This week’s episode looks at a Tang Dynasty Poem that cost Meituan Dianping, one of China’s unicorn internet companies, 26 Billion dollars off its market capitalization. In this episode, we take a look at the Zhang Jie’s “Book Burning Pit” and explore the full story behind the poem that the media is not explaining. Here […]
Today, the Chinese Literature Podcast asks the ultimate geopolitical question: Is Taiwan Chinese? Actually, we are looking at a book titled Is Taiwan Chinese, an anthropological study by Melissa Brown that examines how identity, Chineseness and ethnicity are constituted on both sides of the Taiwan Straits…that is just a fancy way of saying that identity is […]
Today, we take a look at one of the more interesting works of literary analysis to come out on left-leaning literature in 20th Century China. Roy Bing Chan has done close readings of dreams in the works of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and writers from the PRC.
There’s one decade, and one decade only, where we both agree, and this is it. Debate’s more fun, but really? It’s awfully hard to argue about Zhang Ailing.
Ng Kim Chew’s magnificent fiction is the last entry in our series, and I think you’ll agree we saved the best for last. He grapples with the kind of questions only those in the Chinese diaspora can truly ask, the most important of which is: what does it mean to be Chinese when we don’t […]
World traveler. Friend of Sahrawi freedom fighters. Ambassador for Chinese culture in northern Africa. San Mao had the kind of life that few of her time, or any other, have had. Not surprisingly, she’s still one of the most popular writers in the Chinese language, decades after her death.
We’re kicking off a multi-part series on works that discuss China, or use Chinese, but are not written in China. Our first installment is Hu Chunxiang (Hồ Xuân Hương), a Vietnamese woman who wrote in Tang regulated verse during the late 18th and early 19th century.
Song Dynasty Children’s literature + Communist propaganda + global pandemic = today’s discussion. Last week, we talked about the Three Character Classic (三字經). It is a work of probably Song Dynasty children’s literature that functioned as many young Chinese children’s first Confucian text to memorize. The book is written with three Chinese characters in each […]
The 三字經, usually translated as the Three Character Classic, is a fascinating text because it functions like a “my first Confucian text.” Children were given this text when they were quite young and asked to memorize the book, teaching them moral lessons that would prepare them to master the real Confucian classics later in life. […]
This podcast we take a look at a story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate. Here is the […]