From December 19-21 I’ll be speaking at the inaugural “Damn True” Sinophone non-fiction writing conference in Tokyo.

Why Sinophone and why Tokyo? Over the past decade or so, two things have happened.

 One, the space for independent Chinese-language writing in China has shrunk to virtually nil. Once, China boasted a vibrant scene of independent non-fiction writing, something I captured in this 2015 NYRB article about Peter Hessler and his acolytes (which you can read here in the original, behind a paywall but with minimal effort, or here on the Asia Society’s ChinaFile website). 

The changes in China since then have driven many of China’s best writers overseas, including to places like Tokyo. This was nicely captured by the former New York Times correspondent Chang Che in this New Yorker article.  

So, a couple of months ago, the organizers of a non-fiction writing conference in Tokyo contacted me, asking if I’d speak about my book Sparks, as well as the (maybe more important) spinoff of that project, the China Unofficial Archives, www.minjian-danganguan.org. I agreed and have since then been working on this talk. I hope it’s of interest. For those who can’t attend, I’ll find out if it was recorded and post here, or publish some notes. 

For those of you in the region, I hope to see you in person. Below are some images.

Until then!

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Thanks to Italian publisher Neri Pozza, Sparks is coming out in Italian and thanks to two Italy-based academics I’ll be on a four-day seven-lecture tour of the country from Rome to Naples to Milan to Pavia to Florence. 

I’ve put all the details of the tour on the usual speaking/media page but I thought I’d mention how I like the way the book is being presented. First, the subtitle is pretty grabby–“Clandestine Stories from China.” These are indeed clandestine stories, not only in the sense of them being secret but also because the term has a whiff of the conspiratorial, the dangerous, and the underground.

The talks themselves are also cleverly framed for a general audience. Many of them play on the concept of China being a “vulnerable superpower,” which I think is useful, especially because we’re bombarded with hype about China being on the march forward. It is, but it’s also fragile, in part because of the underground historians’ “clandestine stories,” which undermine CCP rule. 

It’s also nice to be speaking at such a variety of  venues: universities, think tanks, and even in a Florentine villa. I’m especially grateful to Enrico Fardella at the University of Naples for organizing the Rome/Naples leg and Axel Berkofsky of the University of Pavia and ISPI in Milan.