Tag Archives: China

A Chinese Burn

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Terror-in-ResonancePosted on the BBC website on April Fool’s Day, and hence not attracting any attention until it turned out to be serious, was the news that China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television had declared war on “borderline pornographic” Japanese cartoons such as Blood C, Highschool of the Dead, and Terror in Resonance. SAPPRFT promises to draw up a blacklist of proscribed Japanese cartoons, all the more to save Chinese streaming sites the trouble of licensing them.

Even in China, the news was greeted with a degree of hilarity. SAPPRFT, after all, was the same body that tried to ban time travel (fortunately only on TV, my time machine is still legal). But as the Qianzhen news site in south China pointed out, SAPPRFT was making the perennial error that has dogged anime all over the world for the last 30 years, confusing cartoons for adults with cartoons for children, and then making the false assumption that children would be watching them.

It’s Japan that’s really in SAPPRFT’s sights. Anime was dragged off-air in China in 2006, where it was proving far too popular. Anime continued to sneak in on video, since apparently Ghibli films didn’t count as evil cartoons. Then, a survey in 2008 concluded that 75% of Chinese undergraduates were watching anime on their computers. Television might have been stamped out, but anime continued to find an audience in pirate editions and on streaming sites. And consider that percentage for a moment: China generates seven million graduates every year – that’s a big audience.

Streaming sites didn’t count as television, so now they are on the hit list, not the least because of the titles listed in the SAPPRFT press release, only Terror in Resonance appears to have any legal presence in the People’s Republic – it’s got bombs going off in Tokyo, sure to entertain the kids. As for Blood C and Highschool of the Dead, both were released in Hong Kong and Taiwan – in other words, they are sneaking in across the border, unhelpfully subtitled in Chinese by the running dogs of capitalism. Long-term readers may remember a similarly absurd situation a few years ago, when Death Note was “banned” in northeast China, despite not actually being legally available there in the first place.

What’s going to happen? Nothing. Servers at Chinese universities will continue to host terabytes of torrented foreign media. Chinese fans will continue to watch anime on their computers, just now without paying a penny to Japan. And distributors everywhere are doing cartwheels at the thought of being able to say that their anime titles are now “banned in China.” Nothing will bump up audiences more than the idea that the cartoon they’re watching can excite such ire.

One wonders, however, if SAPPRFT has bothered to check the credits on Highschool of the Dead and Blood C, which feature listings for companies such as Xuyang and Xing Yue Animation, both based in Jiangsu province. That’s right: the horrible foreign cartoons that SAPPRFT is targeting were partly made in China.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History (UK/US). This article first appeared in NEO #137, 2015.

[Time travel footnote: and here’s me in the LA Times, explaining why Attack on Titan qualifies as “pornographic”]

The Troubled Empire

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61YMFqnan3L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_I have long been a fan of the Harvard History of Imperial China collection, but series editor Timothy Brook has presented a star turn in awarding himself the Yuan and Ming dynasties. With deliberate and playful provocation, he lumps these two later periods together, instead of following in the footsteps of most other researchers, who usually cover the Mongol century of the Yuan as an addendum to the fore-running Song dynasty.

His reason for this is climatic – Brook identifies nine distinct periods of drought, flood, pestilence and famine, each of which constitutes a “slough” in fortune that sorely tests the imperial regime’s ability to manage its state. In fact, he collates the Yuan and Ming because, between them, they span the period that we now know to have constituted the Little Ice Age.

But Brook also displays winning originality in his choice of sources. He begins and ends with gripping accounts of sightings of “dragons”, triangulating this catch-all term for water-spouts, comets, tornadoes and earthquakes with his new-found data on climate change and natural disaster. He also maintains this thread throughout the book, returning to insightful new views of big data, such as the fluctuating number of Ming-era paintings that depicted snowy scenes.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the Yuan and Ming dynasties had been well and truly picked over. With strong grounding in untranslated sources, and intriguing new uses for old materials (do you know the 16th-century Chinese word for a sailor’s gay husband? “Rice-paddy” over “woman” if you ever need it.), Brook excellently demonstrates that history remains an ongoing and evolving practice, and that there is always something new to say.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, and biographies of Marco Polo and Khubilai Khan.

A Brief History of Khubilai Khan

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kkNow finally available on the Kindle (US/UK):

His grandfather was the bloodthirsty Mongol leader Genghis Khan, his mother a Christian princess. Groomed from childhood for a position of authority, Khubilai snatched the position of Great Khan, becoming the overlord of a Mongol federation that stretched from the Balkans to the Korean coastline. His armies conquered the Asian kingdom of Dali and brought down the last defenders of imperial China.

Khubilai Khan presided over an Asian renaissance, attracting emissaries from all across the continent, and opening his civil service to administrators from the far west. His life and times encompassed the legends of Prester John, the pinnacle of the samurai (and, indeed, the Mongols), and the travels of Marco Polo.

Jonathan Clements examines the life and times of this semi-legendary ruler, detailing the religious scandals and cultural clashes within his supposedly inclusive realm, and the long-running resistance to his reign in Japan and Vietnam. His short-lived “Yuan” dynasty barely lasted a century, but transformed China and the world for ever more.

The First Emperor of China

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71FSUWtb1GLIn 1974, Chinese peasants made the discovery of the century… Thousands of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of a tyrant.

Ying Zheng was born to rule the world, claiming descent from gods, crowned king while still a child. He was the product of a heartless, brutal regime devoted to domination, groomed from an early age to become the First Emperor of China after a century of scheming by his ancestors. He faked a foreign threat to justify an invasion. He ruled a nation under 24-hour surveillance. He ordered his interrogators to torture suspects. He boiled his critics alive. He buried dissenting scholars. He declared war on death itself.

Jonathan Clements uses modern archaeology and ancient texts to outline the First Emperor’s career and the grand schemes that followed unification: the Great Wall that guarded his frontiers and the famous Terracotta Army that watches over his tomb.

Published in 2015, this revised edition includes updates from a further decade of publications, archaeology and fictional adaptations, plus the author’s encounter with Yang Zhifa, the man who discovered the Terracotta Army.

Available now in paperback (US/UK) and on the Kindle (US/UK).

Collectable

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collector's libraryIt’s not abundantly clear from the cover, but the hardback, gilt-edged Collector’s Library edition of Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a new edition of my earlier paperback translation. It’s a very portable pocket size, and does look very posh, particularly after you throw away the horrible dust jacket. See here for details of why the world needs another version of Sun Tzu, and here for my thoughts on performance.

It’s out now in the UK and in the US.

Inside the Shadow Factory

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Jonathan Clements investigates the continuing fascination Chinese filmmakers feel for both the First Emperor and the man who tried to kill him.

It was a messy, scrappy struggle in a chilly hall, lasting less than a minute. A suicidal assassin pulled a knife out of nowhere and chased the ruler of the Qin dynasty around his throne. Bodyguards watched in frustration, forbidden on pain of death from mounting the steps to protect their leader. The court physician distracted the assassin by hurling his medicine kit at him, and when the man ducked, his would-be victim was finally able to tug his own long ceremonial sword from its scabbard. The murder attempt was over scant seconds later, as the attacker died under a rain of blows from the man who was supposed to have been his victim.

The incident changed history. Now, nothing stood in the way of the man who would become the First Emperor. The would-be killer, Jing Ke, had been the very last man who stood a chance of getting close enough to kill the power-hungry ruler. His failure to do so was a crucial event in the birth of the nation we now call China, and has been dramatised on countless occasions, not the least on film. Continue reading →

China’s Cleopatra

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24999580The Indonesian edition of my biography of Empress Wu has just been published, with a racy new title and an even racier new cover.

“Dalam kisah nyata yang sensasional ini, Jonathan Clements menuturkan kisah kelam dan dramatis satu-satunya kaisar perempuan dalam sejarah China, Wu Zetian: selir, manipulator, politikus, pembunuh, dan titisan dewi. Inilah kisah Cleopatra dari China; kisah tentang pembunuhan, seks, cinta, kekuasaan, dan pembalasan dendam…” or “In this sensational true story, Jonathan Clements tells the dramatic tale of the dark and only female emperor in Chinese history, Wu Zetian: concubine, manipulator, politician, murderer, and incarnation of a goddess. This is the story of China’s Cleopatra — a tale of murder, sex, love, power, and revenge…” In your face, Game of Thrones. For the English original, recently reissued on paperback and the Kindle by Albert Bridge Books, see here in the UK or here in the US.

Undercover Manga

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shimajiro appI’ve been wondering for a while when the Doraemon bomb was going to go off. Every time I’ve been to China in the last three years, amid ever-escalating sabre-rattling over the Senkaku Islands, I have found the locals avidly denying any interest in Japanese culture. I have found media students unprepared to work on papers about anime, for fear that the word “Japan” will be on their resumé ever more. And I have watched, every day, as two Japanese invaders march in right under Chinese noses.

One is Shimajiro, an infant tiger cub who appears in a hybrid kids’ show that is part anime, part live-action play school. I’ve watched Shimajiro sing songs about London Bridge and demonstrate how to go to the toilet, and nobody has noticed that he’s really Japanese, because the broadcasters have stripped out the original live-action framing footage and replaced it with Chinese people. Also, they don’t make the mistake of calling him Shimajiro, either. In China, he is known as Qiao Hu Dao, the “brave and clever tiger.”

doraemonThe other is Doraemon, that time-travelling blue robot cat who recently enjoyed the surprising honour of a 12,000-page manga translation funded by Japanese government boondoggle money. Doraemon remains a popular movie and TV figure with anime audiences, but was also the subject of so much manga piracy in decades past that he is known by several different names in the Chinese world. My favourite is Ding Dang the Robot Cat (ding-dang, you see, being Mandarin for ding-dong, if you ever need it). He’s even the subject of an exhibition in Hong Kong, which trilled, unwisely, about his true origins.

The Japanese authorities, excited at the amount of love for Ding Dang all over the mainland, have made Doraemon a cultural ambassador, thereby pushing their soft power agenda by showing the Chinese that a perennial favourite was actually from the other side of the water. This has entertainingly backfired, with a schmuck-bait editorial in the Chengdu Daily pointing out the blindingly obvious – that Doraemon was an effort to make Japan look cute and less threatening – and several lesser newspapers getting increasingly irate about the idea, with the Global Times frothing “we must never let a little robotic cat take control of our minds.” Top tip.

This article first appeared in NEO 131, 2014. Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History, in shops now (UK/US).