Chinese State broadcaster CCTV aired their “315” gala last night, in what has become an annual take down of dodgy business practices in China for Consumer Rights Day. Previous targets have included the likes of Volkswagen, Apple, Nike, and Muji, but 2019’s program turned its gaze solely on smaller domestic brands for the first time in years.
One of the most attention-grabbing stories to emerge from the hour-long special was that of medical waste reportedly being turned into household items such as single-use cups, carrier bags, and — most shockingly — children’s toys.
Other hidden camera and dramatic music-heavy segments alleged faults with “flash” payment cards (similar to contactless bank cards), looked at the dangers of e-cigarettes, and warned users of financial apps such as Rong 360 about sky-high interest rates and late fees on loans. The program also exposed health and safety issues at a manufacturer of a popular spicy snack and took aim at companies using automated dialing machines to cold call thousands of people a day.
The “gala” was largely devoid of big-name scalps this year. Perhaps the most high-profile company to fall under the spotlight was Shanghai-based fintech firm Samoyed. The credit transfer service, which filed for an 80 million USD IPO in the US late last year, was accused of collecting consumer data without the proper authorization.
All of which made for a relatively low-key program compared to some of the big exposés that have made the show a major event in recent years. Whether that’s proof that consumer rights and product quality in China are improving or just that big brands are being more careful around 315 is a matter of debate however.
Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue’s “darkly comic” novel Love in the New Millenium has made the Man Booker International Prize 2019 long list. The story follows “a group of women [that] inhabits a world of constant surveillance” and represents the “most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today”, according to its English language publisher, Yale University Press.
Deng Xiaohua, the author behind the Can Xue pseudonym, was born in Changsha, in China’s southern province of Hunan. Her father, the one-time editor-in-chief of a prominent newspaper in the province, was labelled an “Ultra-Rightist” in the late 1950s along with other intellectuals of the period, and was sent to the countryside for two years for allegedly leading an anti-Communist group at the paper.
Can Xue’s work is renowned for its experimental, often abstract style. In the foreword to the novel, also published in The Paris Review, Eileen Myles likens Love in the New Millenium to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet sci-fi film Solaris. She also writes that,
“To be a reader was to become a trailer, and to become an actor, too. It’s irresistible, the way one enters this laughable, shifting no-time where everyone inside is talking about like the weather. It’s also very boring, as a plotless book is. A circling, nonbuilding narrative gets tiring. What’s the pleasure, then? Humor and surprise. It’s a frankly poetic existence. Plus my reader’s sense of awe grew continually at the endless refillability of the thing. The book is a vase, it’s a form.”
The 2019 Man Booker International Prize’s long list of 13 novels will be reduced to a shortlist in April, with the winner set to be announced on May 21 in London.
One of China’s biggest political events, the annual “Two Sessions” meetings, are rumbling on in Beijing this week. And while they’re mostly about rubber stamping leader-approved policies and plans, there is a small, tightly-controlled window in which citizens apparently get to “petition” the ruling authorities with ideas.
Anyone with a “petition” that might remotely threaten the Party’s grip on power isn’t allowed anywhere near proceedings, but the process can sometimes throw up some interesting (albeit confined) debate nonetheless. Case in point: the hashtag “Suggesting the development of nationwide death education” is currently trending on prominent Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo, with 130 million views.
“Death education” is currently a hot topic on Weibo
As many people gear up to visit relatives’ graves for China’s annual Tomb Sweeping Festival next month, a Beijing-based physician has caused a stir by suggesting that the whole country is in need of “death education” and that conversations around death should begin in primary school. Gu Jin, Chief Physician at Peking University Cancer Hospital, has said that Chinese people need to learn to, “respect death to respect life”.
A Beijing News Weibo post on the proposal has been “liked” tens of thousands of times and received thousands of comments, many of them supportive of tackling what Sixth Tone has called “China’s biggest taboo“. Numerous users suggested the policy be implemented along with wider-ranging education in other “essential areas”:
“China lacks three kinds of education: sex education, love education, and death education,” wrote user Bakala. “These three concepts correspond to the three fulcrums of life: making the body complete, the soul abundant, and learning the value of life.”
But the proposal has also caused considerable debate around euthanasia. The Chinese term for allowing those with terminal illnesses to choose the timing of their own death appears in many of the highest-rated comments on the Beijing News post. By far the most-liked reply (with 15,000 “likes” at time of writing) to the story argues strongly in favor of making assisted suicide legal.
“We should actively open the door to euthanasia, so that patients who are helpless can choose their own way of leaving!” says Chidian Daochang. “Just like advanced cancer, daily chemotherapy — patients suffer, loved ones suffer. […] As a doctor, knowing that there is no medicine to save them, why let the patient suffer further, and create more suffering for the family?”
Euthanasia has become a hot topic in China of late. In January, newspaper Hangzhou Daily published a piece by Guo Jing, a judge who had just sentenced three people to up to five years in prison each after they were charged with murder for assisting the death of a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease. “If the defendant is given a mild penalty, society might mistake it as an encouragement of such acts. If they are given a heavy penalty, it defies the spirit of prudence and kindness,” the judge wrote, according to SCMP.
Assisted suicide remains a criminal offence in China.
Cover photo: A shop in Shanghai selling offerings for the deceased.
Trigger warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of bullying and sexual violence.
Three months after seeing Yang Zhefen’s play Fade Away at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, I can still hear the audience’s weeping cutting through the darkness just after the lights went out.
The play is a deeply affecting portrayal of the social issue of bullying and violence in schools, a topic that has become increasingly visible on Chinese social media in recent years. The play begins with the bully’s murder before immediately flashing back to an earlier, much more pleasant scene: three girls share an umbrella and get milk tea together after school, the kind of shared experience that has formed the foundation of many a friendship.
A scene from Yang Zhefen’s play Fade Away (photo courtesy 喆·艺术工作室 Zart Studio)
When the bullying begins, it starts small, with cruel words and a pin placed on a chair — but it escalates dramatically from there. The climax of the play is brutal to behold: one girl, suspected of having told a teacher about the pin on the chair, is set upon by three others, slapped around, burned with cigarettes, and, finally, stripped to her underwear and raped with an umbrella.
One would like to think that portraying something so gruesome took some creative license, but as recently as the second week of 2019, an 8-year-old girl in northwestern Gansu province was beaten up and violated with a broomstick by two of her classmates. (Yang’s play premiered in 2017 in Wuzhen, where it won the grand prize at the festival’s annual competition for young playwrights.)
Chinese netizens were understandably furious about the incident in Gansu, but this was one of countless such stories in the media. News outlets can only cover a fraction of such stories, and the public can only read about so many of them. How many times do we scroll past headlines like this in our own social media feeds? Addressing such an immense social issue is no small feat, and it’s easy to ignore the exact nature of the details in favor of retaining only a basic understanding of the fact that the social issue exists.
Playwright Yang Zhefen, center (photo courtesy 喆·艺术工作室 Zart Studio)
This is precisely why Yang did not shy from depicting the full extent of the bullying onstage. Asked why it’s important to put such graphic violence before the eyes of the audience, she replied: “People whose lives are under the light maybe never know, after all, just how dark those dark places are…. [I]n a certain corner of the world you don’t know, an incident of school bullying is happening ten or a hundred times crueler than what was in the play.”
Yang’s inspiration to write and direct the play was derived in part from an incident from her college years. Noticing a dorm room ajar one morning, she knocked to check if someone was inside, and was greeted with the grim sight of an underclassman lying in bed wearing a nightgown with bloodstains in the buttocks area. Yang says she was stupefied by the sight, and that the memory is still shocking. “I basically couldn’t distinguish her facial features, her whole head was so swollen… I think her tears were not able to flow out, just seep out of the cracks.”
In the aftermath, it came out that four other girls had ganged up on her the night before, because one of the perpetrators suspected that the victim was trying to seduce her boyfriend. The event was, briefly, a sensation at the school, but in the end nothing happened — the school recorded the incident, but did not punish the attackers, and even allowed them to continue living in the dorms.
Yet despite her horror and indignation at that incident, within the context of the play Yang treats the bullying characters almost tenderly, showing flashes of their home lives, as well as that of the eventual victim. All of these characters’ situations are marred in some way by mental or physical abuse at the hands of their own mothers.
In a stroke of brilliance, the same actresses who play the schoolgirls also play each other’s mothers. As painful as it is to witness the trauma of their home lives, there is a quality of sweetness in the way Yang attempts to direct the audience’s attention to the cyclical nature of pain. We all hurt each other, she seems to say — parents hurt children, who hurt other children, who are also being hurt by their parents. Those children later become parents who hurt their own children.
So, where does it end?
The opening scene of Fade Away depicts the victim murdering the main bully in the street — the rest is a flashback. This, too is strategic: had the play ended with a murder, there may have been some indication that this was a note of finality, a tragic heroine reclaiming her honor. What the audience gets instead, right before the lights shut off, is the victim alone onstage, bloodied face turned up and staring into the audience’s souls, pleading, accusing: “Why didn’t you save me? Why didn’t any of you save me? Why didn’t anyone come and save me? Why didn’t anyone come and save me…”
With an uncomfortable prickle, the audience begins to understand that they are, in a sense, complicit in the crime.
In case any audience member insists on denial of this parallel, the bullies are written to be involved to different degrees. There is one clear instigator, one who is relatively willing to help, and one who seems reluctant. Yang says the last was the most difficult character to write. Speaking to the police after the primary bully’s murder, this last girl insists in a panic that she did not participate in the attack, stating truthfully that she neither struck the victim nor touched the umbrella that was the final instrument of harm.
But according to Yang, this character is “the embodiment of not being self-aware.” Handed a phone, she films the initial beating; when ordered to grab one of the girl’s legs in preparation for the rape, she hesitates, but does it anyway, perhaps fearing retribution if she does not assist.
A comparison is drawn, then, between sitting and watching this spectacle within a play and the willful ignorance within our daily lives of the frequency and brutality of such spectacles. Silence and reluctance are complacency, and complacency allows the pain and the violence to continue.
As she falls silent in turn, the other actors file onto the stage and face the audience. Behind them, a montage of dozens of Chinese videos depicting youths being beaten, harassed, and bullied by their peers begins to play, clips all culled from social media and news reports. With a shock, the audience begins to realize exactly how real the events just witnessed on stage truly are. (A simple search of relevant keywords on Baidu or Weibo will indeed yield hundreds of thousands of articles.)
A scene from Yang Zhefen’s play Fade Away (photo courtesy 喆·艺术工作室 Zart Studio)
It would be easy for such a work to come across as preachy or pushy, but Yang and her actresses managed to avoid that tone. It is enough to have left an impression. It is enough that those under the light may now have seen even a fraction of the darkness, and it is enough to know that they will not forget it. Yang’s only real hope for the audience is that if they are faced with such a thing in the future, next time they will not simply overlook it. “Drama may not change society,” she says, “but within the scope of my ability, let more people see my work, let people think, let them be touched; this is what I am able to do.”
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Cover photo: a scene from Yang Zhefen’s play Fade Away (photo courtesy 喆·艺术工作室 Zart Studio)
Yin (音, “music”) is a weekly RADII feature that looks at Chinese songs spanning hip hop to folk to modern experimental, and everything in between. Drop us a line if you have a suggestion.
Just ahead of a trip to Austin, TX for this year’s South by Southwest, the band has released “Jane Pain,” a new single + music video that both inflicts and diagnoses acute existential nausea:
A band that likes a good textual accompaniment (Unnatural Objects’ liner notes were an entire book), David Boring has this to say about the blistering new single:
Jane Pain serves as a confessional/ investigative piece representing the banal tragedy familiar to many — the development of a destructive coping mechanism as a response to a profound existential anxiety, and the unwitting succumbence to a repressed existence. The title “Jane Pain” is a reference to two existing entities which both happened to be full names : 1) Jane Doe – a term often used to refer to a hypothetical “everyman”, or a corpse whose identity is unknown or unconfirmed, and 2) A female counterpart to Brian Emo — another character study appeared in “Unnatural Objects and Their Humans”. […]
The video can be read in two-folds; 1) A found footage, murder mystery style tale on revenge/ cause and effect 2) The setting and plot development serve as an allegory to the protagonist’s mental state – a tribute to Gothic literature*(1). The video also celebrates the unsettling beauty of the macabre, the complex apprehension of the depraved, the joys of extreme (repressed) emotions, the indulgence of fearfulness, and an appreciation for atmosphere. In line with the band’s established philosophy and aesthetics, the song aims to invoke emotions that are not commonly desirable, as a mean to commence the thrills and awe inherent in the sublime.
*(1) One of Gothic literature’s key features is the psychological trappings in relation to the setting, e.g. if a character was in a maze-like mansion, a connection was made to the maze that represents their minds
Follow the band’s next moves via Facebook or Bandcamp, and if you’re around Austin next week be sure to catch them WED 3/13, 11pm @ Valhalla (710 Red River), THU 3/14, 8pm @ Dirty Dog Bar (505 E 6th), and SUN 3/17 @ Big Easy (1806 E 12th), where they’ll play back to back with the also great Beijing band 工工工.
What if there was more to see on the surface of the body than just skin?
Enter the Bronze Man, a thousand-year old medical teaching tool. Unlike the anatomical models made of interlocking plastic organs you might encounter in biology class, the most important part of the Bronze Man isn’t hidden beneath his exterior.
It’s the complicated map of intersecting channels called meridians (or jingluo, 经络) and points (often called “acupoints”) engraved on the surface.
While the jingluo channels may not readily integrate with the biomedical view of the body, in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) they provide a crucial network for understanding physiology and organizing treatment.
According to TCM theory, these channels traverse the entire body, from head to toe. They provide pathways along which qi and blood flow between the inner organs, muscles, and skin, interlinking body parts into a living system and creating unique opportunities for clinical treatment.
Chinese medicine physicians can insert needles, massage the flesh, or burn dried herbs (or moxa) at strategically chosen points along these channels in order to treat disease. This is where we get practices like acupuncture, acupressure, therapeutic massage and moxibustion, which act on the principles of these meridians.
Since each acupoint is a node within a wider network, the therapeutic effects of a single acupuncture needle, for instance, can extend throughout the whole body. Often this aims to improve the flow of qi and blood through a channel, or cause a dysfunctional inner organ that lies along that channel’s path to react.
Twelve channels form the central highways of the meridian system. Their names use the classical Chinese concepts of yin and yang to clarify the location and direction of their flow, as well as the organ system to which each corresponds.
For example, there’s a “Lung Channel of the Hand” and a “Liver Channel of the Foot” — we’ll explain the “hand” and “foot” part later.
Yin channels run on the insides of the limbs, while yang channels run on the outsides.
Each yin channel is linked to one of the five zang organ systems — the Heart, Liver, Spleen, Lung, and Kidney — the primary sites of physiological function.
Meanwhile each yang channel is connected to one of the six fu organ systems, which primarily participate in digestion and circulating fluids.
Physicians divide the yin and yang channels further into channels of the foot and of the hand, adding up to a total of four sets.
The three yin channels of the hand travel from the inner organs to the hand, where they intermingle with the three yang channels of the hand (which run from the hand to the head).
On the head and face, these channels flow together with the three yang channels of the foot, which run from the head to the foot. Finally, the three yin channels of the foot pick up at the feet and flow back into the abdomen. From a distance, with arms outstretched, the body might resemble a sort of bisected arrow shape, wrapped in meridians from top to trunk to toe.
The Bronze Man trained Imperial-era clinicians how to apply their knowledge of these flow patterns in clinical practice. By puncturing the Bronze Man with the correct series of needles, students of acupuncture could direct the flow of water through his body. Eventually, they’d call on the same skills to guide qi and blood through a living one.
The contrast between the Bronze Man and biomedical teaching models reflects broader differences between ways of thinking about the body. It’s hard to precisely locate acupoints within the biomedical body, and their complex circuits don’t necessarily correspond to the circulatory system or nervous system.
Some Chinese medicine physicians even claim that searching for these channels the anatomist’s way — through cadaver dissection — is doomed from the start: qi only flows through living bodies and dissipates at the moment of death.
Instead, for physicians and practitioners, confirmation of the channels’ existence lies in the effectiveness of the treatment methods that act upon them.
