MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Tensions in the Chinese middle class
ANGUS REID speaks to Lin Jianjie about his debut feature Brief History of a Family
FORMALITY AND RETICENCE: (L to R) Guo Keyu, Zu Feng, Lin Muran, Sun Xilun
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
TWO days after I interviewed the young Chinese film-maker Lin Jianjie, Donald Trump escalated the trade trade war between the US and China with the comment that “we should never have let them get so rich.”
What does it mean for Chinese socialism to have allowed its population to “become rich,” and what does contemporary Chinese culture tell us about this?
In Lin’s film Brief History of a Family, he brings a precise, through-a-microscope attention to this very question. “The government,” he says, “doesn’t mention much about class difference,” but when he had the idea for the film he knew “it has to be about the ‘new middle class’ that is rising. This is a very new contemporary theme about China.”
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