![]() ![]() It was as though the China famed for its Economic Reform and Open Door policies for more than three decades was being undone in front of our very eyes. Before long, the coronavirus was reaching around the globe and the People’s Republic found itself rapidly isolated from the rest of the world. The authorities proved themselves to be at a loss as to how to respond effectively, and the high cost of their impotence was soon visited upon the common people. Overnight, the country found itself in the grip of a devastating crisis and fear stalked the land. Boris Pasternak Translated by Sasha DugdaleĪs the Year of the Pig gave way to the Year of the Rat, a virus originating in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province-a city famed as the nation’s major transportation and communications hub-was spreading throughout China. The rule of Xi Jinping is officially hailed as China’s “New Era.” Translator’s Note: Subheadings have been added by the translator. Xu’s essay is translated and annotated here with the author’s permission. Xu never refers to Xi Jinping by name, but rather employs various classical (and sometimes cheekily arcane) terms to lampoon the “People’s Leader.” In translating Xu’s work, I hint at the orotund style of the original and occasionally use capital letters or quotation marks to emphasize terms that have a particular significance for the author. It is a prose free of Party jargon, although the author frequently makes mocking reference to officialese and to the kind of Europeanized Chinese popularized in the 1910s when the vernacular was promoted by political and cultural progressives. Xu’s writing style integrates elements of classical Chinese in which references to or quotations from philosophy, history, and literature are seamlessly interwoven in an elegant but highly personalized literary form that was commonly employed by members of China’s elite from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. ![]() His latest polemical work translated below, appeared online on 4 February 2020 as the coronavirus epidemic swept China and infections overseas sparked concern around the world. Those essays will be published in a collection titled Six Chapters from the 2018 Year of the Dog by Hong Kong City University Press in May 2020.Īlthough he was demoted by Tsinghua University in March 2019 and banned from teaching, writing, and publishing, Xu remained defiant. That philippic was one of a cycle of works that Xu wrote during 2018 in which he alerted his readers to pressing issues related to China’s momentous struggle with modernity, the state of the nation under Xi Jinping, and the mixed prospects for its future. In it Xu warned of the dangers of one-man rule, the threats posed by an increasingly sycophantic bureaucracy and putting politics ahead of professionalism, and the myriad other problems that the system would encounter if it rejected further reforms and continued along its present path. In July 2018, the Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun published an unsparing critique of the Chinese Communist Party and its general secretary, Xi Jinping. ![]() This translation appeared in ChinaFile, an online magazine published by Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. In 2016, he cofounded (with John Minford) the Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology, which publishes China Heritage. He is a historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator, and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early-modern period (1600s) to the present. This essay was translated from Chinese by Geremie R. Shortly after the publication of the following essay, which appeared online in Chinese on 4 February 2020, Xu was placed under close surveillance and he has been kept incommunicado. The author of numerous works on law and constitutionalism, he is also known for his literary essays and commentary. Xu Zhangrun is a professor of law at Tsinghua University in Beijing. ![]()
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