Tag Archives: China

Peer Review Boycott: Say No to Political Censorship

By: Charlene Makley and Carole McGranahan

Would you peer review manuscripts for a journal or press that politically censors its content? If your answer is no, then please join us in making your statement public by signing this petition.

Why the need for what seems like such an obvious defense of academic freedom? Several weeks ago, the People’s Republic of China pressured Cambridge University Press to restrict access in China to articles and book reviews in two major journals: China Quarterly and Journal of Asian Studies (the flagship journal of the US-based Association of Asian Studies). The Press agreed to censor content in China Quarterly, but then changed this decision after international scholarly protest.

The content to be censored was scholarship the Chinese government considered sensitive or dangerous, including works by anthropologists of China, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Content requested to be censored is extensive and dates back to 1952 as you can see on the censorship list for each journal (list of the 300 articles China Quarterly initially blocked, then reversed decision on, and list of content Journal of Asian Studies refused to block).

Not a scholar of this part of the world? Your support of this peer review boycott still matters. It matters for broad support of intellectual freedom and access to scholarship. Your expertise matters as a peer reviewer on manuscripts with topical and theoretical overlaps with your specialties. Continue reading →

Thinking through the untranslatable

This entry is part 12 of 12 in the Fall 2014 Writer’s Workshop series.

(Savage Minds is pleased to post this essay by guest author Kevin Carrico as part of our Writer’s Workshop series. Kevin is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for US-China Issues, having completed his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Cornell University in 2013. His research focuses upon the implications of Han nationalism for ethnic relations in China. He is a contributor to Cultural Anthropology’s special issue on Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet, and his translation of Tsering Woeser’s Self-immolation in Tibet is forthcoming from Verso Press in 2015.)

I recently finished translating a book, Tsering Woeser’s Self-Immolation in Tibet (Immolation au Tibet, la honte du monde), in a project that combines the two main components of my career path thus far: translation and anthropology. Prior to my graduate work, I was a translator of Chinese and French documents in Shanghai. And now as an anthropologist, I still engage in the occasional translation of texts that I consider uniquely insightful. This brief essay is an attempt to think through the relationship between these two activities via my recent work on self-immolation in Tibet. Continue reading →

Strategy of Condescension

中文翻譯 Chinese translation

That Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in Chinese was big news this week. You can see the start of the interview here:

http://youtu.be/n_168pH9GJk

As you can hear, Zuckerberg’s performance was greeted with “repeated cheers and applause by the assembled students and faculty members.” I don’t want to pick apart Zuckerberg’s Chinese – he only started learning a few years ago, but still did better than some people I know who have lived in Taiwan for over a decade. Nor do I want to focus on the mixed reactions he got on the internet later on. Rather, I want to engage in a thought experiment. Can you imagine a Western audience cheering and applauding a Chinese CEO for speaking in English?

Pierre Bourdieu uses the term “strategy of condescension”1 to refer to the “act of symbolically negating” the power relationship between two languages. Continue reading →

On the Defense of Confucius Institutes: At the University of Chicago, For Example

(This piece is a long guest blog by Marshall Sahlins. In an article titled “China U” published late last year in The Nation, Sahlins took issue with Chinese government’s global educational/political enterprise called “Confucius Institutes” (CI). These institutes teach Chinese language and culture which, together with cultural performances, films, celebrations of Chinese festivals, and the like, portrays China as generous, beautiful, and harmonious. Since the CI program was launched in 2004, some 400 such institutes have been founded in colleges and universities world wide—the US presently has 97—and nearly 600 “Confucius Classrooms” in secondary and primary schools. Sahlins argued that CIs exist “as a virtually autonomous unit within the regular curriculum of the host school”. Indeed, according to the standard agreement signed with host schools, the Confucius Institute Head Office (commonly known as “Hanban”) provides the teachers and textbooks for these courses.

In his article, Sahlins argued that CIs function in a way that is antithetical to academic values because they are intended to spread the political influence of the PRC. CIs, he argued, differ from other cultural institutes — such as the Goethe-Institut and Alliance Française — because they are located on university premises and are completely governed by state officials. By giving a foreign government charge of instruction, he claimed, universities promote censorship and self-censorship that are too much like the government prohibitions on discussion of politically-charged topics in Chinese universities.

Continue reading →

anthropology + design: silvia lindtner.

[This post is part of a two-week series featuring interviews with designers reflecting on anthropology and design.]

SILVIA LINDTNER. DIY maker, hacker, and ethnographic design researcher.

silvia 13

ANTHROPOLOGY DESIGN.

Many disciplines and fields often work with competing notions of what counts as design, claiming authority over the term, practice, and definition. Think for instance about efforts in critical design (e.g., Dunne & Raby 2007) and the strong oppositions its practitioners often make to product design. Critical design is aimed at engaging people in critical ways with commonly used products. As Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell illuminate, critical design is positioned in opposition to affirmative design—the latter considered as “the common practice, and this practice is amoral and ultimately a dupe for capitalist ideology, while critical designers are described as moral agents who seek to change society for the better” (Bardzell & Bardzell 2013).

It is important to not shy away from the politics of design, or to brash aside such heated debates over definitions, terms, and authentic practices–many of which are legitimizing efforts of new approaches in an overly competitive market (both industry and the academy). The question is how to engage the politics of design in a way that remains open to multiple viewpoints and approaches. At numerous times in my research, I have heard people argue that the process of making and designing itself is apolitical. There is much that refutes such statements–think for instance of questions of labor when we turn towards sites of production that manufacture the technological products we use on a daily basis, or listen to debates of hackerspace members over what counts as hacking versus making versus product design. What is important here is to consider the differences that lie in designing as a mode of inquiry, a leisure practice, or central to one’s profession and livelihood.

Continue reading →

Concessions, sovereignty, development

With Seeing Culture Everywhere behind us and Joana busy with Betterplace, we have been working together less than usual, but we do have plans. The shared denominator of our current interests is “development,” obviously a key term in Joana’s work with Betterplace and one that has been of increasing interest to Pal as Chinese migrants overseas — a subject he has been working on for nearly two decades — are increasingly involved in massive infrastructural projects or are otherwise transforming livelihoods and aspirations in poor countries.

A few years ago we already did some very modest research on the absence of development: why a road is not being built to link China and Russia across the Altai, despite all economic rationality. Now Pal wants to do some more substantial fieldwork in one of the numerous places — from Laos to Peru — that are being changed by Chinese-built roads or dams,Chinese traders, casinos, clinics, or factories. Despite all the hype that surrounds China’s “development export,” there is very little understanding of how it is actually impacts people’s lives and ways of thinking. Yet, as we wrote in an earlier post, both the capital and the faith in development that Chinese migrants bring to these places is already changing aspirations in ways that both agencies like the World Bank (whose lending portfolio is already smaller than that of China’s Eximbank) and participatory-development NGOs find hard to ignore. In one of the first ethnographies of the subject, Antonella Diana has shown how highland farmers in northern Laos, whose lives have long revolved around the German development organization GTZ, have converted to the prosperity gospel of Chinese rubber planters.

The subject is so interesting because it connects shifting local understandings of “the good life” in African villages to changes in World Bank decisions as well as to changing modes of sovereignty, as evidenced by the rise of modern-day concessions — large rented territories run by foreign (Chinese or other) investors who promise the local government to build model zones of development in exchange for a degree of what in essence is extraterritoriality. And while Chinese “development export” has a lot to do with the state, of no smaller interest is the sudden emergence of private donors and volunteers in China — people who adopt form of action familiar from Western “civil society” but who may have quite different (or, on the other hand, similar) ideas of what kind of lives their help should facilitate.

This is, of course, where Joana’s interests come in. Our next joint project is comparing Chinese reactions to the uses of aid after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to Western debates about the efficiency of aid to Haiti these days. We hope to use the analysis of these (mostly online) discussions to uncover to what extent ideas of aid and of individual-state interaction differ, but if we find Chinese donors for betterplace.org in the process, Joana won’t mind.