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Monday, July 30, 2018


Dear reader,

It’s been a week of worrying about China all over the globe, even in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai in the center of Beijing — if some reports are to be believed.

There have been ongoing protests about dodgy vaccines. Completely unsubstantiated and non-credible rumors of a coup in Beijing suddenly seem strange after the People’s Daily headlines its front page “Xi Jinping returns to Beijing.”

Sam Crane, a scholar of Chinese philosophy, religion, and politics, has been in Beijing for an annual visit. On Twitter, he confirmed a change of Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen: in the new version, the chairman’s face seems “unworldly, unreal, artificially-colored,” and “pretty creepy.” Sam recently wrote an essay about being back in China this year. He describes a “certain middle class satisfaction” about Beijing summer, but also notes a sense of unease:

Yet there is something different this year, an underlying anxiety that has not found its full political or social articulation.

And there are so many other stories that have surfaced over the last few days that pique the imagination:

  • Former self-styled Chief Commander of Cyberspace Lu Wei 鲁炜 has been found guilty of bribery (story in Chinese; SupChina report on his fall in February 2018).
  • On Twitter, I suddenly noticed several odd news stories about Chinese experts acting as observers or consultants to elections in Cambodia, South Africa, and Fiji.
tante character

All of the above somehow makes me think of the word tǎntè 忐忑, which means uneasy, disturbed, perturbed, and maybe even something like “gaslighted.” Look at the Chinese characters: a heart goes up, a heart goes down.

Tante is also the name of a Chinese pop folk song that Gong Linna 龚琳娜 popularized on the internet in China in 2011.

We’ll take a deeper look at all the above stories in our Monday newsletter for Access members. Please sign up here if you’d like to join Access — we’d love to have you on board.

Members also get live chat sessions with subject experts: the aforementioned Sam Crane, for instance, will be joining us next week at 12pm noon EST, August 8.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief

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