Dear patient reader,
My apologies for the long silence. I've had a lot of travel, and a bunch of life stuff, but I’m back. I think the subscription payments have been on hold but if they haven’t I’ll extend yours if you were charged—just email me back.
I am going to change the format of this, and return in spirit to my blogging roots for the next few weeks as I figure out exactly what the offering here is going to be, and it may just be blogging. Without further ado then, and in place of a summary of the news:
App Life in China
I went to China for a month in June, for the first time since the pandemic, and wrote up some thoughts for ChinaFile: App Life: Notes on a Long-Delayed Return to China (no paywall or registration). It’s a short travelogue that describes some of the ways China has changed in the last decade.
Based on social media reactions, I don’t think I emphasized enough how nice China is in so many ways, and what a delight it has become to travel there. The dystopian side is what readers seem to remember. One person really objected to my snark about American food culture.
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The real end of the naughty aughties
The era shift in China that I wrote about in App Life was epitomized by a news story that broke in late August: Hui Ka Yan (许家印 Xǔ Jiāyìn), the former billionaire chairman of Evergrande, once considered the most valuable real estate developer in the world and then the most indebted, was sentenced to life in prison for multiple financial crimes.
Hui was an emblem of the go-go reform years, with a billionaire lifestyle and a position on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which meets once a year to advise the government. A photograph of Hui swaggering about with a gold-buckled Hermès belt at the March 2012 meeting of the CPPCC went viral, as did photos of a number of other delegates wearing outrageously expensive brand name clothing. That was the last gasp of the go-go: On November 16 that year, Xi Jinping took charge, and there were no more Hermès logos at government meetings.
Someone who is still at liberty to wear brand name clothing is Desmond Shum (沈栋 Shěn Dòng), a former go-go years businessman who describes in his book, Red Roulette, flying from China to France with a group including Hui Ka Yan:
In June of 2011, we—four couples—departed for Paris.
We’d planned to travel in the three jets, but at the last minute, the other men decided they wanted to play cards. We still took the other two jets, they just followed empty.
Shum left China before he got in trouble. He is currently engaged in something of a Twitter feud with Bó Guāguā, who also left China before he got in trouble. Guagua is the son of Bó Xīlái 薄熙来, a charismatic Communist Party leader of the go-go years who is behind bars in China for corruption.
• Here’s an excellent profile of Hui Ka Yan at the start of his fall, by Chang Che.
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Hǎi 海, the ChinaFile project I am helping to produce, has published a number of good things recently:
“I had never read a book like this—about us—in either Chinese or English. It would not have passed censorship in China. Yet it’s nothing like the English-language literary fiction about China I’ve read in the past…” Shen Lu on M Lin’s The Memory Museum 记忆博物馆.
The fuss on the internet in China and the U.S. over Chinese a podcaster’s interview with Odyssey director Christopher Nolan, by Caiwei Chen.
The remaking of Shanghai’s Jifeng bookstore in Washington D.C., by Yangyang Chen.
A video explainer by Anna Kook, based on an article published by independent Chinese news outlet Mangmang: