What China is reading and why it matters: A conversation with author Megan Walsh

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Megan Walsh, journalist, literary critic, and author of the brand-new book The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters. The book offers an accessible overview of China's literary scene, from better-known writers like Mò Yán 莫言 and Yán Liánkē 阎连科 to writers working in fiction genres like crime and sci-fi, and from migrant worker poets to the largely anonymous legions of writers churning out vast amounts of internet fiction. Megan talks about the burden of politics in the life of writers, the wild popularity of dānměi 耽美 (gay-male-themed web fiction), and the surprising streak of techno-optimism in Chinese science fiction.

7:09 – The long shadow of the May Fourth Movement

12:09 – Politics and the western gaze

17:51 – Why Yan Lianke is Megan's favorite Chinese writer

26:51 – The literary scene in Beijing in the 2000s

29:05 – China's ginormous and mostly terrible internet fiction industry

39:19 – What makes Chinese science fiction Chinese?

A transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Megan: Yiyun Li's memoir, Dear Friend, from my Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding

Kaiser: The Audible Original epistolary audio drama When You Finish Saving the World by Jesse Eisenberg

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina.
0:14.9	Subscribe to SubChina's daily access newsletter, keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources.
0:21.6	Or check out all the original writing on our site at suppChina.com. We've got reported stories,
0:27.6	essays, and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing
0:33.5	library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its
0:38.4	ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples
0:42.7	in China's Xinjiang region to the tectonic shifts underway as China rolls out what we call
0:48.6	the Red New Deal. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation
0:53.8	that is reshaping the world.
0:55.8	We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
0:58.8	I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1:02.8	If you've been listening to this podcast in the last several weeks, you'll know that I've got something of a theme going,
1:08.2	looking at the different ways we approach understanding China.
1:12.5	As with any society, I hope it should go without saying that one vital perspective on it
1:16.7	should be its humanities without a sense of the role played by the arts and letters,
1:22.2	by culture of all brows, as it were. Can we really say that we know anything about a society?
1:28.4	That's why I was really excited to see a new book by Megan Walsh called The Subplot,
1:34.2	What China is Reading and Why It Matters.
1:36.7	Immediately I thought that a conversation with the author would slot right into this series,
1:40.7	and on reading the book, I was not at all disappointed.
1:43.6	Megan Walsh is a journalist who lived and worked in Beijing for a number of years in the
1:47.0	2000s and early 2010s, studied Chinese literature extensively at SOAS, and has done the English
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kaiser Kuo, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Kaiser Kuo and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.