Forum: Counting and Corruption

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Party Policies From One to Ten

Chinese political and ideological campaigns are often packaged into mnemonics or numerical slogans. The habit long predates Communist Party rule. Sun Yat-sen — leader of the Republican revolution in the 1910s — for example, promoted the Three Principles of the People (sanmin zhuyi 三民主义), loosely translatable as nationalism, democracy and social welfare. The following are prominent party doctrines of the first months of the Xi Jingping–Li Keqiang period, organised from one to ten.

The Top Twenty People: Successful and Distasteful

In December 2012, Entrepreneurs’ Daily (Qiyejia ribao 企业家日报) published its selection of China’s leading entrepreneurs under the headline of ‘Relaxed and Confident, Measuring their Forward March’ (Congrong yu zixin zhangliang tamende bufa 从容与自信 丈量他们前行步伐).

The Ugly Chinaman

by Bo Yang

Bo Yang is the pseudonym of Guo Yidong (1920–2008), a controversial Taiwan writer who was born in Kaifeng, Henan. The Ugly Chinaman (Chouloude Zhongguoren 醜陋的中國人), from which the following translated extracts by Don Cohn are taken, was originally given as a speech that Bo Yang delivered at Iowa University on 24 September 1984. Subsequently published in the Hong Kong Pai-shing Fortnightly (Baixing banyuekan 百姓半月刊), it set off a small-scale ‘battle of the pens’ among the magazine’s readers. A translation of one of the more negative letters Pai-shing received in reply to Bo Yang is appended to the abridged translation of the speech.