with the internet. Really just magnifying things or exacerbating things all put together, resulting in this new kind of new generational, modern Chinese language.

Louisa Lim  26:44

But in a way, that’s really an internalisation of censorship that, although it is, I can see that it’s a driver to creativity in some ways. But also, the younger generation has, to that extent already internalised a lot of those dictates. And that drives the way they write, no?

Emily Jin  27:03

Now, to use the word internalisation still seems somewhat like kind of reducing the complexity of the situation. That it’s not really just like a, oh, like this has been happening, that it’s like boiling a frog and warm water that this is all that it is. But I think rather, like I was trying to emphasise, I think it’s still a combination of that. But also, the internet once again, provided simultaneously freedom and also a space to further kind of self-evolve. It rather feels like the current generation of writers is evolving like some kind of a call or algorithm, that they get a certain kind of input, and they digest it and what comes out is a result of that. So in terms of not exactly really internalising, but it’s just that whatever you get fed, you produce accordingly. And this is just a version of what’s being produced.

Michael Berry  27:57

For the last 20 years or so, Chinese Science Fiction really did provide a somewhat, a liminal space, a marginal space wherein writers were indeed able to kind of smuggle things into their fiction that they wouldn’t be able to get in so-called serious fiction. Because it was taking place in this alternative space or outer space or, you know, this imaginary setting. One thing, though, that nobody, I think really anticipated was what Louisa mentioned at the very beginning, this science fiction overnight. I shouldn’t say overnight, but over the course of a very short period of time transforming into this multibillion-dollar industry as so-called IP. I mean, for a long time, the Chinese government had been figuring out how do we so called ‘send Chinese culture out into the world,’ right? That was a government policy. And for a while they thought Mo Yan would do it or so and so would do it and they had their eyes on various potentialities. I don’t think anyone imagined Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem being the work that would truly send Chinese culture into the world. It was kind of the Black Horse. And so in a very short period of time, a lot of investment has gone into the Chinese kind of science fiction cultural enterprise. But what that also means is that this genre that historically had been able to fly under the radar, in terms of publishing stories and ideas that were quite explosive, and really pushing the boundaries is now being commandeered to some extent, by the system. So you know, it’s now there’s so much government, there’s so many eyes on the genre. Now, there’s so much investment, that it also makes it harder and harder to smuggle those ideas that could have gone through very smoothly a decade ago. Now, there’s going to be much more policing. And there’s also going to be more flag waving, very sneakily embedded into some of these science fiction stories. Which you thought, well, since it’s set on Mars or set in some alternate future, you know, you don’t have the burden of nationalism, but somehow it’s still kind of reappearing. And so I think the rise, the financial rise of Chinese Science Fiction is also creating a challenge for those creators that would like to maybe push the boundaries a little bit.

Graeme Smith  30:10

Yeah, it’s so interesting that the people who are in charge now I grew up on I guess the first wave of Chinese science fiction which was sort of based on Soviet science popularisation, rather than what we have now, which is something totally different. But to get historical for a moment, Michael. I’ve always been struck by the party’s evangelism around science and that every turn citizens are urged to believe in science, which is kind of ridiculous, you know, xiangxin kexue 相信科学. And if you go way back to the regime’s origin, in the May 4 movement, you had Mr. Science who you were meant to, to rally around. Not many regimes have that in their DNA? I mean, how does this fetishization of science, this almost as a substitute for religion impact Chinese science fiction in the way the party sees it?

Michael Berry  30:55

Well, I think it plays into that to some degree. I mean, even you look at test scores among say, Chinese high school students in the sciences and mathematics compared to their western counterparts. There is there’s still a much greater investment in knowledge about science and scientific history than I think there is, at least in the United States, and I think also in a lot of other Western nations. And so I think that certainly contributes to the popularity of writers like Liu Cixin and those who are working in the so-called, you know, hard science fiction and really, kind of unpacking these sophisticated theories and weaving them into their worlds. There’s a much greater base of general readers who can get it who can understand that, because the base knowledge for you know, an average educated Chinese is quite high in terms of what they know about science and mathematics and the history of medicine and all of these kinds of topics. So I think it does create a much stronger reader interest in the, in the genre. And then, of course, this is good for the state, too. I mean, if so, it’s something that’s certainly encouraged. And I think it, it all works works together.

Louisa Lim  32:05

I was reading these reports about the recent science fiction convention in in China, you know, you always imagine those as being sort of super nerdy, but it sounds like this one was a sort of full-on government-organised thing. And Xinhua was quoting the Vice President and Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, Xu Wei, who said that sci-fi was a unique and effective form of science, popularisation that is increasingly playing a prominent role in enhancing scientific literacy. I mean, Emily, do they really like sci-fi, these government departments or is it just opportunistic, a cultural export that’s finally stuck. And they’re jumping on the bandwagon?

Emily Jin  32:49

Yeah. So actually, I’m really glad that you gave this really funny example. Because I think that really just encapsulates much of what I’ve been talking about. Is that, you know, on the surface, you get these big overblown, like, master narratives of how you know, science, sci-fi, the country is all coming together. But in reality, if you’re actually at a convention like that, it is still the super nerdy convention that you’re expecting. That, you know, you don’t actually get officials walking around in like cosplay gear. It’s still, you know, like, people just up like Star Wars characters appearing, you know, doing like lightsaber fighting, buying books, lining up to meet Liu Cixin, to get his like autograph whatsoever. That’s like, you know, the usual package of convention attendance. And just to add on to that, actually, people who actually go to the conventions, as in the community of sci-fi fans in China is, to my surprise, much younger than the average age of fans like that. In America, for example, because I’ve been to many of these different conventions, especially Worldcon I was at the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Worldcon. And just in comparison, it seems like the main body of sci-fi fans who are actually you know, buying books who are following the writers, both online and offline are college students, some even high school students. Many of the universities in China have their own sci-fi communities, these like after school reading clubs, which is something that I don’t see necessarily in, you know, like US universities, that people who actually come to conventions are people who have a more stable income, who like many of them are there with family and children and all that. But in China, sci-fi still feels very young and vibrant.

Graeme Smith  34:37

And Emily, I mean, it seems the science fiction scene in China, it’s still really dominated by one writer, Liu Cixin. And particularly the Three Body Problem, just you know, was the first Asian book, I think, to win the Hugo prize, which is sort of the science fiction equivalent of a Nobel Prize. And, you know, people like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, you know, vocal fans of it. I mean, there’s that sort of celebrity, how does that affect the younger riders in his shadow? Is it good for them? Or is it a bit hard for them to emerge?

Emily Jin  35:07

One of the big reasons of why he’s still popular is obviously what you said just now. And I think people still, in general, in China, do take the idea that one book from any Asian writer being recognised kind of internationally, especially in the English world, becoming a best seller and all that, that adds to all of this, you know, this halo effect surrounding the book, basically. And it’s not that like science fiction, fans read it, not only younger people, but you know, like my parents, like even my grandparents have heard of it. So I think it’s really became this national phenomenon, that everyone’s not even just like celebrating the success of one person. But the, also the, success of finally being kind of recognised. You know, not only that Chinese writers can write like great novels, but everyone else in the world is also seeing that happen. So there’s like a sheer sheer sense of like joy and pride in that. That’s also I think, pretty, pretty wholesome in its own way. But to bring this back, I think, obviously, this resulted in the people that came after Liu Cixin, once again, especially the younger generation of writers going from, you know, people who are born in the 1980s. So, as the aforementioned, Chen Qiufan, Baoshu 宝树, etc. They all came into their own writing careers, reading Liu Cixin reading, Han Song and Wang Jinkang. And they were the people who kind of also shaped their first like understandings of what is it like to write Chinese sci-fi. So for them, I think what’s happening for them now is that they’re gradually trying to go their own ways, while acknowledging the influence of those sin and his generation. Finding a path that suits themselves better. So I think you see many interesting efforts happening. So for instance, to Chen Qiufan. And as an example, his exploration right now is to also combine some of the avant garde experimental literary attempts into writing science fiction. And he’s also working on you know, adding in more, for instance, elements of traditional culture of his own locality to really put out the message that though he’s writing as a, you know, Chinese writer, and he’s taking experiences from having lived in China, it’s not so that he’s representing a sense of confined Chineseness. Or, since he’s been translated so much to really show his international audience that Chinese sci-fi is just one Liu Cixin after another, by writing, for example, for his novel Waste Tide, he’s writing about his coastal hometown, on the southern coast of China. And that’s, you know, a place where people don’t normally talk about or pay attention to, especially once again, in the Anglophone world, when they’re talking about China. That China isn’t just Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen. It’s not just, you know, these facial recognition techniques, or people constantly scanning QR codes. But there’s a large part of China or actually, I would say, most of China is so diverse and so complex, and technology is influencing these places to very different extents. So there are writers kind of capturing that. And of course, there are also writers who made their name on the internet, who are doing this, largely also for the market for the group of audience they already have. And they’re only writing sci-fi to test out new waters, doing this for entertainment. All of that add together people are recognising here in the writers’ community in China on science fiction that though we do celebrate and we like love the system very much. It is right now at a turning point where it’s about time that not only kind of within China domestically, but also spreading out to the rest of the world to really demonstrate that Chinese science fiction isn’t just this like one syllable phrase that has some core characteristics. That even just to bring this back to Han Song again, his writing is so different from those a student and I’m just really happy that he’s being translated.

Louisa Lim  39:11

Liu Cixin’s translator Ken Liu, who has this lovely quotation, that the act of translation involves breaking down one piece of work into one language, and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language. And he said when the gulf separating the two is as wide as the Pacific Ocean that separates China from America, the task can be daunting. I mean, both of you are translators as well. Maybe both of you could talk a little bit about the sort of particular challenges in translating Chinese sci-fi into English. Maybe Michael, you first?

Michael Berry  39:52

Oh, you know, the Han Song project is my first real work of science fiction I’ve translated. I’ve been translating since I was an undergraduate. Yeah, 25 years. But I’m kind of new to translating Chinese science fiction. And I think the sheer volume of knowledge of fields that I’m not that comfortable with, like medical history and technology. You know, there’s especially a book like this, there’s just an amalgamation of medical tests and diseases and strange disorders. I don’t even know what half of those things were in English, when I first encountered them. And so there was a lot of homework and also medical history. There’s all it’s almost Encyclopaedia of Western and Chinese medical history that’s embedded into Han Song’s Hospital. And so there was a lot of homework that I needed to do, as I would encounter these strange terms. But probably, from a translator’s perspective, the most challenging aspect of the Hospital trilogy, what had simply had to do with the, there was a peculiarity in terms of the source text. So when I started translating this, Han Song actually sent me, maybe Emily knows this story. Han Song had sent me a PDF of the book. And that’s what I was working off of. And after I was maybe halfway through the book. And one day, I took the hardcopy off my bookshelf, and I laid down to thumb through it and just get a sense of what was coming next around the corner. And it was completely different than what I just translated. And I had this ominous feeling descend upon me. And I immediately texted Han Song and said, Did you send me the right version? He’s like, Yeah, it’s fine. Whatever version, you know, you have is fine. Don’t worry about it. And I said, Well, it’s really different than the published version. He’s like, No, it’s fine, whichever you pick, whichever you want to use. And I sent him back what he sent me and I said, this is what you sent me says, Oh, that is quite different. He said, that’s actually an early version of the book. Before we had really gotten under the hood, and done editing, and major revisions, and he said, but the good thing is that before the censors got their hands on the books, so there’s a lot of things that I had to take out that are preserved there. So he actually liked it in a strange way. And then he started sending me other versions. And there were four different versions of the book that he sent me, all in different states. And the published version in English is something of a mutant because half of it is based on the early manuscript. Another half, the second half is based on the published manuscript. And then Han Song, who also he was an English, he’s an English editor, at Xinhua. So he reads and writes beautiful English, and he actually did a lot of revisions directly to the book, directly in English. And so this is a little bit long-winded, but in short, it was probably one of the most unique translator experiences I ever had. Because of the real hands on intervention of the writer and how much he actually did to it. And it was a sense that we were working together to create something new based on those different versions of the manuscript. And also it was very science fiction, it was as if these were… Metaverse is all the rage these days. It was as if I had four different hospitals from four different metaverses. And we were trying to traverse these different universes and kind of bring them together. But it was a really fulfilling, but also really challenging project because it wasn’t just the straight Chinese to English, but it was this navigation of these different versions of Han Song’s world. And ultimately, he was so happy with the end result, he actually asked the other foreign language publishers to use that as the source text for any future editions.

Louisa Lim  43:48

But that’s really interesting, because isn’t that what happened with Liu Cixin’s book as well. That he had originally written it, starting with the Cultural Revolution, and then the censors asked him to change it. And then when Netflix came along, they switched it back. So is it the case that the translations we’re seeing are not necessarily particularly pure, but maybe a translation of a different iteration that includes stuff that is not allowed in Chinese?

Michael Berry  44:17

There is some of that and I think there is an almost a restorative process that went into at least the Han Song process, for for part of the manuscript. And part of that was accidental, and later that became very self-conscious as we started working together on bringing these different assets, different versions of the source texts together to produce the translation. With Liu Cixin’s novel, I think also that just had to do with different sensibilities in terms of English readership and Chinese readership. I mean, what works in English sometimes, it’s just very different than what works in Chinese. And this can be in terms of what’s a good hook to start a chapter with, or try start a book with, to issues of gender. I know there’s been a lot of times talk about subtle gender references in the Liu Cixin’s fiction which went underwent some tweaks to make them more palpable or less objectionable to Anglophile readers.

Graeme Smith  45:11

Emily?

Emily Jin  45:12

First of all, I think the gender aspect of things. And this is also to add on to the previous response I gave regarding younger generation of writers trying to leave the shadow of Liu Cixin. Unlike Michael, who kind of came in translating Yu Hua 余华. For example, in a more traditional translator writer paradigm. I think, when I first joined this entire like act of translation, I started with actually working with sci-fi writers, so straight out of college. And the experience I had was obviously really different because the writers I first worked with are writers who are mostly very fluent in English. So I’ve gotten the whole translator-writer talking about what to do, changing the English version of things based on what suits the market better, what suits the habit of English readers better. And also, another important aspect is the author’s own personal growth. That it’s entirely possible that the author just felt one thing when they’re writing the Chinese a decade ago, than a decade later things have changed in their creative process and their lives. And having the translation happen then, and having the chance for them to be involved in shaping this translation meant that they kind of have a second chance to go back to the story to redo things that they didn’t like those concerns and those efforts. Also, step beyond the simple it’s translation, helping people get past censorship, etc, etc. So I think a lot of is also because of the author’s personal approaches to a same piece of text. And many authors also tend to circle back to things in questions they’ve been concerned with throughout their creative career. So that’s one experience I’ve gotten translating with them. Because to add a little personal background of this. Is that I did grew up reading a lot of the writings by the authors I work with now. So I think to see how much they’ve evolved as writers and networking with them as translators, one major aspect is the amount of like, younger male writers realising that the language they’re using is not okay is something that actually is quite impressive. Because I’ve had more than one author kind of tell me that after being translated, I started realising in a way that, oh, I should probably not, you know, automatically put down these few words to describe a woman. Or, you know, after being translated, I’m realising that my novel utterly lacks female characters and all that. So I think to have that happen, is really also a learning process for both the translator and the author, to give them a chance to, you know, reexamine not only the way they write science fiction, not only the novel itself, but habits in language use in general. And I think it’s a nice trend that’s happening, that the process of translation can actually help writers and translators together achieve that sense of perspective that extends beyond our own bodies and cognitions. I’m also seeing more and more, once again, younger female writers purposely wanting to work with female translators. So it’s no longer kind of like a linear blackbox process that the writer just gives up their work and whoever gets to translate, it just does the job and moves on. That the writers are, you know, asking for people who they think would understand their background better their mentality better.

Graeme Smith  48:38

Really briefly from you both, because this has just been such an amazing episode. I mean, how do you see the future of Chinese science fiction, five, ten years from now? I mean, do you think it could end up being a victim of its own success? Or is it going to just keep going from strength to strength?

Emily Jin  48:52

Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and be the radical. But I think having heard the term Chinese science fiction, so many times, being you know, on podcasts and at conventions, and all that, actually, my personal wish is that in five years to ten year’s time, we no longer refer to Chinese science fiction as a collective, that people are recognising the writers who are writing now who are the most active by names by volumes by their work and approaches. Rather than, oh, they’re all Chinese and they write sci-fi. So I think science fiction being expanded majorly as a genre. And also, you know, wiggling out of the shackles of many kinds of expectations of big, you know, social, political, and also cultural expectations. Also, notably, being translated into English. The gaze placed upon Chinese sc- fi, slash Chinese literature by an audience largely not knowing China. All of that put together I just hope that those layers would be eventually removed one by one and Chinese sci-fi writers can be seen as writer’s before anything.

Louisa Lim  50:01

And for you, Michael, do you think the government approbation and oversight combined with just the fast pace of change, will that end up killing it?

Michael Berry  50:11

I don’t think it will kill it. But there are challenges ahead. But there’s also a lot of promise. I mean, a lot of the writers we’ve been talking about, like Liu Cixin, Han Song, they’re part of, you know, the so-called apex, you know, the big three, or the big four, they’re sometimes referred to. And they were all male writers. And they were, kind of peaked, you know, maybe I don’t know, a decade ago or so. But there is a younger generation now of women writers like Xia Jia 夏笳, Hao Jingfang 郝景芳and even younger writers and non-binary writers, and writers who I think are bringing a whole new perspective to the field. And there’s also in terms of cinematic adaptation and television adaptation of science fiction stories. China has had some bumpy starts early on. I mean, there was a Three Body Problem film that was haunted with problems and kind of in limbo for a long time. But as we saw a few years ago, the adaptation of Wandering Earth became one of the most profitable films in Chinese cinema history. Its sequel kind of reduplicated that success. And I think there’s a lot of potential in the future for more television and film adaptations for science fiction, which will, and of course, the big Netflix adaptation of Three Bodies coming very soon. That will, of course, blow this up even bigger stage globally. And so I think there’s a lot of exciting room for development in terms of new voices, and also adaptations of older classic works. But there is the big caveat or the elephant in the room is the fact that as more eyeballs start concentrating on this genre. The government will want to regulate it, and kind of commandeer it, and utilise it to make main melody-style themes. You know, politically correct themes that are woven into these and make them kind of fulfil the political line of Xi Jinping and the party. And so I think that’s going to be a delicate dance that writers and filmmakers and creators are going to have to navigate moving forward, but I do see a lot of potential. But there, there certainly will be landmines ahead as well.

Graeme Smith  52:20

What a perfect way to end. Michael, Emily, thanks for joining us.

Michael Berry  52:23

Thanks for having us.

Graeme Smith  52:31

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing Beltway. Many thanks to our guests and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, [our transcripts are by Juliette Baxter], our music is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

The post Cat Years in Cat Country: Sci-Fi in China appeared first on The China Story.

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Louisa Lim  00:37

China’s reality is more sci fi than sci fi. Those are the words of Han Song 韩松, one of China’s earliest science fiction writers. Today we’re looking at the reality of China’s sci-fi boom. The science fiction industry in China reached $12 billion last year. And of course, the crown jewel in that Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem is soon to be on Netflix in a show made by the creators of Game of Thrones.

Clip  01:10

We fear the dark. There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know.

Graeme Smith  01:27

That’s the trailer which has just been released. This month we’re talking all things sci fi with Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator, as well as a PhD candidate at Yale University. We’re also joined by Han Song’s translator, Michael Berry, who is also a professor of contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Michael, let’s start with that statement of Han Song’s. If you could channel Han Song for a minute, how is China’s reality more sci-fi than sci-fi?

Michael Berry  01:58

You know, I think any Chinese scholar or anyone who has travelled or spent extended periods of time in China over the last several years, will, it will be, you’ll be hard pressed not to be startled by the radical social transformations that are playing out right before your eyes. I often, for years now, I’ve been telling people who know very little about China, when I’m trying to describe it and give them a sense of the pace and the urgency of this transformation. To think about it like cat years, or dog years, which are usually it’s seven cat years for one human year. For a long time, especially. I first went to China in the early 90s. I think 1993. And from that period all the way through, I would say the first decade of the 2000s, that’s really what it felt like. If you went to a city and left and came back a year later, you couldn’t find your way. Entire streets were ripped out, you know, buildings were torn down. Neighbourhoods were reimagined. And it had a very, a sense of dislocation. And I think a lot of people who lived through that or would go to travel through China during that time would really be startled by just the pace of this kind of transformation. And so it really did feel like a science fiction movie playing out before your eyes, the demolition and the reconstruction. And what that also did the people’s sense of values and place and morality, because just as the physical space was transforming, so two, people’s sense of where they belong in the world was also constantly in flux.

Louisa Lim  03:37

And Emily, what do you think? I mean, in terms of young Chinese readers, why do you think sci-fi is kind of speaking to them at this moment?

Emily Jin  03:46

This is actually my first time back in China after two years in America. One major point is that the prevalence of technology of app using, of, you know, facial recognition, all of those things just permeating, you know. I’m in Beijing now. The streets, the malls, wherever you go, not being here at home for quite some time and then coming back, makes me realise how unadapted I am to life in China. Even if it’s just two years, like you’d assume that two years isn’t, you know, too much of a time to be spent away from home. But once you’re kind of in that situation, you realise that you don’t actually know what’s going on. Where are the shops? How do you get groceries, the pace in which online delivery is happening, and you’re home and it’s kind of your parents now teaching you what to do when you’re back in China. It was obviously the same feeling when I travelled, when I last travelled back to Beijing back in 2020. So that was when the pandemic just kind of hit the world. So to put that together, I think technology actually plays such a huge role in everyone’s daily lives in China that you know, still here in the US, we you know, walk around with credit cards and carry little purse. But now, it’s that, from me, to my parents to people that I know, everyone’s just out there with one phone that does everything. It’s like your social life, your, you know, bank account, everything about yourself just kind of confined in this little black box that is a smartphone. And I’ve talked to many friends in my generation, and they were kind of equally as confused as I am being back in China, especially for the summer, because this is, you know, the peak in which a lot of us who were kind of stranded, quote unquote, abroad are coming back to visit. And everyone’s like, Oh, no, I don’t know how to pay. I don’t know where to store my like identity cards and all that. So I think to bring this back a little, the reason why sci fi is being so popular is because of the sheer amount of technology we’re interacting with on a daily basis, and also at the rate in which that’s evolving. And I think it’s just happening in such a way that no matter if you’re coming in from the outside, like us having lived abroad for most of our lives, adult lives. Or if you’re just you know, having lived in China, all your life, but still having to constantly adjust to the new apps that are coming out, the new kinds of tech that you’re dealing with. I think, science fiction kind of functions as a sort of mental anchor for you to be like, okay, there’s still some kind of imaginary space I can escape into that somewhat prepares me not even like factually, but like more like emotionally for the world I’m living in.

Graeme Smith  06:27

Our sci fi canon has works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was written way back in 1818, and has sometimes been described as the first work of science fiction.

Clip  06:37

This is the story you’ve heard about, talked about. The spine tingling, blood killing story that stunned your emotions. Frankenstein, don’t touch that.

Louisa Lim  06:51

There’s also Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, filmed in 1968 in scenes which appear ever more likely today. How a computer comes to life and becomes murderous.

Clip  07:04

Open the pod bay doors, HAL. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. What’s the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. I don’t know what you’re talking about HAL. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

Graeme Smith  07:27

Michael, what are the antecedents for China’s science fiction writers? What do they draw upon?

Michael Berry  07:32

Oh, you know, it’s a very diverse set of influences. The ones you just quoted are certainly influential for a lot of Chinese writers today. But also earlier, earlier works. Also, local Chinese works, some of the writers, you mentioned, Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, Han Song. They’re very influential for the newer generation. But if we want to break things down, Chinese science fiction has gone through several waves over the years. And there’s been starts and stops. And so I really look at the first start as being the late Qing Dynasty. Where if you look at that historical period, this is where the Meiji Restoration was very successful in Japan. And China was really struggling with how to modernise and how to envision its own future. And one way that they were trying to imagine their future was through the lens of science fiction. And so you have this first explosion of sci-fi during the late Qing. When we get to the May 4 movement, by then it really starts to die down. And you have a long period where there really isn’t a lot happening in science fiction. During the early socialist period in the fifties, there’s a slight blip in terms of a couple of films, a couple novels that are in the science fiction genre. But I would really look at the second major wave after the late Qing being the early reform era. Where after Deng Xiaoping opened up, and you have of course, the Four Modernizations, right, where China overnight was trying to modernise its military, bring in science, technology. And one powerful avatar for that was science fiction. And that’s where you see the second boom, and all of a sudden the creation of science fiction journal, a huge influx of translations of Western science fiction into China coming back for the first time or introduced for the first time. The import of Western science fiction films in the 1980s and 90s. And so you have the 80s as the second wave. And then again, it dies down for a while. And then it’s really not until the 2000s, post 2000s that you get this third wave, the current wave, which we’re currently in the middle of. With the rise of writers like Wang Jinkang 王晋康, Liu Cixin, Han Song, etc, where, it’s probably the biggest wave yet, in terms of its global impact. And so each of those waves had different influences. But I think it’s always been a mishmash of both local and foreign influences. And of course in China you have the very robust wuxia 武侠 or martial arts tradition, especially the more fantastical, mystical side of that. That’s also played into the reimagination of science fiction by borrowing elements of that side by side with elements from the Western canon.

Graeme Smith  10:23

So, Emily, I mean, one work that some people cite as being kind of China’s first work of science fiction is Lao She’s Cat Country (猫城记), which oddly is a book that he himself ended up not liking, because he thought it wasn’t very funny. I mean, do you think that has any influence? Or is it even a science fiction work? Some people say it’s not?

Emily Jin  10:44

Yeah, actually, I’m like, kind of interested in talking about how exactly is the genre of sci-fi defined in China? That, you know, Michael, just now kind of traced the entire history of how this whole idea of Chinese Science Fiction gradually came into shape. And the one thing I’m interested in is talking about, you know, when we mention science fiction, in China, what exactly are we referring to? So, I know that you know, cat city, it has been, in a way canonised into the entire history of Chinese science fiction. But was it actually viewed a sci-fi in a way that, for example, us in the Anglophone world define a sci-fi? Or is it just, you know, to Lao She 老舍, more like an experimental way of metaphorically expressing what he’s been feeling, observing at the time? And I think the same question can actually be extrapolated to talking about the current trend of Chinese sci fi. In which we are somewhat moving away from the generation of Liu Cixin, which, you know, came under the impact heavily of these, you know, what we call the golden era American, British science fiction writers. You know, the whole Space Odyssey fascination with tech details and all that. We’re moving into a generation, which on one hand, as also Michael said, just now. You know, the opening up of the genre of sci-fi to incorporate elements from wuxia. From also, you know, self-cultivation, as they call it xiuxin 修心, which got popular primarily online. The prominence of internet fiction, online forums of people adding various influences from pop culture, also from their own local folk culture into writing science fiction, into imagining science society, and what it means to, you know, fundamentally be Chinese in a world like this. So I think all of that put together makes us constantly think about how to actually define what we call by Chinese science fiction. So are we you know, a community? Are we a genre? Are we somewhat canonised at this point? Are we not? Are we still exploring? What is our potentiality for change. So like my generation, who are just ready to emerge onto the stage, writing sci-fi, being translated. Of course, coming under the assumption that their work has a higher chance of being translated than, for example, when Han Song and Liu Cixin first started writing. So I think we’re really in this really exciting period. And so if that’s, you know, moving too far away from the question about Lao She. But I think I’m getting very similar feelings towards how are we actually interpreting sci-fi as we move into the near future?

Louisa Lim  13:24

So for those really young writers, a lot of them are kind of writing online, aren’t they? And being discovered not the way that traditional writers were discovered? How do you think that’s changing the genre Emily?

Emily Jin  13:35

Yeah, I think, you know, in the past, our common understanding is that if you want to read Chinese sci-fi, so, Science Fiction World, kehuan shi jie 科幻世界is kind of the big magazine that you go to. So having your stories being accepted by that magazine, marks a certain kind of prestige. It means that you’re officially kind of initiated into this Chinese sci-fi cult, if you can say that. But now, people aren’t going on, you know, popular Internet fic sites. So it’s jinjiang 晋江, or qidian 起点. They’re writing sci-fi in the way that they don’t even need to have an interaction with what we call, you know, the more proper Chinese sci-fi. They don’t have to have read the Three Body Problem to write a sci-fi. They can simply just be fascinated with, you know, I want to write a story that incorporates romance. I want to have these people fall in love with robots. And they’re perfectly fine with doing that. And that is also sci-fi. Except that, you know, the thrill you get from that may not be so much centred on what we do in our reading of sci-fi, which is like, oh, intellectual experiment. It’s all about philosophy, society. But for them, it’s really just, I just want to see a good love story that’s happening between human and a form of nonhuman. And sci-fi seems to be the most convenient place to take these tropes from. So for them, it’s kind of like, really, they’re doing their own thing. And without the burden of having to represent some kind of, I am writing sci-fi for China or for the world. It’s more like I’m writing this simply for myself and a handful of audience that are interested. So that’s where, you know, it’s really just a storytelling. The characterization that matters, instead of having to really come to some major understanding about human technology.

Graeme Smith  15:24

And so are we starting to see, and this might be a question for either of you, crossover with other popular online genres? Are we seeing, for example, boys love sci-fi?

Emily Jin  15:33

Of course, that’s actually a huge thing right now. Boys love, actually to trace back the history, I think China got the tradition largely from Japan, which it became its own little niche genre were largely female, or queer writers describe the romance between two male characters. And that became kind of a way for, especially, you know, younger women to imagine, explore romantic relationships, while coming out of gender confinements. So that kind of started evolving in China for the past two decades. And it’s always been, you know, going strong in China. So now, the entire idea of like, boys love genre fiction plus sci-fi, is quite popular. Because now instead of writing two characters, you know, developing a romance in real life reality, you know, going into work, being at school, they want them to meet each other on a spaceship. Which is fun, and adds the flavour. So, it has been really popular.

Louisa Lim  16:34

And it’s actually really interesting. I mean, I’m just thinking about my students from China. And recently, we did a audio assignment where they had to do an assignment on breaking the binaries. And so many of them did assignments about breaking the binaries between online life and real life, and they were living quite sci-fi existences. You know, there’s one who had an AI boyfriend. And there were people who wrote about how they were Tomb Sweeping virtually. And you know, you know, and all these other kinds of online relationships inside games like Second Life. And I just did feel like, it is almost like a more dystopian world. Or, you know, one step further ahead than what we’re doing in the West, when it comes to this sort of integration of online life and real life. Is it hard for Chinese sci-fi writers to go that much further into the future?

Michael Berry  17:31

You know, that, I mean, that’s a question I’ve asked a few writers. Especially during the COVID period, where our everyday lives because, you know, you know, people, just to leave their house you have to scan a QR code. You have to go get swabbed. And that level of the intervention of technology into people’s everyday lives. And the level to which it penetrated into these everyday activities. It really felt it was, you know, one of the classic cases where reality became much stranger and more bizarre than fiction. And I’m certain that it certainly did pose some challenges to certain writers, and in some cases, preempted certain suppositions that writers had about what the near future might look like. I mean, recently, Chen Qiufan 陈楸帆, he co-authored a book… Stanley Chen, he co-authored a book with Lee Kai-Fu 李開復called AI 2041. It’s a collection of short stories, that imagines what the world looks like in a few decades with the penetration of AI. And I ran into one of the co-authors Stanley a few months ago. And he said, just you know, a year and a half after the book was published, so much of the content was already outdated. Because what had actually happened with the real-life progression of AI complete, was completely, outside the box in terms of what they had imagined when they were writing the book. And I think that’s a great example of how the technological advancements in terms of AI in some cases are even giving our most sophisticated science fiction writers a run for their money in terms of trying to really anticipate where where things are going.

Louisa Lim  19:09

It’s like in America, political satirists, couldn’t deal with the Trump years in China. Sci-fi writers are in trouble. Michael, let me ask you about Han Song’s hospital trilogy, which you translated, and it was published in March. And it seems like a thinly disguised take on Chinese politics. You know, it’s the story of this new age of medicine where hospitals have become cities and patients have to submit to the hospital for this sort of endless ongoing, never-ending treatments. I mean, how was Han Song allowed to write this? Is it the case that sci-fi writers have more leeway for manoeuvre in their sort of imaginary universes than fiction writers, straight fiction writers?

Michael Berry  19:55

Yeah I think that in some sense, it’s still quite remarkable that this trilogy got published in China. It was published originally 2016, three volumes: 2016, 2017, 2018. So one volume per year during that period. So this is already under the flag of Xi Jinping. And it is quite remarkable that it was able to pass the censors, because we all realise that censorship in terms of cultural discourse in China has gotten increasingly stringent over the last couple of years. And I think the way that this was able to get past censorship and to get published, is because on the one hand, he’s using the genre of science fiction, so it’s this alternate space, this alternate reality, he actually never uses the word China in the entire book. And so it’s a very deliberate avoidance of those those terms. And besides science fiction, I also really look at it almost more so as avant garde fiction. It’s very weird. It’s very strange. So much so that I doubt many censors even got through the book. And those who did get through the book, I wonder if they really even got what he was trying to say. It’s very experimental, it’s very contorted in terms of its language. And I think, in some sense, when you were approach the book, you have to go through a process of decoding as a reader to understand what Han Song was really trying to say in a book like this. But it’s a great testament to the power of fiction, that even in a moment where so many books are being banned. Or not even, you know, just being pulled off shelves. That the ingenuity of this writer was able to pull off this grand literary feat to publish not just one but three volumes, where he was saying things that are quite explosive and quite, quite bold, much more than I think, many of his contemporaries.

Graeme Smith  21:52

And so do you think it’s just the censors are not keeping up? Because I mean, if you think of time travel dramas are banned. Hospital dramas are now banned. Also an effect this, in many ways, was a combination of those two genres, two of the most sensitive genres in Chinese censorship. Do you think possibly in the future, they might go, oh, hang on? What’s this story really about?

Michael Berry  22:14

I mean, that’s part of it. Also, I think, you know, literature doesn’t have the power that it once held. I mean, Han Song, although he’s very well known in science fiction communities, he’s not a bestselling writer. And the type of fiction that he’s writing is very niche, you know, like I said, experimental, dark, weird, strange. It’s not, you know, for your Tom Clancy, or Stephen King market, it’s something very, very different. And I think because of that, because it is a relatively small market, he’s able to get away with more. Also, because of his day job. Han Song leads, leads something of a double life. He is a reporter and an editor and head of the translation newsroom at Xinhua news, you know, the big state media conglomerate in China. And so by day, he’s part of the system. And then at night, he puts on his cape and writes these strange, fantastical stories, horrific stories, where he assumes a very different identity. But I also suspect that his good standing in terms of his day job also maybe helps him in terms of getting some of these works past the stringent censorship standards.

Graeme Smith  23:23

His day job probably helps him gather material too, I guess?

Michael Berry  23:27

Yes and he’s talked about, he’s been very open about that, about how his experiences. Not one as someone who deals with chronic illness and has spent a lot of time in hospitals, but also living through these kinds of bureaucracies of the state system, in his professional life. Have really been a direct inspiration for a lot of this fiction.

Louisa Lim  23:47

I feel like my experience at an Australian university might qualify me to write bureaucracy lit. But maybe there’s no audience for that. Emily, what about those younger sci-fi writers? Do they struggle with censorship? Or are they doing stuff or using platforms where they can kind of bypass it?

Emily Jin  24:06

I view this rather as an action-reaction loop, in a sense, because people talk about censorship in China and publishing, especially as if, it’s something that it’s just kind of impossible to get past. That, in many ways, that itself, especially to the outside world also becomes somewhat of its own, you know, yet another overblown myth about China, that people kind of hyper focus on in many ways. But I think just my knowledge of the younger generation of people, I think, we are definitely born in a generation where we learn how to write things smartly. You know, how to play these kinds of fascinating language puns, how to incorporate thoughts into metaphors. So I think that’s actually a direction in which the language that the generation is, the younger generation, is using is really evolving. It’s a combination of having read books by writers who are already being careful about what they’re writing, growing up, and also a large influence coming from the internet community. Because that’s usually where the censorship hits on a day-to-day basis. So if they’re using, you know, social media, they have to be savvy about what keywords cannot appear. Not even just in a narrow political sense, but like porn, for example. If you’re hinting at, you know, these people are doing something obscene, there’s a chance of the entire kind of article being censored. And just very weird censorship, like pops up here and there, that can also get pretty absurd. And once again, that’s a combination of human censors plus AI censors. So it’s become some kind of an interesting ecosystem in the sense that it’s not really that you are confined in a box in which you just kind of can’t get out, hard walls. But it’s more like you get to leak out from all directions, you can kind of move around the cracks, but then appear as if you are doing it, like sneakily. talking in metaphors has been has become a skill in which everyone slowly got adapted to. And in a way, in a pretty like neutral way, I guess that is also contributing to the way that these like avant garde fiction, or how this new generation is really exploring literary creation in general. So this is kind of like, once again, you see a combination of, you know, human society procedures, things that are purely human, combined with the internet. Really just magnifying things or exacerbating things all put together, resulting in this new kind of new generational, modern Chinese language.

Louisa Lim  26:44

But in a way, that’s really an internalisation of censorship that, although it is, I can see that it’s a driver to creativity in some ways. But also, the younger generation has, to that extent already internalised a lot of those dictates. And that drives the way they write, no?

Emily Jin  27:03

Now, to use the word internalisation still seems somewhat like kind of reducing the complexity of the situation. That it’s not really just like a, oh, like this has been happening, that it’s like boiling a frog and warm water that this is all that it is. But I think rather, like I was trying to emphasise, I think it’s still a combination of that. But also, the internet once again, provided simultaneously freedom and also a space to further kind of self-evolve. It rather feels like the current generation of writers is evolving like some kind of a call or algorithm, that they get a certain kind of input, and they digest it and what comes out is a result of that. So in terms of not exactly really internalising, but it’s just that whatever you get fed, you produce accordingly. And this is just a version of what’s being produced.

Michael Berry  27:57

For the last 20 years or so, Chinese Science Fiction really did provide a somewhat, a liminal space, a marginal space wherein writers were indeed able to kind of smuggle things into their fiction that they wouldn’t be able to get in so-called serious fiction. Because it was taking place in this alternative space or outer space or, you know, this imaginary setting. One thing, though, that nobody, I think really anticipated was what Louisa mentioned at the very beginning, this science fiction overnight. I shouldn’t say overnight, but over the course of a very short period of time transforming into this multibillion-dollar industry as so-called IP. I mean, for a long time, the Chinese government had been figuring out how do we so called ‘send Chinese culture out into the world,’ right? That was a government policy. And for a while they thought Mo Yan would do it or so and so would do it and they had their eyes on various potentialities. I don’t think anyone imagined Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem being the work that would truly send Chinese culture into the world. It was kind of the Black Horse. And so in a very short period of time, a lot of investment has gone into the Chinese kind of science fiction cultural enterprise. But what that also means is that this genre that historically had been able to fly under the radar, in terms of publishing stories and ideas that were quite explosive, and really pushing the boundaries is now being commandeered to some extent, by the system. So you know, it’s now there’s so much government, there’s so many eyes on the genre. Now, there’s so much investment, that it also makes it harder and harder to smuggle those ideas that could have gone through very smoothly a decade ago. Now, there’s going to be much more policing. And there’s also going to be more flag waving, very sneakily embedded into some of these science fiction stories. Which you thought, well, since it’s set on Mars or set in some alternate future, you know, you don’t have the burden of nationalism, but somehow it’s still kind of reappearing. And so I think the rise, the financial rise of Chinese Science Fiction is also creating a challenge for those creators that would like to maybe push the boundaries a little bit.

Graeme Smith  30:10

Yeah, it’s so interesting that the people who are in charge now I grew up on I guess the first wave of Chinese science fiction which was sort of based on Soviet science popularisation, rather than what we have now, which is something totally different. But to get historical for a moment, Michael. I’ve always been struck by the party’s evangelism around science and that every turn citizens are urged to believe in science, which is kind of ridiculous, you know, xiangxin kexue 相信科学. And if you go way back to the regime’s origin, in the May 4 movement, you had Mr. Science who you were meant to, to rally around. Not many regimes have that in their DNA? I mean, how does this fetishization of science, this almost as a substitute for religion impact Chinese science fiction in the way the party sees it?

Michael Berry  30:55

Well, I think it plays into that to some degree. I mean, even you look at test scores among say, Chinese high school students in the sciences and mathematics compared to their western counterparts. There is there’s still a much greater investment in knowledge about science and scientific history than I think there is, at least in the United States, and I think also in a lot of other Western nations. And so I think that certainly contributes to the popularity of writers like Liu Cixin and those who are working in the so-called, you know, hard science fiction and really, kind of unpacking these sophisticated theories and weaving them into their worlds. There’s a much greater base of general readers who can get it who can understand that, because the base knowledge for you know, an average educated Chinese is quite high in terms of what they know about science and mathematics and the history of medicine and all of these kinds of topics. So I think it does create a much stronger reader interest in the, in the genre. And then, of course, this is good for the state, too. I mean, if so, it’s something that’s certainly encouraged. And I think it, it all works works together.

Louisa Lim  32:05

I was reading these reports about the recent science fiction convention in in China, you know, you always imagine those as being sort of super nerdy, but it sounds like this one was a sort of full-on government-organised thing. And Xinhua was quoting the Vice President and Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, Xu Wei, who said that sci-fi was a unique and effective form of science, popularisation that is increasingly playing a prominent role in enhancing scientific literacy. I mean, Emily, do they really like sci-fi, these government departments or is it just opportunistic, a cultural export that’s finally stuck. And they’re jumping on the bandwagon?

Emily Jin  32:49

Yeah. So actually, I’m really glad that you gave this really funny example. Because I think that really just encapsulates much of what I’ve been talking about. Is that, you know, on the surface, you get these big overblown, like, master narratives of how you know, science, sci-fi, the country is all coming together. But in reality, if you’re actually at a convention like that, it is still the super nerdy convention that you’re expecting. That, you know, you don’t actually get officials walking around in like cosplay gear. It’s still, you know, like, people just up like Star Wars characters appearing, you know, doing like lightsaber fighting, buying books, lining up to meet Liu Cixin, to get his like autograph whatsoever. That’s like, you know, the usual package of convention attendance. And just to add on to that, actually, people who actually go to the conventions, as in the community of sci-fi fans in China is, to my surprise, much younger than the average age of fans like that. In America, for example, because I’ve been to many of these different conventions, especially Worldcon I was at the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Worldcon. And just in comparison, it seems like the main body of sci-fi fans who are actually you know, buying books who are following the writers, both online and offline are college students, some even high school students. Many of the universities in China have their own sci-fi communities, these like after school reading clubs, which is something that I don’t see necessarily in, you know, like US universities, that people who actually come to conventions are people who have a more stable income, who like many of them are there with family and children and all that. But in China, sci fi still feels very young and vibrant.

Graeme Smith  34:37

And Emily, I mean, it seems the science fiction scene in China, it’s still really dominated by one writer, Liu Cixin. And particularly the Three Body Problem, just you know, was the first Asian book, I think, to win the Hugo prize, which is sort of the science fiction equivalent of a Nobel Prize. And, you know, people like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, you know, vocal fans of it. I mean, there’s that sort of celebrity, how does that affect the younger riders in his shadow? Is it good for them? Or is it a bit hard for them to emerge?

Emily Jin  35:07

One of the big reasons of why he’s still popular is obviously what you said just now. And I think people still, in general, in China, do take the idea that one book from any Asian writer being recognised kind of internationally, especially in the English world, becoming a best seller and all that, that adds to all of this, you know, this halo effect surrounding the book, basically. And it’s not that like science fiction, fans read it, not only younger people, but you know, like my parents, like even my grandparents have heard of it. So I think it’s really became this national phenomenon, that everyone’s not even just like celebrating the success of one person. But the, also the, success of finally being kind of recognised. You know, not only that Chinese writers can write like great novels, but everyone else in the world is also seeing that happen. So there’s like a sheer sheer sense of like joy and pride in that. That’s also I think, pretty, pretty wholesome in its own way. But to bring this back, I think, obviously, this resulted in the people that came after Liu Cixin, once again, especially the younger generation of writers going from, you know, people who are born in the 1980s. So, as the aforementioned, Chen Qiufan, Baoshu 宝树, etc. They all came into their own writing careers, reading Liu Cixin reading, Han Song and Wang Jinkang. And they were the people who kind of also shaped their first like understandings of what is it like to write Chinese sci-fi. So for them, I think what’s happening for them now is that they’re gradually trying to go their own ways, while acknowledging the influence of those sin and his generation. Finding a path that suits themselves better. So I think you see many interesting efforts happening. So for instance, to Chen Qiufan. And as an example, his exploration right now is to also combine some of the avant garde experimental literary attempts into writing science fiction. And he’s also working on you know, adding in more, for instance, elements of traditional culture of his own locality to really put out the message that though he’s writing as a, you know, Chinese writer, and he’s taking experiences from having lived in China, it’s not so that he’s representing a sense of confined Chineseness. Or, since he’s been translated so much to really show his international audience that Chinese sci-fi is just one Liu Cixin after another, by writing, for example, for his novel Waste Tide, he’s writing about his coastal hometown, on the southern coast of China. And that’s, you know, a place where people don’t normally talk about or pay attention to, especially once again, in the Anglophone world, when they’re talking about China. That China isn’t just Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen. It’s not just, you know, these facial recognition techniques, or people constantly scanning QR codes. But there’s a large part of China or actually, I would say, most of China is so diverse and so complex, and technology is influencing these places to very different extents. So there are writers kind of capturing that. And of course, there are also writers who made their name on the internet, who are doing this, largely also for the market for the group of audience they already have. And they’re only writing sci-fi to test out new waters, doing this for entertainment. All of that add together people are recognising here in the writers’ community in China on science fiction that though we do celebrate and we like love the system very much. It is right now at a turning point where it’s about time that not only kind of within China domestically, but also spreading out to the rest of the world to really demonstrate that Chinese science fiction isn’t just this like one syllable phrase that has some core characteristics. That even just to bring this back to Han Song again, his writing is so different from those a student and I’m just really happy that he’s being translated.

Louisa Lim  39:11

Liu Cixin’s translator Ken Liu, who has this lovely quotation, that the act of translation involves breaking down one piece of work into one language, and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language. And he said when the gulf separating the two is as wide as the Pacific Ocean that separates China from America, the task can be daunting. I mean, both of you are translators as well. Maybe both of you could talk a little bit about the sort of particular challenges in translating Chinese sci-fi into English. Maybe Michael, you first?

Michael Berry  39:52

Oh, you know, the Han Song project is my first real work of science fiction I’ve translated. I’ve been translating since I was an undergraduate. Yeah, 25 years. But I’m kind of new to translating Chinese science fiction. And I think the sheer volume of knowledge of fields that I’m not that comfortable with, like medical history and technology. You know, there’s especially a book like this, there’s just an amalgamation of medical tests and diseases and strange disorders. I don’t even know what half of those things were in English, when I first encountered them. And so there was a lot of homework and also medical history. There’s all it’s almost Encyclopaedia of Western and Chinese medical history that’s embedded into Han Song’s Hospital. And so there was a lot of homework that I needed to do, as I would encounter these strange terms. But probably, from a translator’s perspective, the most challenging aspect of the Hospital trilogy, what had simply had to do with the, there was a peculiarity in terms of the source text. So when I started translating this, Han Song actually sent me, maybe Emily knows this story. Han Song had sent me a PDF of the book. And that’s what I was working off of. And after I was maybe halfway through the book. And one day, I took the hardcopy off my bookshelf, and I laid down to thumb through it and just get a sense of what was coming next around the corner. And it was completely different than what I just translated. And I had this ominous feeling descend upon me. And I immediately texted Han Song and said, Did you send me the right version? He’s like, Yeah, it’s fine. Whatever version, you know, you have is fine. Don’t worry about it. And I said, Well, it’s really different than the published version. He’s like, No, it’s fine, whichever you pick, whichever you want to use. And I sent him back what he sent me and I said, this is what you sent me says, Oh, that is quite different. He said, that’s actually an early version of the book. Before we had really gotten under the hood, and done editing, and major revisions, and he said, but the good thing is that before the censors got their hands on the books, so there’s a lot of things that I had to take out that are preserved there. So he actually liked it in a strange way. And then he started sending me other versions. And there were four different versions of the book that he sent me, all in different states. And the published version in English is something of a mutant because half of it is based on the early manuscript. Another half, the second half is based on the published manuscript. And then Han Song, who also he was an English, he’s an English editor, at Xinhua. So he reads and writes beautiful English, and he actually did a lot of revisions directly to the book, directly in English. And so this is a little bit long-winded, but in short, it was probably one of the most unique translator experiences I ever had. Because of the real hands on intervention of the writer and how much he actually did to it. And it was a sense that we were working together to create something new based on those different versions of the manuscript. And also it was very science fiction, it was as if these were… Metaverse is all the rage these days. It was as if I had four different hospitals from four different metaverses. And we were trying to traverse these different universes and kind of bring them together. But it was a really fulfilling, but also really challenging project because it wasn’t just the straight Chinese to English, but it was this navigation of these different versions of Han Song’s world. And ultimately, he was so happy with the end result, he actually asked the other foreign language publishers to use that as the source text for any future editions.

Louisa Lim  43:48

But that’s really interesting, because isn’t that what happened with Liu Cixin’s book as well. That he had originally written it, starting with the Cultural Revolution, and then the censors asked him to change it. And then when Netflix came along, they switched it back. So is it the case that the translations we’re seeing are not necessarily particularly pure, but maybe a translation of a different iteration that includes stuff that is not allowed in Chinese?

Michael Berry  44:17

There is some of that and I think there is an almost a restorative process that went into at least the Han Song process, for for part of the manuscript. And part of that was accidental, and later that became very self-conscious as we started working together on bringing these different assets, different versions of the source texts together to produce the translation. With Liu Cixin’s novel, I think also that just had to do with different sensibilities in terms of English readership and Chinese readership. I mean, what works in English sometimes, it’s just very different than what works in Chinese. And this can be in terms of what’s a good hook to start a chapter with, or try start a book with, to issues of gender. I know there’s been a lot of times talk about subtle gender references in the Liu Cixin’s fiction which went underwent some tweaks to make them more palpable or less objectionable to Anglophile readers.

Graeme Smith  45:11

Emily?

Emily Jin  45:12

First of all, I think the gender aspect of things. And this is also to add on to the previous response I gave regarding younger generation of writers trying to leave the shadow of Liu Cixin. Unlike Michael, who kind of came in translating Yu Hua 余华. For example, in a more traditional translator writer paradigm. I think, when I first joined this entire like act of translation, I started with actually working with sci-fi writers, so straight out of college. And the experience I had was obviously really different because the writers I first worked with are writers who are mostly very fluent in English. So I’ve gotten the whole translator-writer talking about what to do, changing the English version of things based on what suits the market better, what suits the habit of English readers better. And also, another important aspect is the author’s own personal growth. That it’s entirely possible that the author just felt one thing when they’re writing the Chinese a decade ago, than a decade later things have changed in their creative process and their lives. And having the translation happen then, and having the chance for them to be involved in shaping this translation meant that they kind of have a second chance to go back to the story to redo things that they didn’t like those concerns and those efforts. Also, step beyond the simple it’s translation, helping people get past censorship, etc, etc. So I think a lot of is also because of the author’s personal approaches to a same piece of text. And many authors also tend to circle back to things in questions they’ve been concerned with throughout their creative career. So that’s one experience I’ve gotten translating with them. Because to add a little personal background of this. Is that I did grew up reading a lot of the writings by the authors I work with now. So I think to see how much they’ve evolved as writers and networking with them as translators, one major aspect is the amount of like, younger male writers realising that the language they’re using is not okay is something that actually is quite impressive. Because I’ve had more than one author kind of tell me that after being translated, I started realising in a way that, oh, I should probably not, you know, automatically put down these few words to describe a woman. Or, you know, after being translated, I’m realising that my novel utterly lacks female characters and all that. So I think to have that happen, is really also a learning process for both the translator and the author, to give them a chance to, you know, reexamine not only the way they write science fiction, not only the novel itself, but habits in language use in general. And I think it’s a nice trend that’s happening, that the process of translation can actually help writers and translators together achieve that sense of perspective that extends beyond our own bodies and cognitions. I’m also seeing more and more, once again, younger female writers purposely wanting to work with female translators. So it’s no longer kind of like a linear blackbox process that the writer just gives up their work and whoever gets to translate, it just does the job and moves on. That the writers are, you know, asking for people who they think would understand their background better their mentality better.

Graeme Smith  48:38

Really briefly from you both, because this has just been such an amazing episode. I mean, how do you see the future of Chinese science fiction, five, ten years from now? I mean, do you think it could end up being a victim of its own success? Or is it going to just keep going from strength to strength?

Emily Jin  48:52

Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and be the radical. But I think having heard the term Chinese science fiction, so many times, being you know, on podcasts and at conventions, and all that, actually, my personal wish is that in five years to ten year’s time, we no longer refer to Chinese science fiction as a collective, that people are recognising the writers who are writing now who are the most active by names by volumes by their work and approaches. Rather than, oh, they’re all Chinese and they write sci-fi. So I think science fiction being expanded majorly as a genre. And also, you know, wiggling out of the shackles of many kinds of expectations of big, you know, social, political, and also cultural expectations. Also, notably, being translated into English. The gaze placed upon Chinese sc- fi, slash Chinese literature by an audience largely not knowing China. All of that put together I just hope that those layers would be eventually removed one by one and Chinese sci-fi writers can be seen as writer’s before anything.

Louisa Lim  50:01

And for you, Michael, do you think the government approbation and oversight combined with just the fast pace of change, will that end up killing it?

Michael Berry  50:11

I don’t think it will kill it. But there are challenges ahead. But there’s also a lot of promise. I mean, a lot of the writers we’ve been talking about, like Liu Cixin, Han Song, they’re part of, you know, the so-called apex, you know, the big three, or the big four, they’re sometimes referred to. And they were all male writers. And they were, kind of peaked, you know, maybe I don’t know, a decade ago or so. But there is a younger generation now of women writers like Xia Jia 夏笳, Hao Jingfang 郝景芳and even younger writers and non-binary writers, and writers who I think are bringing a whole new perspective to the field. And there’s also in terms of cinematic adaptation and television adaptation of science fiction stories. China has had some bumpy starts early on. I mean, there was a Three Body Problem film that was haunted with problems and kind of in limbo for a long time. But as we saw a few years ago, the adaptation of Wandering Earth became one of the most profitable films in Chinese cinema history. Its sequel kind of reduplicated that success. And I think there’s a lot of potential in the future for more television and film adaptations for science fiction, which will, and of course, the big Netflix adaptation of Three Bodies coming very soon. That will, of course, blow this up even bigger stage globally. And so I think there’s a lot of exciting room for development in terms of new voices, and also adaptations of older classic works. But there is the big caveat or the elephant in the room is the fact that as more eyeballs start concentrating on this genre. The government will want to regulate it, and kind of commandeer it, and utilise it to make main melody-style themes. You know, politically correct themes that are woven into these and make them kind of fulfil the political line of Xi Jinping and the party. And so I think that’s going to be a delicate dance that writers and filmmakers and creators are going to have to navigate moving forward, but I do see a lot of potential. But there, there certainly will be landmines ahead as well.

Graeme Smith  52:20

What a perfect way to end. Michael, Emily, thanks for joining us.

Michael Berry  52:23

Thanks for having us.

Graeme Smith  52:31

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing Beltway. Many thanks to our guests and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Background research by Wing Kuang, [our transcripts are by Juliette Baxter], our music is by Suzy Wilkins and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.

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