Some Friday reading

In Lingua Sinica, Ryan Ho Kilpatrick looks at Sino United Publishing…

Go book-shopping in Hong Kong and you may be surprised by the range of stores to choose from. Three local chains — JP Books (三聯書店), The Commercial Press (商務印書館), and Chung Hwa Book Co. (中華書局) — run up to a dozen locations each. Not bad for a city where book publishers and sellers are reeling from political controls and where only around 14 percent of residents, less than half the international average, say they like reading “very much.”

But all these are different faces of the same media empire: Sino United Publishing (聯合出版), or SUP. It is an empire that single-handedly controls over 80 percent of the local publishing market and runs over 50 retail stores territory-wide — a virtual monopoly. It is also an empire within an empire, owned and operated by the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government (LOCPG), which is long rumored to run the Special Administrative Region from the shadows.

Lucy Hornby on China’s first lady. Not to be confused with Joan Baez…

Of course, Peng Liyuan is not just a First Lady. Long before most people in China had heard of Xi, they knew about her. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was one of China’s most popular performers. Western writers tend to describe her as a “folk singer” which gives the entirely misleading impression that she was something like a Chinese Joan Baez. In fact, she was a military soprano, belting out nationalistic hymns to concert halls packed with uniformed officers. For years, she reached a national audience during CCTV’s Lunar New Year gala. This is not a style of music that I myself enjoy, but in China, military singers are undeniably popular. Her album sales made her independently wealthy by the 1990s.

…Despite her obvious achievements, Peng Liyuan’s main propaganda role is as a model of wifely subservience. Back in the 1990s, she gave gushy interviews about Xi being the boss in the relationship, throwing in coy details about her own housekeeping.

Former Guardian correspondent John Gittings’ photos taken in China from 1978-2003. Commentary here. 

For history geeks, an academic paper from the Journal of the History of International Law: The Gentle Civilizer of the Far East – A Re-Examination of the Encounter between ‘China’ and ‘International Law’.

Opening today – I will be seeing it tomorrow: The Solitary Gourmet…