Cui Weiping

Cui Weiping (1956-), a native of Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, is a scholar and translator.

Cui was born into a family of local CCP cadres. Her parents were sent to the May Seventh Cadre School during the Cultural Revolution, and she was sent down to the countryside with her parents. After graduating from high school in 1974, Cui once again went to the countryside as a sent-down youth for three years, growing cotton in Sheyang County in Jiangsu Province. Reflecting on lessons learned from that era, : “First, the truth is buried in the ground and is not popular. People need to hold on to the truth, and doing that requires perseverance. Secondly, this country has traveled a very crooked path, especially in terms of ideas. Many of the things that were once held up as the norm are just absurd, but they have profoundly affected our way of thinking, and require constant reflection in order to be purged.”

As one of the first batch of university students admitted after the Cultural Revolution, she studied at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Nanjing University from 1978 to 1984, where she received a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature and an M.A. in Literature and Art. In 1984, she was assigned to teach at the Beijing Film Academy, and was promoted as a professor in 1999, before retiring in 2011.

Her main fields of research are film and literary theory, as well as contemporary Chinese avant-garde literature. In 1993, she came across a book by Václav Havel, and since then her research interest has extended to political philosophy, especially contemporary Eastern European thought and culture. She was the earliest translator and introducer of the works of Havel and the Polish thinker Adam Michnik in mainland China, and has translated Collected Works of Václav Havel and Towards a Civil Society, among others. She has also written many books, including Dawn with Wounds (1998), The Immortal Haizi:A Collection of Commentaries on Haizi (1999), I've Seen Beautiful Sights, (2000), Active Life (2003), Before Justice (2005), Narratives of Our Time ( (2008), Ideas and Nostalgia (2010), and Charming Lies (2012).

In March 1999, Cui published an article entitled “Criticism, for What Purpose?” in which she invited readers to think about “why Havel criticized totalitarianism, and what exactly the purpose of our criticism is.” She sees this article as a starting point of her role as a social critic. , “The reason for emphasizing why we do what we do, why we criticize and resist, rather than simply criticizing and resisting ...... is that we want to avoid repeating mistakes made by our predecessors. Established way of thinking is more stubborn than people think. It will be around for a long time even after that kind of ultra-left history is over, and it may still be held up by the new generation of people who criticize and resist.”

Inspired by Hannah Arendt's call for active participation in the public realm and facilitated by the rise of the Internet, Cui began to actively publish social commentaries online. , “I write to bring the hidden under the bright light.” Like Havel, she writes “to make the unseen seen and the unheard heard.” In 2010, she was named one of the Top Ten Public Intellectuals of the Year by The Time Weekly, a Guangzhou-based newspaper.

Cui has been actively speaking out on public affairs for many years, committing to her social responsibility as a public intellectual. She signed Charter 08 in 2008, and went to Prague in 2009, along with Xu Youyu (see separate entry) and lawyer Mo Shaoping, to receive the "Homo Homini" Award, a human rights prize, on behalf of one of the chief drafters of Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo, and the document’s signatories.