第八位中國商人同消失咗嘅海員The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Seamen Hong Kong, Typesetter Publishing, 2022.
Chan Chin Lee, a ‘Chinese merchant’, left Canton in the early 1910s for the United Kingdom. Having traversed the anti-Chinese racism of 1920s and 1930s Britain, during World War Two he would open a café-cum-gambling house frequented by Chinese sailors. Counting on the seamen’s patriotism, he collected funds through the gambling house to support the anti-Japanese war effort back in China. In 1945–1946, a combined operation of the then Labour government, the Home Office, the police force and a shipping company sought to forcefully repatriate all Chinese seamen from the UK. This anti-Chinese action was concealed for over half a century. Based on personal memories of his grandfather Chan Chin Lee and relying on government documents relating to the repatriation, Gregory Lee raises provocative questions in this biographical novella about the long-neglected history of the diasporic Chinese in the UK
https://typesetter.hk/2022/07/01/eightherchant/
Chan Chin Lee, a ‘Chinese merchant’, left Canton in the early 1910s for the United Kingdom. Having traversed the anti-Chinese racism of 1920s and 1930s Britain, during World War Two he would open a café-cum-gambling house frequented by Chinese sailors. Counting on the seamen’s patriotism, he collected funds through the gambling house to support the anti-Japanese war effort back in China. In 1945–1946, a combined operation of the then Labour government, the Home Office, the police force and a shipping company sought to forcefully repatriate all Chinese seamen from the UK. This anti-Chinese action was concealed for over half a century. Based on personal memories of his grandfather Chan Chin Lee and relying on government documents relating to the repatriation, Gregory Lee raises provocative questions in this biographical novella about the long-neglected history of the diasporic Chinese in the UK
https://typesetter.hk/2022/07/01/eightherchant/
China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power (2018)
London: Hurst, 2018.
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.
Gregory Lee traces 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’. If China is a product of Westernisation, is it now the West’s turn to become China?
London: Hurst, 2018.
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.
Gregory Lee traces 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’. If China is a product of Westernisation, is it now the West’s turn to become China?
China's Lost Decade
Revised, US edition (2012)
In writing this book, I chose to foreground the poet Ai Qing as an example of the liberal Communist intellectual of the pre-People’s Republican era. When Pablo Neruda, the Chilean liberal Communist Nobel laureate poet visited China for the last time in 1957, he searched in vain for his Chinese poet-friend. But Ai Qing had fallen foul of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement and the following year would be dispatched to a labour camp in the north-western province of Xinjiang together with his family. He had two sons, the youngest of whom, one year old at the time, was Ai Weiwei 艾未未.They did not return to Beijing untill 1975.
On 3 April 2011, Ai Weiwei, was detained by police at Beijing airport and his staff interrogated over his alleged of "economic crimes." Although released on 22 June 2011, he continues to lives under house arrest and, while forbidden from doing so, persists in communicating with the outside world. His family and entourage are frequently harassed by the authorities.
This repetition of the persecution of socially concerned writers and artists sadly bears out the thesis of this book: that the short post-Mao period constituted by the 1980s was an exception to practices stretching back not just decades but to the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual a century ago and forwards to the present day.
On 3 April 2011, Ai Weiwei, was detained by police at Beijing airport and his staff interrogated over his alleged of "economic crimes." Although released on 22 June 2011, he continues to lives under house arrest and, while forbidden from doing so, persists in communicating with the outside world. His family and entourage are frequently harassed by the authorities.
This repetition of the persecution of socially concerned writers and artists sadly bears out the thesis of this book: that the short post-Mao period constituted by the 1980s was an exception to practices stretching back not just decades but to the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual a century ago and forwards to the present day.
Un Spectre hante la Chine (2012)
La Chine d’aujourd’hui sur le plan politique et sociétal présente toutes les caractéristiques d’une incertitude et instabilité qui règnent depuis le fondement de la République Populaire en 1949, et ce, en dépit de sa transformation en puissance industrielle et l’émergence accélérée d’une société de consommation ; la récente chute d’un « prince » politique, Bo Xilai, en témoigne. Les réformes sont à bout de souffle, la libéralisation économique a donné ses fruits mais laisse la Chine aux prises à des problèmes socio-économiques, environnementaux mais surtout politiques considérables. Les paysans et les ouvriers sont en constante ébullition sociale et les émeutes localisées sont devenues monnaie courante. Désormais, la classe « pensante » qui avait composé avec le parti communiste pendant les années 1990 et avait vu s'améliorer ses conditions matérielles, recommence à se poser des questions, (sur la vénalité dans la vie publique, la persistance des inégalités sociales, le manque de droits fondamentaux, un système de justice arbitraire et aléatoire, une population constamment surveillée, et la censure de l’expression politique mais également culturelle et scientifique.) Ce sont les mêmes questions que l’on se posait avant « Tiananmen », en 1989.
Si donc, aujourd’hui, en Chine les quelques artistes et intellectuels, tels Liu Xiaobo et Ai Weiwei, qui militent en faveur des droits de base (la protection de l’environnement et la sûreté alimentaire) se trouvent réprimés et bridés par le pouvoir, ils représentent néanmoins la face publique d’un bouillonnement plus généralisé des milieux scientifique et culturel de la Chine actuelle. Pour comprendre pourquoi en Chine ces milieux culturel et scientifique sont si impliqués dans l’action politique il faudrait raconter l’histoire du XXème siècle et, en particulier, celle de la période du Mur de la démocratie (1978-79) jusqu’à la catastrophe du 4 juin 1989. Or, c’est précisément cette histoire qui risque de se délabrer dans l’oubli collectif et volontaire, faute de ne pas la raconter. Pourtant le spectre de ce moment qui promettait une société plus ouverte et libre hante toujours la Chine, et les acteurs, les faits et les mots de cette période menacée d'oubli, constituent les fondements de la contestation actuelle du pouvoir ainsi que l’espoir de l’avenir.
Si donc, aujourd’hui, en Chine les quelques artistes et intellectuels, tels Liu Xiaobo et Ai Weiwei, qui militent en faveur des droits de base (la protection de l’environnement et la sûreté alimentaire) se trouvent réprimés et bridés par le pouvoir, ils représentent néanmoins la face publique d’un bouillonnement plus généralisé des milieux scientifique et culturel de la Chine actuelle. Pour comprendre pourquoi en Chine ces milieux culturel et scientifique sont si impliqués dans l’action politique il faudrait raconter l’histoire du XXème siècle et, en particulier, celle de la période du Mur de la démocratie (1978-79) jusqu’à la catastrophe du 4 juin 1989. Or, c’est précisément cette histoire qui risque de se délabrer dans l’oubli collectif et volontaire, faute de ne pas la raconter. Pourtant le spectre de ce moment qui promettait une société plus ouverte et libre hante toujours la Chine, et les acteurs, les faits et les mots de cette période menacée d'oubli, constituent les fondements de la contestation actuelle du pouvoir ainsi que l’espoir de l’avenir.
China's Lost Decade: The Politics and Poetics of the 1980s In Place of History
Lyon & Hong Kong, Tigre de Papier, 2011, 396 pages.
Preview
The objective of this book is to discuss a moment in China's recent history from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s that constituted the last period to date of a widespread intellectual and cultural engagement with the politics of the modern nation-state. This time can be seen as a long decade, but also historically as a "lost" decade. It is "lost" in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; it is also "lost" in that its memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; "lost" also in the embarrassed silence of those who prefer to foreground the subsequent economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today's more prosperous China; and "lost" as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen. And yet those who were active in 1978-1979 and again in 1989 are among those who find themselves consistently the targets of the authorities' ire and suspicion even today.
Preview
The objective of this book is to discuss a moment in China's recent history from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s that constituted the last period to date of a widespread intellectual and cultural engagement with the politics of the modern nation-state. This time can be seen as a long decade, but also historically as a "lost" decade. It is "lost" in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; it is also "lost" in that its memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; "lost" also in the embarrassed silence of those who prefer to foreground the subsequent economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today's more prosperous China; and "lost" as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen. And yet those who were active in 1978-1979 and again in 1989 are among those who find themselves consistently the targets of the authorities' ire and suspicion even today.
Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness
London: RoutledgeCurzon Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.
This book is about the ways Chineseness has been represented over the past hundred years or so. Much of the book discusses the Orientalizing and crude racist ideologies that have formed the foundations of the way white people have both popularly and scientifically imagined China. But the book also discusses how Chinese cultural producers in China, and in exile, have imagined China, sometimes challenging and sometimes reproducing nationalist narratives of Chineseness. Thus the book takes as its texts both elite literary representations, such as the Duoduo's story "Going Home", and popular cultural texts including Chinese television "soap" serials and MTV, and British popular cultural media such as the songs of George Formby and, that very British performative medium, the pantomime.
Ce livre discute les différentes manières dont on a représenté la sinité au cours des cent dernières années. Une grande partie de l'ouvrage est consacrée aux idéologies orientalisantes et souvent grossièrement racistes sur lesquelles les Blancs ont basé leurs imaginaires populaire et scientifique de la Chine. Mais le livre décrit également comment les producteurs culturels chinois en Chine, et en exil, ont imaginé la Chine, défiant ou reproduisant parfois les récits nationalistes de la sinicité. Ainsi, on y trouve côte à côte des représentations littéraires d'élite et des textes culturels populaires.
The Boy Who Catches Wasps
Brookline, MA, USA: Zephyr Press, , 2002, 213 pages.
Bilingual edition of the poems of Neustadt prize-winner Duoduo. Translated, annotated and with an introduction by Gregory Lee.
(texte bi-lingue chinois-anglais; traduction en anglais, introduction et annotation de Gregory Lee)
Dans les notes de jaquette qui accompagnent ce livre, Eliot Weinberger, essayiste et traducteur d'Octavio Paz, estime que Duo Duo "est une des montagnes sur la carte topographique de la poésie contemporaine mondiale".
See also/voir aussi :
Gregory Lee & John Cayley, Looking Out From Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (traduction de la poésie contemporaine de Duoduo). London: Bloomsbury, 1989.
Gregory Lee & John Cayley, Statements: The New Chinese Poetry of Duoduo. London: Wellsweep Press, 1989.
Bilingual edition of the poems of Neustadt prize-winner Duoduo. Translated, annotated and with an introduction by Gregory Lee.
(texte bi-lingue chinois-anglais; traduction en anglais, introduction et annotation de Gregory Lee)
Dans les notes de jaquette qui accompagnent ce livre, Eliot Weinberger, essayiste et traducteur d'Octavio Paz, estime que Duo Duo "est une des montagnes sur la carte topographique de la poésie contemporaine mondiale".
See also/voir aussi :
Gregory Lee & John Cayley, Looking Out From Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (traduction de la poésie contemporaine de Duoduo). London: Bloomsbury, 1989.
Gregory Lee & John Cayley, Statements: The New Chinese Poetry of Duoduo. London: Wellsweep Press, 1989.
La Chine et le spectre de l'Occident : Contestation poétique, modernité et métissage
Paris: Editions Syllepse, Paris, 2002.
Collection "Exploration et découvertes en terres humaines"
Pour l'Occident, la Chine a constitué depuis plusieurs siècles à la fois un spectacle et un spectre. Alors que pour la Chine, c'est l'Occident qui l'a menacée, envahie, et contrainte à changer ses modes de vie. Pendant plus d'un siècle la société et la culture chinoises ont dû faire face aux pratiques et aux mentalités de la modernité occidentale et le métissage socioculturel y a été imposé par le colonialisme. En Occident, en choisissant d'oublier cette histoire, on exige aussi que la Chine reste "authentique" et "exotique", source de philosophies apaisantes et passives pour assouvir nos âmes troublées.
Que cet ouvrage cible les pratiques lyriques n'est pas un choix aléatoire, car si c'est le roman qui a narré et négocié notre modernité, c'est bien la poésie, quand ses pratiquants ne se sont pas laissés séduire par les politiciens, qui l'a contestée.
Dans ce livre, des contestataires lyriques célèbres, tels que Benjamin Péret côtoient des poètes chinois "dissidents" tels que Duoduo et Bei Dao, et des penseurs d'avant-garde tels Guy Debord et Raoul Vaneigem, sont associés à des chanteurs d'Occitanie, à des troubadours des Chinatowns, ou encore aux pionniers du rock et roll pékinois. La mobilisation de ces diverses formes de pensée exprime toute la puissance que représente l'arme de la critique intellectuelle et poétique.
Dans les combats de civilisation qui se jouent aujourd'hui autour des formes de la mondialisation n'oublions pas le monde rêvé par les penseurs poétiques qui en imaginent aussi l'avenir.
Collection "Exploration et découvertes en terres humaines"
Pour l'Occident, la Chine a constitué depuis plusieurs siècles à la fois un spectacle et un spectre. Alors que pour la Chine, c'est l'Occident qui l'a menacée, envahie, et contrainte à changer ses modes de vie. Pendant plus d'un siècle la société et la culture chinoises ont dû faire face aux pratiques et aux mentalités de la modernité occidentale et le métissage socioculturel y a été imposé par le colonialisme. En Occident, en choisissant d'oublier cette histoire, on exige aussi que la Chine reste "authentique" et "exotique", source de philosophies apaisantes et passives pour assouvir nos âmes troublées.
Que cet ouvrage cible les pratiques lyriques n'est pas un choix aléatoire, car si c'est le roman qui a narré et négocié notre modernité, c'est bien la poésie, quand ses pratiquants ne se sont pas laissés séduire par les politiciens, qui l'a contestée.
Dans ce livre, des contestataires lyriques célèbres, tels que Benjamin Péret côtoient des poètes chinois "dissidents" tels que Duoduo et Bei Dao, et des penseurs d'avant-garde tels Guy Debord et Raoul Vaneigem, sont associés à des chanteurs d'Occitanie, à des troubadours des Chinatowns, ou encore aux pionniers du rock et roll pékinois. La mobilisation de ces diverses formes de pensée exprime toute la puissance que représente l'arme de la critique intellectuelle et poétique.
Dans les combats de civilisation qui se jouent aujourd'hui autour des formes de la mondialisation n'oublions pas le monde rêvé par les penseurs poétiques qui en imaginent aussi l'avenir.
Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers : Lyricism, Nationalism and Hybridity in China and Its Others
Durham, NC: Duke University Press [USA]; London: C. Hurst & Co.[Europe] 1996; also available from the HKU Press in Hong Kong.
· 1. White Other, Hybrid Others
· 2. The Barriers of Routine and Habit: Poetry, Patriotism, Ideology
· 3. Chinese Modernism, Western Colonialism
· 4. Contempt for the Contemporary: Orientalists, Western Marxists and Chinese Poetry
· 5. Exile and the Potential of Modernism
· 6. Chinese Trumpeters, French Troubadours: Nationalist Ideology and the Culture of Popular Music
· 7. Fear of Drowning: Pure Nations, Hybrid Bodies, Excluded Cultures
· 8. Poetic Zones, Autonomous Moments
Book review. Excerpt:
This book strikes a rather different note from a host of others that deal with such heavily marked and loaded terms as nationalism, hybridity, and Other that have become academic shibboleths of sorts that students of literature must pronounce in order to cross the line and join the crowd under the general rubric of Cultural Studies. What I am saying is that not only is Gregory Lee knowledgeable about Cultural Studies and the various critical theories underlying that enterprise (and he reads French as well as English and Chinese), but he often has a sense of what is going on and where he stands vis-à-vis the various issues and theories discussed in this book. In my view, at least, that is by no means an easy accomplishment.
Right at the outset, then, this book has my recommendation as an informative and original contribution to the study of the cultural scene in contemporary China, a study that often relates the situation in China to other and comparable scenes in different cultures and places--for example, the United States, Britain, and particularly France.
Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makersis a collection of essays on different forms of what Lee calls "cultural productions," chief among which is poetry or the lyric, including the lyrics of songs in popular music. The author has a rather strong and serious, if not idealistic, belief in the efficacy of poetry in the contemporary world. With Benjamin Péret, he asserts that poetry is determined by a commitment to a complex human emancipation and an over-turning of the alienation...
http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/china_review_international/v007/7.2longxi.pdf
ZHANG Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University, Hong Kong, China Review International- Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 2000, pp. 487-490
University of Hawai'i Press
Chinese Writing in Exile
Select Papers 7, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1993. Available from the CEAS, University of Chicago; or contact Gregory Lee .
Includes: Gregory Lee's translation of Fugitives, a play in two acts by Gao Xingjian, performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, June 1992, and at the University of Sydney, August 1993, and by Western Theatre Conspiracy at Performance Works, Granville Island, Vancouver, March-April 2002.
Also includes translations of the poetry of Neustadt prize-winner Duoduo, and contributions by Leo Ou-fan Lee and C.H.Wang (Yang Mu).
Includes: Gregory Lee's translation of Fugitives, a play in two acts by Gao Xingjian, performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, June 1992, and at the University of Sydney, August 1993, and by Western Theatre Conspiracy at Performance Works, Granville Island, Vancouver, March-April 2002.
Also includes translations of the poetry of Neustadt prize-winner Duoduo, and contributions by Leo Ou-fan Lee and C.H.Wang (Yang Mu).
Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist
Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989.
Dai Wangshu (1905-1950). Neo-symbolist poet. Shanghai modernist (1920s-1030s).