Tag: Nineteen Hundred Nineties

Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Rust Belt

Media Library

For a long time during Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered what hidden disaster had befallen his family. His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped going to work, and the family moved into an empty factory storage room to save money on rent. But they rarely talked about what had happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that some special shame had struck his family alone. It was not until later that he learned about the mass layoffs that swept northeastern China…

In Chinese Photography, Political Anguish Made Physical

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — Chinese photography erupted with creative energy in the early 1990s, only to subside about a decade later. It was a period of anxious uncertainty. The encouragement of capitalist practices and the partial easing of restrictions on political and artistic expression of the ’80s had ended abruptly and tragically with the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. By 1992, it was apparent that economic reforms would continue full throttle, but the political relaxation of the ’80s would not. In that troubled time, there was an outpouring of artistic…