Lecture: an underground journal in Xi’s China

As part of my project on memory and history in China, I’m revisiting a magazine that I wrote about in an two-part series for The New York Review of Books in 2014 (part 1 here and part 2 here on the NYRB website, both reprinted without a paywall by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile website here and here). 

The magazine is called Remembrance (记忆) and as of early 2022 has published 308 times going back to its inaugural issue in 2008. The magazine is completely self-published and electronic: PDFs are emailed out to interested people–it is free and there is no subscription list. Even though all journals in China are tightly controlled by the party, this informal arrangement manages to bypass censors but still allows issues to circulate widely to thousands of public intellectuals.

I’ll be speaking about this magazine on January 14, 2022, at an conference sponsored by the University of Nottingham on self-publishing and ‘zine culture in China. If you’re interested, please sign up via Eventbrite here.

Eventually, this will be part of a book I’m writing for Oxford University Press on counter-histories in China. Stay tuned…