Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I may have gone a little overboard with recommendations this week, so I’ll skip the commentary and get right to it. Happy reading.

Recommendations

China Stories

Bloomberg News, “Xi’s Quest for Ethnic Unity Turns Genghis Khan Into New Danger”
Keith Bradsher and Joy Dong, “Xi Jinping Is Asserting Tighter Control of Finance in China”
Chris Buckley, “Dr. Gao Yaojie, Who Exposed AIDS Epidemic in Rural China, Dies at 95”

Distinct in approach but with overlapping themes, the questions raised in this trio of books do not merely concern a single country, political system or period. At a time when the battle over history rages in autocracies and democracies alike, and technologies open up new means of preservation and erasure, they raise fundamental questions about life, its meaning and responsibilities. How we remember the past is how we honor the dead; it is how we carry on living; it asks where we come from, where we are going, and what makes us human.

Yangyang Cheng, “The Bones Remember”

Johanna M. Costigan, “China’s Vision for World Order: Xi Jinping Wants China to Shape Other Countries’ Sense of Themselves”

Political indoctrination and cultural marginalization have always been inseparable from modern education in Tibet since the region’s conquest by China in the 1950s. Until recently, however, schools in Tibet were mostly local day schools, and students returned home each evening; whatever they were taught in school was moderated by what they learned at home. But since Xi came to power, the government has shuttered most of these local schools and consolidated them into newly constructed boarding establishments located far from villages and towns. Unlike the schools of the past, the residential institutions enable the state to fully wrest control of the students’ attention and environment. This gives the Chinese Communist Party unprecedented power to shape the worldview and mold the identity of the youngest generation of Tibetans.

Tenzin Dorjee and Gyal Lo, “Erasing Tibet: Chinese Boarding Schools and the Indoctrination of a Generation”

The Economist, “A year on from the white-paper protests, China looks much different”
Rebecca Feng and Cao Li, “China’s Colossal Hidden-Debt Problem Is Coming to a Head”
The Living (via Chinanarrative), “University Grads Flock to Food Delivery as China’s Job Market Dries Up”

Henry Kissinger was many things, and his impact on U.S. foreign policy was significant and enduring. But when it comes to China in particular, his reputation is largely a result of his own myth-making. His actual record on China is much less flattering, a record that unfortunately rarely emerged in his obituaries.

James Mann, “The Six Myths Kissinger Created About Himself — That Everyone Fell For”

Mark Mazzetti and Edward Wong, “Inside U.S. Efforts to Untangle an A.I. Giant’s Ties to China”
Tom Seymour, “The Lost Art: Why are China’s museums closing and being gutted of their art?”
Alexandra Stevenson, “China Evergrande’s Crash Was Accelerated by Questionable Accounting”
Vivian Wang, “Can U.S.-China Student Exchanges Survive Geopolitics?”
Benno Weiner, “Fear and Writing in Xinjiang: On Tahir Hamut Izgil’s ‘Waiting to Be Arrested at Night’ and Perhat Tursun’s ‘The Backstreets’”
Huizhong Wu and Dake Kang, “One year after protests shook China, participants ponder the meaning of the brief flare of defiance”
Elaine Yu, “Activist Flees Hong Kong After Patriotic Education Trip to China”

Wanderings Around the World

Vasilisa Kirilochkina, “Russian Women Get a Fresh Warning About Their Rights”
Simone McCarthy, “In Southeast Asia, the horror of Kissinger’s explosive legacy goes on”
Karishma Mehrotra, “India’s women are staying in school longer — but not for their careers”

The premise of our show was a frankly selfish desire to revisit books we knew had meant a lot to us though we could not recall details of the books at all. We’d become friends in grad school and the idea for the show was a kind of gift to ourselves for finishing. When I’d started my program, someone teased me for citing American Girl as a childhood inspiration for pursuing an interest in History. We’d had similar moments in those years of having our interests demeaned because they didn’t appear overly academic or ground each intellectual commitment in a monograph we’d read.

Anne Helen Petersen, “The Dolls of Our Lives” — interview with historians/podcasters/authors Mary Mahoney and Allison Horrocks

Eduardo Porter, “The Global South hasn’t forgotten Kissinger”
Nina Siegal, “After 9 Years in Limbo, Treasures From Crimea Return to Ukraine”

Standout Story

Hannah Beech, “Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?”

While the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.

New York Times writer Hannah Beech uses the disappearance of Hong Kong’s iconic neon signage as a metaphor for its darkened social and political cityscape. I’ve been reading page proofs of a forthcoming AAS Publications book on law in Hong Kong (Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong by Michael C. Davis) and even though I watched events play out, I still almost can’t comprehend the speed at which the Chinese Party-state dismantled so many of the territory’s institutions. This weekend offers the latest example, as a “patriots-only” district election drew a mere 25% of voters, despite intense government campaigns to bring people to the polls. In contrast, the 2019 district elections—held at the end of a year marked by unprecedented protests—attracted 71% of voters, who turned out to show their support for pro-democracy candidates. Four years later, none of those candidates would pass the political screening necessary to secure a spot on the ballot.

Feature Photo: “香港霓虹燈招牌 Hong Kong Neon Lights 砵蘭街 Portland Street 旺角 Mong Kok, 2008.” See-ming Lee, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.