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Review essays

Reign of Terror on the Tibetan Plateau Reading Woeser’s Forbidden Memory

Tibet During the Cultural Revolution
Yu Jie
p. 104-108

Abstract

Yu Jie, born in 1973 in Chengdu, won fame as an acerbic essayist in the late 1990s. A Beijing University graduate and self-declared Lu Xun imitator, he was dismissed from his first professional job at the China Modern Literature Museum in 2000 and chose to live by writing. He has championed various causes, including the US invasion of Iraq, right to religion in China (after he converted to Chirstianity), and reconciliation with Japan. He has openly said that before the current authorities’ dispute with Japan over past history, Mao had hailed the Japanese invasion as a means of weakening Chiang Kai-shek, and that far from honouring Nationalist Anti-Japanese fighters, the People’s Republic persecuted them as traitors. Yu Jie concluded that, “a sign of maturity of a people is its ability to have sufficient confidence to forgive. Woeser, a Tibetan writing in Chinese, was relieved of her duties at the Tibetan Writers Association in 2003 after she published Notes on Tibet (Xizang biji), a collection of essays on the region’s culture. She lives in Beijing with Wang Lixiong, whom she met while he was researching his book Celestial funeral (Tianzang). Wang Lixiong, born in 1953, became famous with his novel Yellow Peril (Huanghuo) in 1991, has also for long been an advocate of Tibetan and Uighur cultures, as well as gradual democratisation in China. Moreover, he has taken up environmental causes, starting an NGO for that purpose as far back as in 1994.  Yu and Wang contributed to the 12-point proposals of Chinese intellectuals for resolving the Tibet conflict in March 2008.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Yu Jie, “Reign of Terror on the Tibetan Plateau Reading Woeser’s Forbidden Memory”China Perspectives, 2008/1 | 2008, 104-108.

Electronic reference

Yu Jie, “Reign of Terror on the Tibetan Plateau Reading Woeser’s Forbidden Memory”China Perspectives [Online], 2008/1 | 2008, Online since 01 January 2011, connection on 28 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/3463; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.3463

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About the author

Yu Jie

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Copyright

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