This is a collection of essays by Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. The title, inspired by Hannah Arendt, covers a wide range of fields from poetry and movies to politics and ethics, and tells the stories of fascinating people, the construction of their inner world and external lives. These people include Hai Zi, Wang Xiaobo, Arendt, Woolf, Beauvoir, Tarkovsky, Kremer, Herbert, Havel, and many others. Behind these seemingly unrelated names, there are hints of these two interdependent spiritual dimensions: on the one hand, the construction of the external world in which we live; on the other hand, the construction of our own inner world, which cannot be neglected. This book, published by Renmin University of China Press in 2003, has had a significant impact on the development of civil society in China.
This book is the memoir of Chinese economist's Yang Xiaokai. It tells the stories of more than two dozen characters he met while imprisoned in Changsha during the Cultural Revolution. Published in 1994, it was reprinted in 1997 and 2016. The English version is titled *Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution*, published by Stanford University Press in 1997.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Yang Xiaokai was a senior high school student at No. 1 Middle School in Changsha. On January 12, 1968, he published an article entitled "Where is China Going?" which systematically put forward the ideas of the "ultra-leftist" Red Guards, criticized the privileged bureaucratic class in China, and advocated for the establishment of a Chinese People's Commune based on the principles of the Paris Commune. Yang Xiaokai recalled that his parents were beaten because they sympathized with Liu Shaoqi's and Peng Dehuai's views, and that he was discriminated against at school and could not join the Red Guards. As a result, he joined the rebel faction to oppose the theory of descent. Yang Xiaokai was later sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for this article. Yang Xiaokai died in 2004. This article is a retrospective of his life.
Traveling Chinese history scholar Li Jianglin began working on the Tibet issue in 2004. She has traveled to India every year in search of Tibetan refugees, visited 14 Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal, contacted more than 200 exiled Tibetans from the three regions of Tibet, and personally interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in 2008. In 2010, Li Jianglin completed her book <i>Lhasa 1959!</i> by drawing on interviews, information searches, and rare historical photographs provided by the Tibetan government in exile, in the hope of reconstructing the little-known history of the Dalai Lama's departure from Tibet in 1959. The book was published by Taiwan's Lianjing Publishing House in 2010 and reprinted in 2016.
Around the eighth century A.D., the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Guru Rinpoche, prophesied, "When the iron bird flies in the sky and the iron horse runs on the earth, the Tibetans will be dispersed all over the world like ants, and the Buddha's Dharma will be spread into the land of the red people." More than 1,000 years later, in the middle of the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party drove the "iron bird" across the sky and rode the "iron horse" across the plateau. The Tibetans courageously rose up to resist resulting in with countless deaths countless deaths. Those who survived were forced to leave their homeland and live in exile in India, drifting around the world. Thus, the prophecy came true. From a military point of view, the Tibetan war in Tibet was a victory, but it received only minimal publicity. The official version of the Party's history is either vague or evasive about the bloody massacre during the entry into Tibet, attempting to cover it up by "suppressing armed rebellion" and "purging counter-revolutionaries". More than sixty years later, this war has yet to be demystified. Li Jianglin, an independent scholar, was moved by the tragedy of the war and the plight of the Tibetans, and endeavored to restore the historical facts. Since 2004, she has devoted herself to research, visiting hundreds of Tibetan elders, searching for tens of thousands of historical materials, collecting military archives, and comparing them with the official published materials of the Communist Party of China, in order to present memories of past, little by little.
The Xi’an-based videographer Zhang Shihe, or Tiger Temple, has been a fixture on the independent Chinese history scene for more than twenty years. In 2010, he began a thirty-part series of short interviews with leading Chinese thinkers called “Working Toward Civil Society,” in which he explores how China can build a true civil society. Some of those interviewed have now been silenced, passed away, or moved abroad, making the series itself a work of history.
In this episode, Zhang interviews one of China’s most thoughtful public thinkers, Cui Weiping. Cui is a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, and translator of Havel into Chinese. She was a signer of Charter 08, and friend of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Although the interview is only 8 minutes long, Cui touches on some of the key problems that continue to plague China: how to break free of overwhelming government control of civic life?
Note to English speakers: this interview only has Chinese subtitles. The CUA is working to add English subtitles to all of our video offerings so check back in a few months.