Originally white icons recreated in white

More on the ‘Inflatable Wonders’ at Central waterfront… 

The team behind a Hong Kong art installation of inflatables that was mocked online for one of the exhibit’s resemblance to gravestones has defended its decisions on how to display the works.

…some internet users have joked that the white Stonehenge installation look like gravestones, while others took potshots at the green-lit Pyramids of Giza display, saying they resembled police tents used at crime scenes.

David Rule, managing director of Central Venue Management that organised the exhibition, called the comments “rather short-sighted”.

“I think that the artist’s intention was to create known icons from around the world and they were originally designed in white, so we recreated them in white.”

I don’t think I could put it more underwhelmingly.

Some weekend reading (much probably paywalled)…

Reuters on the impact of Beijing’s threatened death penalty for Taiwan ‘separatists’…

Wen-Ti Sung, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said the guidelines would force foreign companies to “either move their operations out entirely to keep Taiwanese talent or they stop hiring Taiwanese talent.”

That would mean that “even fewer Taiwanese will be working or living in China, thereby making Beijing’s attempts to win over their hearts and minds even harder,” Sung said.

China Media Project on another policy contradiction – Beijing’s attempts to stir nationalism while eliminating extreme xenophobia online…

In what Chinese state media portrayed as a full-scale effort to grapple with the problem of violent xenophobia, several platforms issued statements last week condemning the “extreme nationalist” comments users had left under news stories about the Suzhou attack. They included Weibo, Tencent, Phoenix Media, Baidu, and others. But this moment of supposed reflection ignored the deeper roots of extreme nationalism in the public discourse of the Chinese party-state, which for years has nurtured a sense of nationalist outrage over the imagined slights of foreign countries, including Japan in the United States, and has turned the blind eye to extreme nationalist sentiment online. 

Foreign Policy reviews At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning With China, by Edward Wong…

Wong presents the People’s Republic of China as the successor to the Qing empire and frames many of the leading controversies about China today as those of imperial periphery. These controversies include the genocide in Xinjiang, the occupation of Tibet, the imposition of authoritarianism on Hong Kong, and Beijing’s threats to take Taiwan by force.

…Modern scholarship in China presents the Manchu rulers as following in the footsteps of previous conquering barbarians, who soon assimilated with the majority Han and thus became “Chinese,” leaving little mark on the civilization they adopted.

But Wong presents the Manchus’ impact as substantial, even definitive, in creating China as we know it today. He outlines how the Manchus expanded China’s borders larger than ever before, establishing various forms of imperial oversight over vast swaths of territory from Manchuria in the north to the Central Asian Uyghur heartland in China’s far west to Tibet in the far southwest. “The Qing conquests were the culmination of a centuries-old pattern of history in the Asian heartland: cycles of invasion, subjugation, and assimilation that defined what many people call China,” Wong writes.

I recently watched the whole 76-part Qing extravaganza Empresses in the Palace (not in one four-days-and-nights binge-sitting). Mostly concubines’ ritualisitc bowing and scraping, interspersed with occasional horrific sadism and violence, plus a mention of donkey skin as medicine, which boosted sales when first broadcast. It’s all on YouTube – if you want.