This is the fourth issue of the “Our Stories” series published by WeChat public account “We and Equality,”, a compilation of 20 oral narratives from Chinese people who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic firsthand, and a personal reflection by the author of this issue, Qiao Yilin. The editors hope to “document the history of ordinary people, to combat the forgetting that should never have happened, and to present the real experiences, feelings, and voices of all of us–to help us remember what has happened to us.”
The interviewees in this volume are diverse, including those of different ages, educational background, ethnicities, physical and mental status, sexual orientations,marital status, and mobility. They shared their own memories of the pandemic, including facing threats to their survival due to food shortage, not being able to take anti-depression medication due to the lockdown, international students having a hard time returning to China, people with hearing impairments facing various inconveniences, and the discrimination faced by those who had recovered from COVID-19Although primarily focusing on experiences and feelings during the pandemic, many interviewees shared additional personal stories that provided useful background information for readers to understand their situation during the pandemic.
In addition to these personal narratives, “We and Equality” also published a 44-question “Women's Mental Health Questionnaire” on WeChat, asking about respondents’ experience during the pandemic, including their sense of belonging, care/housework commitments, sleep quality, emotional and mental status, feeling about quarantine, lockdown, illness or death of loved ones, and attitudes towards the government’s COVID-19 policies. The questionnaire received a total of 453 valid responses. Based on the responses, “We and Equality” has compiled a bilingual data analysis report.
”We and Equality" is a grass root project started in November 2016. Through the WeChat public account, they publish articles weekly to raise awareness and share knowledge on gender-related issues in China. They also organize in-person activities bi-weekly where people gather for in-depth discussion, and foster a community to promote gender equality.
Published in China in 1989, this book caused a sensation, reportedly selling as many as 300,000 copies. Described as the first "descriptive study" of the reality of China. In order to raise national awareness of the need for environmental protection, it examines the agricultural, environmental, and resource problems that China was likely to encounter in the course of modernization and predicts that the future would likely be even worse. The book was banned immediately after publication.
The author of this book is economist He Qinglian. As early as 1998, the manuscript began to circulate on the Internet. In 2005, it was published by a publishing house in mainland China and was immediately banned. The materials cited in the book discuss many aspects of China's social and economic issues today and are regarded as a representative interpretation of China's reforms by independent intellectuals. The author said that the book answers a question: What consequences has economic reform brought to China?
Fiber City—the collective name Fujian Textile and Chemical Fiber Factory—was founded in 1971. China's first production in the 1970s, one of the nine Vinylon factories located in Yongan City, Fujian Province, deep in the mountains, 3 kilometers outside the outskirts of the industrial town. Once glorious, it has been gradually lowering its curtains. The old factory buildings are mottled, its young workers are now gray-haired, and many have left. The documentary shows the fate of this big factory during the planned economy.
This monograph by Sun Liping, a professor at Tsinghua University, was published by China Literature Publishing House in 2003. The author systematically analyzes a series of changes in Chinese social life since the 1990s. The book discusses the meaning and characteristics of fractured society; the formation and background of fractured society; widening income gaps and the formation of vulnerable groups; the new urban-rural dual structure; trust crisis and social order; social conflicts and institutional innovation, etc.
This book is a collection of political essays by Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. It is a sister volume to *Single-Edged Poisoned Sword - A Critique of Contemporary Nationalism in China*, which covers many aspects of Chinese politics, including: one-party dictatorship, powerful capitalism, rights defense, June Fourth, and nationalism.
This book presents the dramatic life of Mao Zedong, revealing a wealth of unheard-of facts: why Mao joined the Communist Party, how he came to sit at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, and how he seized China step by step. Writers Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday took ten years to complete this book, interviewing hundreds of Mao's relatives and friends, Chinese and foreign informants and witnesses who worked and interacted with Mao as well as dignitaries from various countries.
Purchase link:https://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679746323.
As one of China's foremost feminist activists and thinkers, Ai was interviewed by the Global Feminisms Project at the University of Michigan. In this interview, Ai talks about her upbringing as well as about the current state of feminism in China and its outlook.
The author of this book, Yang Jisheng, is a veteran journalist with 35 years of experience in journalism at Xinhua News Agency, China's official news organization. He knows a great deal about the ups and downs of Chinese politics after the end of the Cultural Revolution as well as the intricate power struggles at the top and has a lot of first-hand information. He personally interviewed Zhao Ziyang, Zhu Houze, Li Rui, Ren Zhongyi, An Zhiwen, Tian Jiyun, and other important people. “Political Struggles in China's Reform Era”, first published in Hong Kong in November 2004, was the subject of a series of crackdowns by the authorities against Yang Jisheng. It was republished in 2010 by Hong Kong's Cosmo Books.
“The Course of Reform”, a memoir by Zhao Ziyang, former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was published on May 29, 2009 by New Century Press in Hong Kong. Its English translation, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang” was published on May 13 before that. According to the book's preface, in 1992, Du Guanzheng, an old subordinate of Zhao Ziyang and former director of the State Press and Publication Administration, together with Xiao Hongda, another former high-ranking CCP official, persuaded Zhao Ziyang, who was under house arrest, to organize his experiences into a book.
Purchase link: https://www.kobo.com/hk/zh/ebook/ZoerWPfG8TiqoXIYwvW2iw.
Land reform is one of the important events that affected the course of Chinese history in the twentieth century. Liao Yiwu spent two years on and off from the end of 2005 to complete <i>The Last Landlord</i>. The book comprises interviews with land reform survivors. As the author says, "Based on the degree of physical and mental weakening of the interviewees, I estimate that in another five or six years, the history of the land reform as orally told by those who witnessed it will be completely untraceable."
<i>The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement</i> is a sociological monograph. It explains the process of the 1989 school movement and interprets the political and economic situation from four perspectives: state legitimacy, ecological environment and mobilization structure, discourse and modes of action, and public opinion. Author Zhao Dingxin interviewed 70 participants in the movement at the time. He also examined many little-known domestic documents. Thus, theory and evidence are closely intertwined.
The book won the 2002 Distinguished Book Award (Collective Action/Social Movements) and the 2001 Distinguished Book Award (Asian and Asian American) from the American Sociological Association.
It is published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.
Tang Degang is a historian and biographer who specializes in oral history. In the latter half of his life, he settled in the United States and taught at Columbia University and the City University of New York. In the field of history, he put forward the "Three Gorges Theory of History", which divides the change of Chinese social system into three major stages: feudalism, imperialism, and civil rule. The book was originally titled <i>Mao Zedong's Dictatorship, 1949~1976</i>, but was renamed <i>Thirty Years of New China </i> when it was released on the mainland.
Wukan is a village in Luwei City, under the jurisdiction of Shanwei City, Guangdong Province. From 2011 to 2016, Wukan villagers have continued to fight to protect their land and fight for villagers' rights. Facing strong pressure from the government, some even paid with their lives. In the process, the villagers had elected their own villagers' committee by one person, one vote to practice their democratic rights. Although the protests were eventually suppressed, the impact was far-reaching. Ai Xiaoming rushed to the scene at the beginning of the Wukan incident and left this precious record.
*What Else Did Zhao Ziyang Say - Du zheng's Diary* was published simultaneously in Hong Kong and Taiwan on January 17, 2010 (Hong Kong Tiandi Book Co., Ltd. and Taiwan Printing Literature and Life Magazine Publishing Co). The book is the first to publicize more than 30 unpublished conversations in Zhao Ziyang's recorded oral transcripts, covering a number of major issues. The book is illustrated with a selection of more than 40 rare photographs taken by the author. The book is divided into three parts: upper, middle and lower. It records Zhao Ziyang's exhaustive expressions on topics such as anti-corruption, the nascent bureaucratic capitalist class, federalism, punishment by words, media management, political system reform, and the new leftist trend of thinking.
In January 2007, Hong Kong Open Press published the book "Conversations of Zhao Ziyang under House Arrest". It was narrated by Zong Fengming and prefaced by Li Rui and Bao Tong. The narrator, Zong Fengming, is an old comrade of Zhao Ziyang. He retired from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1990. From July 10, 1991 to October 24, 2004, using the name of a qigong master, Zong Fengming visited Fuqiang, who was under house arrest in Beijing. Zhao Ziyang, who lives at No. 6 Hutong, had hundreds of confidential conversations with Zhao Ziyang. This book is a rich account of these intimate conversations. Zhao Ziyang talked about the power struggle and policy differences within the top leadership of the CCP, his relationship with Hu Yaobang, his evaluation of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, his criticism of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Sino-US relations, the Soviet Union issue and Taiwan issues. He also conducted in-depth reflections on the history of the Communist Party.
On New Year's Day 2018, Beihang University graduate Luo Xixi took the lead in breaking China's silence on the issue of sexual harassment when she publicly reported on social media that Beihang professor Chen Xiaowu had sexually harassed her. This was the first major event in China’s #Metoo movement, which has since spread from colleges and universities to other fields. #Metoo provoked an unprecedented discussion in China, and the issues of feminism and sexual harassment attracted a rare and widespread attention, with a variety of complaints, comments, studies, and advocacy articles springing up all over the internet.
<i>#MeToo in China Archives 2018.1-2019.7</i> is a compilation of sexual harassment-related articles written between January 2018 and July 2019. This archive is massive, totaling more than 2,500 pages, and is divided into three main volumes: “#Metoo in Higher Education”, “#Metoo in other fields”, and “#Metoo discussions’. Volume I and Volume II consist of individual #Metoo cases, arranged in chronological order. Articles in volume 3 can be broadly categorized into general reviews, investigative reports, personal stories, advocacy and activism, tools and resources,etc. During the #Metoo movement, many liberal public intellectuals questioned the movement, likening it to big-character posters during the Hundred Flowers campaign, and arguing that it might lead to the proliferation of wrongful convictions. It triggered heated debates, and this archive also contains a number of related articles.
The process of compiling this archive itself became an act of resistance, given the severe repression on freedom of expression and social movements. The editorial team faced tremendous challenges in collecting articles that had been deleted or published as images to bypass online censorship. It spent a great deal of time and personnel piecing together scraps of information and transcribing words in images. Reading traumatic personal stories - including those about the hardships in seeking remedies - caused psychological trauma for the editors themselves.
Nevertheless, #Metoo has also a process of collective healing, in which women with shared experiences saw each other, realized the structural problems behind sexual violence, and gained the strength to move on and push for change. Finally, during the compilation process, the editorial team also benefited from archiving efforts made by other websites and individuals, demonstrating that the rescue and preservation of people’s history is a collective and collaborative task.
This archive is published on https://chinesefeminism.org/.
Since 2012, a group known as the “Young Feminist Activists”, has emerged in China. They often use performance art in public to promote gender equality issues; they question injustice, and engage in policy advocacy to advance women’s rights. They make use of social media and the internet to provoke public debate, build public support, and mount pressure for social and self-transformation in China. Their direct actions created new space for activism in China's tightening political environment.
This article provides a detailed overview of the actions initiated by the young feminist activists between 2012 and 2019. These actions cover a wide range of gender issues, including but not limited to sexual assault/harassment, gender-based violence, gender equality in employment and schooling, gender stigma and stereotyping, marriage autonomy, and lesbian rights and interests. These actions have not only raised the public's awareness of gender equality, but also promoted the introduction of gender equality legislation and policies.
A turning point came In 2015 when five young feminist activists were arrested and detained for 37 days for planning to hold an anti-sexual harassment campaign on March 8, Interantional Women's Day. Since then, young feminist activists have almost completely lost their space on the streets. However, as can be seen from this article, feminist activism did not disappear, but sustained and continued in a variety of ways, including the creative use of social media and leveraging transnational solidarity and action.
In the article, the author says, “Young feminist activists should not be forgotten by the public, especially in an environment where censorship has intensified in the past years, civil society has nearly collapsed, and it is extremely difficult for people to speak out. While there is a seeming increase in discussion of feminism in domestic social media, it has been severely depoliticized, feminist activists are marginalized and stigmatized, and their voices silenced. Therefore, it is particularly important to tell the stories of young feminist activists and popularize knowledge about the domestic feminist movement. It is important to let more people see the spirit and achievements of the new generation of Chinese feminists, and understand the important gender issues they have promoted.”
The article is accompanied by numerous images, videos and links to other resources for further reading.