Show Notes
Today's episode is a joke. No really, we are looking at a joke that is making the rounds on Weibo. This is a joke that is very opaque, but that opacity points to how autocracy in China works today.
More from Chinese Literature Podcast
In May, I did a podcast on Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuangzi. I screwed something up. In this episode, I explain what I got wrong and why.
In today's episode, I got the chance to speak with Salih Hudayar, the Foreign Minister of the East Turkestan Government-in-Exile. We talked about Uyghur literature, Uyghur history and even American history.
In this podcast, we look at the novel that was, a little more than a week ago, awarded the International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue is a novel that pretends to be a travelogue, where a Japanese woman from Nagasaki, an important writer in the Japanese empire. She travels to Taiwan to travel and talk about her writing, but she comes to have a sort of friendship with a Taiwanese woman. This novel is an interrogation of Japanese and KMT colonialism in Taiwan. It may also be a romance, though that is never clear. An overall great novel that deserved the Booker.
I am sad to report that Stephen Owen, a professor at Harvard University who wrote about Chinese poetry, just passed away at the age of 79 in Massachusetts. This short podcast talks a bit about one of the giants of the field.
In this podcast, I got the chance to do a face-to-face interview with Professor Li Wai-yee, a Harvard scholar who is one of the most prolific scholars of Chinese literature. During our interview, we discussed her new book, The Confucius Chronicles, just released by Columbia University Press, along with the massive role that Confucius has played in Chinese history.