Barbarians at the Gate

China’s New Youth

Barbarians at the Gate

An episode of Barbarians at the Gate

In this episode, hosts Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser catch up with writer and editor Alec Ash, to discuss the new US edition of his book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. Alec’s book is an intimate portrait of six diverse members of China’s “post-80s” generation, tracing their lives’ trajectory in the context of China’s turbulent and unpredictable economic modernization process. Orville Schell called the book “a fascinating mosaic that gives us a wonderfully vivid sense of what it’s like to grow up today in the People’s Republic of China.” With the themes of the book as a jumping-off point, the topic broadens in historical scope, exploring communalities and contrasts in earlier youth movements such as the May 4th movement, the Tiananmen Square movement, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, and the current resurgence of nationalism among the “post-2000s” generation. Alec is China correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his articles have appeared elsewhere including The New York Review of Books, The Economist, the Guardian, and The Sunday Times.

 

Q&A

How Will Chinese Americans Vote In 2020?

Yi Chen

Mengyu Dong talks to Yi Chen about her documentary film First Vote

Yi Chen is an independent filmmaker who tells stories about Chinese American communities. In her most recent documentary, First Vote, she follows the journey of four Chinese Americans from the 2016 presidential election to the 2018 midterms. I spoke with Chen about the film’s behind-the-scenes stories as well as her own experience being a Chinese American filmmaker. She hopes her film can showcase political engagement in the Chinese American community and inspire people to vote in the upcoming presidential election. The film will be broadcast as part of the America ReFramed series on October 20, 2020. – Mengyu Dong

Mengyu Dong: Let's start with the name of the film, First Vote. How did you come up with the title? What do you think it represents?

Yi Chen: It actually took me a while to come up with the title. There are several layers of meanings. I was interested in first-time voters. In 2016, it was the first time to vote for Sue Googe (former Republican candidate for the US Congress in North Carolina) and Lance (Lijian) Chen’s (Assistant Professor in the School of Business Administration at the University of Dayton). That was partly where the title came from. And, as I was becoming an American citizen, this is also my journey before I cast my first vote.

 

Podcasts

China’s New Silk Road Comes To Kazakhstan

Mary Kay Magistad

Ed: We’re pleased to bring you this podcast and accompanying essay by Mary Kay Magistad, part of her new podcast series for the Global Reporting Centre, "On China's New Silk Road." In the series, Magistad, a former China correspondent for NPR and PRI, explores the impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, reporting from different corners of the world where the project reaches to uncover where it came from, why it is being pursued and how it is viewed on the ground. In this, the second episode of the series, she travels to Kazakhstan.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s capital, in 2013, seemed like another boring meeting worth skipping, according to Dulat Yesnazar, then a college student studying international relations. Xi had come to announce the launch of one of the most sweeping global infrastructure initiatives in history.

 

Essays

Four Types of Chinese Nationalism

Chang Che

How nationalism in today’s China is far from monolithic – Chang Che 

71 years ago, at 3pm on October 1 1949, Mao Zedong stood at a podium above Tiananmen square to found the People’s Republic of China. Soldiers in pine-green tunics marched across the square in triumphant celebration of victory in the Chinese civil war, four years after Japanese occupation ended. Now the anniversary is commemorated with a military parade, nighttime firework displays, and an extended national holiday called “Golden week.” Yet October 1, National Day, is not fully analogous to a day of independence. It commemorates not a nation’s birth, but a nation under new management — that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

After seven decades, the Party has undergone a marked transformation. Once a fledgling faction with revolutionary ambitions, it is now a ruling party that detests radicalism and claims exclusive representation over the interests of the Chinese people. National Day is an occasion for patriotic festivities, yet hides within it a hidden premise: by presenting an anniversary for the Party as one for the country, it implies the nation and the Party are one and the same.

 

Essays

The Chinese ‘alt-left’ who support Trump’s alt-right

Alec Ash

How Trump still has fans among social conservatives in China – Alec Ash

“To change a president is common; to change an era is very rare.” So wrote Li Ziyang (李子暘), a 43-year old self-described Chinese nationalist and “self-media” opinion influencer, at 6:24pm on November 9, 2016, Beijing time, when Donald Trump’s electoral victory was secure but America was just waking up to discover it. Li was posting on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo, where he has almost 900,000 followers. And as a Chinese supporter of Trump, he was delighted.

“I like Trump because he’s a businessman, not a revolutionary,” Li told me after the election. We were in a Beijing Starbucks, and the Chinese patriot was wearing an Oakland Athletics baseball cap, slurping an Americano. There were three key areas where he was in agreement with Trump’s policy, he said. First: like Trump, Li is anti-immigration, in a Chinese context as much as an American one. Second: he hates social welfare policies, especially for ethnic minorities (“only Trump openly says that’s not all right”). And last: he enjoys giving the liberal Western mainstream a hard time, taking relish in the drumming that Trump doles out to what he, too, calls jia xinwen, “fake news.”