Bollettino 26 ottobre 2022
Atlas Sinensis
POLITICA - POLITICS
Politics will determine China’s economic future during Xi’s third term (Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Foreign Affairs)
Xi Jinping received a rare third term as head of the Chinese Communist Party and elevated his loyalists to its top leadership body. Here’s what that means for China’s economy.
Hope US will comprehensively, accurately receive signals from 20th CPC National Congress (Global Times editorial)
After the conclusion of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the outside world is highly concerned about the direction of China-US relations. The White House and the Department of State said that they will continue to "responsibly manage the competition with China," seek cooperation in areas where interests are aligned, and keep lines of communication open. If this is Washington's "standard messages," then some US political elites and public opinion are revealing a more realistic mind-set toward China. They clamor that they need to prepare for a "China prepared for conflict with the US," thus playing up the tensions of the China-US confrontation.
China to make greater contributions to human progress (He Yin, People’s Daily)
The report delivered by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, on behalf of the 19th CPC Central Committee, to the 20th CPC National Congress, is seen by the international community as sign of China keeping pursuing its dreams and win-win cooperation with the rest of the world.
ECONOMIA - ECONOMY
China’s economy: dragon in turbulence (Pushan Dutt, Insead)
Anaemic growth and a crippling economic war with the United States weigh on Xi Jinping even as he cements his position as China’s most powerful leader since Mao.
China’s economy slows in october as business confidence slumps (Bloomberg news)
China’s economy slowed in October as car and real-estate sales weakened and global trade and small business confidence contracted, signaling last month’s pickup in activity wasn’t enough to change the country’s grim economic picture.
Yuan in crollo sul dollaro, cosa sta succedendo in Cina (QuiFinanza)
Numeri allarmanti per la valuta cinese, mai così in perdita negli ultimi 15 anni dopo le mosse "conservative" del presidente Xi Jinping.
ATTUALITÀ -CURRENT AFFAIRS
China using illegal police bases in Netherland to target dissidents, say report (Jon Henley, The Guardian)
Dutch government investigating ‘undeclared’ stations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, claimed to be part of global network.
Regno Unito: Sunak lancia il primo avvertimento alla Cina, messi al bando gli Istituti Confucio (Agenzia Nova)
Presenti in molte università in tutto il Regno Unito, gli istituti diffondono la conoscenza del mandarino ma, secondo l'intelligence britannica, servono anche da copertura alle attività del Partito comunista cinese.
Hong Kong Catholic media mogul Jimmy Lai also convicted of fraud (AsiaNews)
Jailed almost two years ago, the pro-democracy activist was tried for violating the terms of lease. On 1 December, he is set go on trial for threatening national security and sedition. Tomorrow Card Joseph Zen’s trial enters its final phase.
CRISTIANESIMO - CHRISTIANITY
We Continue to Develop Christianity in the Chinese Context: Chairman of CCC&TSPM (John Zhang, China Christian Daily)
In the ninth issue of “China Religion” in 2022, Xu Xiaohong, chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), wrote an article "Ten Years of Sharpening a Sword: Continue to Deepen and Realize the Sinicization of Christianity", which was also released on October 3 by the WeChat account of SARA (China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs). Xu mentioned that the term “Sinicization of Christianity” in the writings of Tsu Chen Chao (a Protestant theologian) and Timothy Ting-fang Liu (a Protestant educator), was more viewed from the standpoint of missionary and apologetics. Registered Churches Start to Self-Build Website or APP as Religious Regulations Required
Registered Churches start to self-build website or app as religious regulations required (Anthony Li, China Christian Daily)
A large percentage of Chinese TSPM churches start to build their own website or application, as China’s new religious information law required.
La Cina ai Cinesi: padre Vincent Lebbe, 1877-1940 (Aurelio Porfiri, Oltre il giardino)
L’impulso di indigenizzare le comunità cristiane in terra di missione, diede impulso a vari tentativi di difendere i diritti del clero locale rispetto a quello che alcuni interpretavano come strapotere di alcuni missionari. Questo fu vero anche per la Cina, anzi essa fu strumentale per un certo cambiamento di mentalità che culminerà con la Maximum illud di Benedetto XV nel 1919. Già nel XIX secolo alcuni missionari avevano parlato in questo senso, pensiamo al lazzarista Joseph Gabet (1808-1853) che fortemente si era battuto per i diritti del clero locale. Ma il nome più noto in questo senso sarà quello del lazzarista belga Vincent Lebbe.
The Chinese Christians fighting for Hong Kong (Tim Scheiderer, Providence Magazine)
Why do Christians fight for freedom in Hong Kong? Why do many lead the charge?
New name for justice and peace commission reflects changing times (Sunday Examiner)
Bishop John Baptist Wu Cheng-Chung, with a view to putting into practice the Vatican II teaching on promoting integral human development, set up the Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission in 1977. It aimed to help the marginalised in society, such as the fishermen’s wives and the mothers of children born in Hong Kong who had no right of abode, and to speak for those whose voices were not heard, thereby helping the Church to play her rôle as servant and prophet. Discerning the new signs of the times, the diocese has decided to change, at the end of this year, the name of the commission to Diocesan Commission for Integral Human Development, in order to reflect its broadened scope of services in response to the new needs of society and evangelization.
At symposium, experts say mutual understanding between China and the world is of critical importance (Marco Carvalho, O Clarim)
The Ricci Institute’s annual symposium began on Thursday with a panel that debated the contribution of Confucianism to the cultural dialogue. The roundtable discussion included contributions from Thierry Meynard, a professor at the philosophy department of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Anna Mahajar Barducci, researcher at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington, and Edmond Eh and Cristina Lu, scholars at the University of Saint Joseph.
CINEMA
Hit film Return to Dust has vanished from China’s cinemas. Why? (Danny Leigh, Financial Times)
Li Ruijun’s unexpectedly popular rural drama has fallen from favour as the Communist party’s grip on culture tightens.
LIBRI E RIVISTE - BOOKS AND MAGAZINES
Fitzgerald, J. (2022). Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804779319
This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China “woke up” in this century. The book follows the legend of China’s awakening from its origins in the European imagination, to its transmission to China and its encounters with a lyrical Chinese tradition of ethical awakening, to its incorporation and mobilization in a mass movement designed to wake up everyone. Fiction and fashion, architecture and autobiography, take their places alongside politics and history, and the reader is asked to move about among writers, philosophers, ethnographers, revolutionaries, and soldiers who would seem to have little in common. The book focuses on the Nationalist movement in south China, highlighting the role of Sun Yat-sen as director of awakenings in the Nationalist Revolution and the place of Mao Zedong as his successor in the politics of mass awakening. Of special interest is the previously untold story of Mao’s role in the Nationalist Propaganda Bureau, showing Mao as a master of propaganda and discipline, rather than as peasant movement activist.
Ownby, D. (2022). Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804764841
This study examines the emergence and evolution in China of a tradition of popular organization generally known under the rubric of “secret society.” The author suggests that the secret society is properly understood as one variety of the “brotherhood association,” a category that encompasses a range of popular fraternal organizations that flourished in the early and mid-Qing period. The book begins by describing the proliferation of brotherhood associations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in Southeast China. It concludes in the early nineteenth century, as the Qing suppression of the Lin Shuangwen rebellion in late 1780’s forced members of the best-known brotherhood association, the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui) to flee their homes in the Southeast, taking refuge in other parts of South China and Southeast Asia and, eventually, in Chinatowns throughout the world. This episode set the stage for the violent nineteenth-century confrontations between the Qing state and the secret societies.
Liff, A., & Lin, D. (2022). The “One China” Framework at 50 (1972–2022): The Myth of “Consensus” and Its Evolving Policy Significance. The China Quarterly, 1-24. doi:10.1017/S030574102200131X
This lead article surveys the history and evolving policy legacies of the “one China” framework 50 years after US President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China. It begins by introducing key concepts and highlighting the crucial difference between Beijing's self-defined “one-China principle” and the US's, Japan's and key other countries’ variable “one China” policies as it relates to Taiwan. It argues that three seminal 1970s developments consolidated the “one China” framework as an informal institution of international politics. The ambiguity baked in by Cold War-era geopolitical necessity provided flexibility sufficient to enable diplomatic breakthroughs between erstwhile adversaries, but also planted seeds for deepening contestation and frictions today. Recent developments – especially Taiwan's democratization and Beijing's increasingly bold and proactive assertion of its claim to sovereignty over Taiwan – have transformed incentive structures in Taipei and for its major international partners. The net effect is that the myth of “consensus” and the ambiguities enabling the framework's half-century of success face unprecedented challenges today.
本篇专节的首文回顾了尼克松 1972 年历史性访华 50 年后，“一个中国”框架的发展和政策遗产。它首先定义几个贯串专节的关键概念，重点强调了中华人民共和国政府主张的“一个中国原则”与美国、日本和其他主要国家的“一个中国”政策之间的关键区别。本文指出 1970 年代三个开创性的发展如何巩固了“一个中国”框架作为国际政治的非正式机制。“一个中国”框架内含的模糊性为昔日冷战对手之间的外交突破提供了足够的灵活性，但也为今日升高的竞争和摩擦埋下了种子。最终结果是，支撑该框架半个世纪成功的模糊性现正面临着前所未有的挑战。
Walravens, H. (2022). Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs. Deux cents ans de sinologie française en France et en Chine , by Pierre-Étienne Will et Michel Zink (eds.), T'oung Pao, 108(3-4), 550-557. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685322-10803010
It was a splendid idea to convene a symposium of experts to commemorate
the establishment of the world’s first chair of Chinese Studies in 1814 and the
subsequent development of sinology in France over the course of the past
two hundred years. This was a welcome opportunity to review the lives and
achievements of many scholars who taught mainly, but not exclusively, at Paris
institutions. The result of this critical survey is impressive: it proves the zeal of
the researchers and teachers, their ideas, their productivity, and their impact;
during the first 150 years French sinology was the leader in the Western world,
until this changed after ww ii when the United States took over, owing to the
war efforts and the immigration of scholars from many countries, especially
from China and Japan. There are already a number of valuable contributions
to the history of French sinology, but a veritable history is still on the wish list
for the future. The present volume does not purport to present such a complete
history but it offers major building blocks and a vast amount of information for
such a future project.