The Mothers of Tiananmen: Curating Social Justice

Focusing on the activist exhibition The Mothers of Tiananmen (2019), this article examines my methodology of curating for social action and justice using international collaboration and participatory arts-as-research. The exhibition responded to the ongoing campaign for justice for the victims and survivors of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, as well as sought to support women’s creative resistance and voice. The Mothers of Tiananmen was co-created with artist Mei Yuk Wong, the 64 Museum (Hong Kong), and artists participating in the Centre for International Women Artists (Manchester). The context for the exhibition is the city of Manchester, which has one of the highest Chinese populations in England, along with a diverse international demographic with over 200 languages spoken. Through this case study, curating is presented as a creative and critical tool by which to respond to the range of justice and activist concerns of international and diasporic communities.

Mash-up, Smash-up: Mixing Genres and Mediums to Rewrite History in Do Not Say We Have Nothing

In Madeleine Thien’s novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a historical photograph of three protestors at Tiananmen Square is directly inserted into the fictional text. The goal of my research is to start a scholarly conversation on this work by exploring the relationship between the historical image and the fictional text to establish Thien’s novel as postmodern. Drawing on postmodernist theories, this paper applies the works of prominent thinkers in the field to ask how the collision of genres and mediums (history and fiction; image and text), in Do Not Say We Have Nothing renders the novel postmodern. The first aim of this paper is to demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between text and image. The relationship is reciprocal because while the photograph certifies and undermines the story, the story also certifies and undermines the photograph. After establishing the multiple functions of the relationship between text and image, this paper explores how the collision of genres elicits multiple interpretations of the novel and the historical events it details. To understand how multiple interpretations of history destabilize historical metanarratives, this paper will finally investigate how the novel gives a voice to those omitted from history. By acknowledging Thien’s novel as postmodern, this paper analyzes the important role of fiction in representing those whose experiences are effaced by historical metanarratives. My postmodernist interpretation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing will provide new ways of reading and interpreting the novel and situating it within the canon of Canadian Literature.

Przybrany ojciec. Czesław Miłosz w Chinach

Czesław Miłosz remains among the most important foreign authors and literary authorities for Chinese poets. Initially received in China with distrust and uncertainty, then portrayed in the official state discourse of romantic-revolutionary literature as the bard of socialism, Miłosz became the spiritual father of the younger generation affected by the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square Massacre, a witness of the age, and a symbol of intellectual independence and resistance against totalitarianism. After a period of reading Miłosz in terms of ethical and political categories, Chinese reviews and literary texts in the 2010s and 2020s increasingly refer to Miłosz as philosophical and metaphysical poet. This article analyses Miłosz’s reception in China, paying attention to the historical, cultural, and linguistic factors that shaped the assimilation of his work and the values he brought to Chinese poetry.

“New Cold Wars Have Begun”

Chapter 3 uses Party texts to explore China’s changing view of the United States at the end of the Cold War and the ends, ways, and means of its subsequent grand strategy to blunt American power. It demonstrates how China went from seeing the United States as a quasi-ally against the Soviet Union to seeing it as China’s greatest threat and “main adversary” in the wake of three events: the traumatic trifecta of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, and the Soviet collapse. It traces how Beijing launched its blunting strategy under the Party guideline of “hiding capabilities and biding time,” which it tied to perceptions of US power captured in phrases like the “international balance of forces” and “multipolarity.” The chapter also introduces China’s effort to asymmetrically weaken American power in Asia across military, economic, and political instruments, which are discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

The Fightback

This chapter tells the story of the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre inside the foreign ministry and follows the painstaking efforts of Chinese diplomats to salvage China’s reputation. In the aftermath of the massacre, the country’s diplomats made painstaking efforts to salvage China’s international reputation. Channeling the same impulses they’d used to woo the world in the 1950s, the country launched a new charm offensive with its neighbors, embracing tools from economic diplomacy to sports diplomacy, media management, and arms control to try to win friends. At the same time, China’s diplomats were branded traitors by nationalists who saw engagement with the United States as a throwback to China’s humiliating past after the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

"Chairman Mao's Good Soldier" Lei Feng

The article examines the personality of "Chairman Mao's good soldier" Lei Feng — a soldier of the People's Liberation Army of China, who died tragically in 1962. On March 5, 1963, on the initiative of Mao Zedong, a political and ideological campaign was announced in China under the slogan "Learn from Lei Feng". In order to consolidate the positive image of Lei Feng in the mass consciousness of the people of the PRC, the possibilities of culture and art were widely used. The largest-scale political and ideological campaign under the slogan "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!" acquired in the first years after the death of Lei Feng and during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). In 1977 Lei Feng's study campaign unfolded with renewed vigor. In the 1980s, the mass movement gradually began to fade. The CPC leadership made significant efforts to preserve it in 1980-1981, to revive it in 1987 and after the tragic events in Tiananmen Square (1989). Since 2012, there has been an increase in this campaign. Currently, Lei Feng is the personification of altruism, volunteering and helping others, carried out on a selfless basis. In this capacity, the image of Lei Feng is used in the public discourse of modern China. The Chinese media constantly refer to stories, the heroes of which are ordinary Chinese — "modern Lei Feng’". The cult of Lei Feng, persistently promoted by the CCP for decades, confronts the recently widespread facts of corruption in various (including the highest) echelons of political power.

China, Eastern Europe and Russia compared

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall it was conceivable that China would follow the path towards the cessation of communism, as it happened in the successor states of the USSR, Yugoslavia and the East European satellite states of the Soviet Union. But the Communist Party of China (CPC) managed to retain control and avoided the Russian and East European collapse, a full-fledged transition to capitalism and liberal democracy. For a while, China was on its way to market capitalism with the possible outcome to turn eventually into a liberal democracy. This was a rocky road, with backs-and-forth. But the shift to liberal democracy did not happen. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, approved by Deng Xiaoping, was a more alarming setback than the contemporary Western observers were willing to realize. This paper presents an interpretation of the changes under present Chinese leader, Xi Jinping in a post-communist comparative perspective.