Recent writing - écrits récents
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How did China become China? And where is it leading us? We talk as if it had always existed: eternal China with its 5,000 years of uninterrupted history. But the name ‘China’ was first used by sixteenth-century Europeans, and its Chinese equivalent, Zhongguo, only gained currency in the mid-1800s.
China Imagined is a thoughtful exploration of the idea of China, from the naming and mapping of its territory and peoples to the creation and rise of the modern nation-state. China’s early history describes a multilingual space, ruled by a homogeneous elite with its own minority culture—a far cry from Maoism’s national mass culture, or Xi Jinping’s state-controlled digital society today.
In this book I trace this complex, diverse entity’s evolution since the Opium Wars into a China made in ‘our’ image. Today, it is a great power integral to the global system, whether it comes to climate change, security or inequality. Given this rapid convergence with the West, Xi’s China holds up a mirror to our own nations. Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia and post-Brexit Europe all betray echoes of ’the Chinese Dream’.
‘This richly provocative text, written with verve and urgency, has something to say to all scholars of China, past and present. Its broad reach and moral grasp enable penetrating questions about exactly what it is we think we are studying when we study China.’
Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford, and author of Art in China
‘If there’s one word to describe Gregory Lee’s book, it’s iconoclastic. Bristling with ideas and insights leavened by his vast knowledge and understanding of ‘things Chinese’, this sweeping account lays the ground for a new reading of both China and the Western imagination of it.’
Michael Dutton, Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths University of London and author of Beijing Time
‘An erudite and trenchant analysis of a political, cultural, social, ethnic, and linguistic world that has taken many shapes under several different historical pressures. Each chapter contains a wealth of information, presented clearly and vividly. One could not wish for a better guide and interpreter than Gregory Lee.’
David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Nationalism Unbound: China, Hong Kong and Brexit through the Prism of Castoriadis
3 January 2020
Castoriadis, wrote very little that directly dealt with Chinese politics. What is striking, however, is how with a time-lag of between ten and twenty years, Castoriadis's analysis of the Soviet Union may be mapped onto Mao's China. Even today looking at Xi Jinping's China the insights of Castoriadis ring true.
An English Poet from the Liverpool Cantonese Borderlands — Jennifer Lee Tsai
2 November 2019
There is no way I could not like Jennifer Lee Tsai’s poetry, a poetry that rises like mist off the mingling tides of the rivers Mersey and Pearl. Her poetry is written out of lived experience, and so rings true. Its “Chineseness” seems natural, woven-in, not forced, not precious or ostentatious. But Tsai’s is above all a personal and ‘local’ poetry —in the best senses of both terms.
2 November 2019
There is no way I could not like Jennifer Lee Tsai’s poetry, a poetry that rises like mist off the mingling tides of the rivers Mersey and Pearl. Her poetry is written out of lived experience, and so rings true. Its “Chineseness” seems natural, woven-in, not forced, not precious or ostentatious. But Tsai’s is above all a personal and ‘local’ poetry —in the best senses of both terms.
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