ChinaRhyming - June 1 2024 - From Lady Artists to Narcotopia & Plenty In-between
Two forgotten artists of inter-war China, Narcotopia comes to leafy Richmond!, How China got "invented", the endless shelf of Xi, forthcoming novels from China, Socialism is Great!
Two Lady Artists in Peking - Now on the SCMP Website
They have faded from view now, but Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mullikin were intrepid a pair of north China resident artists who documented China in paintings before World War II tore them apart. Read my story on their lives and work plus a host of examples of their paintings at the South China Morning Post online here…
Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA on June 8th, 7pm, Books on the Rise, Richmond
Join Books on the Rise on London’s Richmond Hill for a fascinating talk with Paul French in conversation with Patrick Winn on his new book Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA on June 8th, 7pm.
The jagged mountains dividing China and Burma belong to the Wa, an indigenous group who have outwitted the CIA to create the world’s mightiest narco-state, controlling more territory than Israel and with more troops than Sweden. Are they crime lords? Or visionaries?
Wa State has become a real nation with its own highways, anthems, schools and flags. Its leaders promise freedom, using profits from trafficking heroin and meth to attain what China’s other frontier peoples, Tibetans and Uyghurs, can only dream of: a state of their own. Patrick Winn embarks on a risky journey of discovery, chasing clues about the forbidden republic from Thailand to Burma to the secretive Wa State itself.
Patrick Winn is an award-winning investigative journalist. He mostly covers rebellion and black markets in Southeast Asia.
Tickets and more details here
The Invention of China - All Episodes Now on BBC Sounds
Just a little reminder that if you missed the BBC Radio 4 four part series The Invention of China with Misha Glenny and Miles Warde it’s all available now on the BBC Sounds app or the BBC Radio Listen Again website (both internationally accessible I think). The show ranges from the First Emperor to the current one, Mr Xi. Talking heads include me as well as Tania Branigan, Frances Wood, Jonathan Fenby, Nathan Law, Henrietta Harrison, Steve Tsang, Linda Jaivin….
The Invention of China - in which Misha Glenny (above) reveals himself to be a keen student of China but a bit of a fussy eater….
Telling China’s Stories Better - China Media Project
An interesting article on the state of Chinese publishing overseas from the China Media Project, with a few quotes from, among others, me… click here (and do subscribe to the CMP’s substack - Lingua Sinica).
#50 on the Sinica Ultimate China Bookshelf….. Lijia Zhang’s Socialism is Great
Socialism Is Great! is an autobiography recounting Lijia Zhang's own life journey from disillusioned Nanjing factory worker to organizer in support of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, to a writer and journalist based in the UK. Her story spans the immediate Cultural Revolution era and the jolting onset of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up period. Read it all here on the Sinica substack…
Available Everywhere Now
The latest in my Bloomsbury Asian Arguments series….(including here on bookshop.org and here directly from Bloomsbury)
Juli Min's The Shanghailanders - Shanghai Launch - June 11, Garden Books, Shanghai
Juli Min will speak about her dazzling and ambitious debut novel, Shanghailanders, that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years. Register here….
And Finally…Another Little Competition…. Shanghai….
A signed copy of my book Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books), a collection of 18 essays on the city from Eugene O’Neill’s Shanghai breakdown to Langston Hughes’s summer nights in the Canidrome, will wing its way to you. All you need to do is tell me which novel the two excerpts below come from?
FYI
Details of my next book - Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson here
Remember I still blog at www.chinarhyming.com
I also still post a lot of images on my Instagram feed - @oldhshanghaipaul
And, all the books noted above are available from my Bookshop.org page - an online bookstore funding independent bookstores