One critic of Chinese poetry has written, suggestively: “Western readers are sometimes struck by what they do not find …”. One of the most familiar constituents of poetry, particularly of the lyric, that will not be found in much of Chinese nature poetry is an identifiable grammatical subject. It is not uncommon for a translator of Chinese poetry to ask “… who is its subject? I? You? She?” The requirements of the translation into Western languages suggest, of course, that a subject be supplied. Caught between syntactical correctness and the authority of the text, the translator is often forced to opt for fluency in the target language rather than fidelity to the source language. To be sure, this practice is of no great consequence in most instances. But, if we look at two excerpts, one from the Li Sao and the other from the T'ang shih san pai shou, and compare both text and translation, it becomes clear that there will be times when something other than mere linguistic convention is involved.

In the first decade of the present century, Peter Hessler published three acclaimed works on China, mostly (although not exclusively) dealing with the present period. Many of the parts of the second and third volumes, in particular, initially appeared as articles in the New Yorker and National Geographic, where the deftness of Hessler's writing and his superb skills as a storyteller attracted attention well beyond the academic world. Hessler's books have also been widely and generously praised—and used in class—by teachers of contemporary China. Yet, to my knowledge, no China specialist has yet attempted a comprehensive assessment of their contribution to the deepening of American understanding of the complexities of Chinese life today. Such an assessment is the modest aim of this essay.

For many reasons, including the importance of local geographic variation, twentieth century Chinese phenomena such as “warlordism” must be examined in individual sub-national cases. Szechwanese provincial militarists maintained a high degree of independence from outside control and stood aloof from central government politics from the end of the Northern Expedition until 1935. However, a combination of communist military pressure and provincial economic collapse finally induced Szechwan's leading militarist to seek Nanking's help. From early 1935, the National Government attempted to bring Szechwan within its sphere of military, economic, and political influence. In its struggle with entrenched provincial militarists, Nanking employed a complex set of reforms, at the heart of which were measures for the restricting of local administration and the extension of formal administrative control into local society. When the Sino-Japanese War Erupted in July 1937, however, Nanking had achieved only very partial success. The Nationalists' final peacetime opportunity to solve the modern dilemma of central vs. sub-national power in China had passed.

These three excellent documentaries have received both high honors from the film world and an appreciative welcome from Asia scholars eager to make use of them in the classroom. Students and non-China specialists seeing them for the first time generally praise them for “humanizing” life in rural China, for providing an “intimate” look at “real” Chinese people as they are but rarely glimpsed in the West. When students have first been primed with readings from William Hinton's two classic prose documentaries of life in Long Bow Village (Fanshen [1968] and Shenfan [1984]), the films may be especially rewarding. They put faces to a few familiar names and give us images—of donkeycarts rattling over the tired earth, of bundled babies in bare adobe courtyards—that validate the village Hinton's books have already brought to life in our minds. But for viewers who have not done any background reading on Long Bow's special history under Communist land-reform and collectivization policies or on the village's past complex patterns of religious conflict and gender politics, these films will stand on their own. They succeed well in their “intimate" and “humanizing” endeavor not because we already know something about Long Bow villagers and what they have been through but because the filmmakers have skillfully kept narration to a minimum, allowing village people themselves to do most of the communicating. In their words, their gestures, their laughter, and their eyes, we recognize again and again that familiar, perhaps uniquely human, emotion—ambivalence.

At the turn of the fifth century, a story about a man contesting real estate with a ghost circulated in several different versions in South China. In one of the versions, a young man discovered three lacquer coffins when digging a tomb for his deceased father and had the coffins reburied elsewhere. That night, he dreamed of Lu Su 魯肅 (172–217), the powerful minister in the southern Kingdom of Wu, who angrily announced that he would exact revenge. He also dreamed of his late father, who told him that Lu Su was fighting with him over the gravesite. Later, the young man found copious blood on his father's seating mat.

After the U.S. victory in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, devastated Okinawans lived off of U.S. military rations, including unfamiliar foods such as pork luncheon meat and corned beef hash. Okinawans incorporated these and other U.S.-made goods into daily life as “Amerikamun,” literally meaning “American products,” but loaded with postwar Okinawan perceptions of America, its military, and the social contexts of the goods themselves. Connotations have shifted over the postwar period, at times suggesting Okinawan appropriation of American power through consumption of “luxurious” (jōtō) U.S. goods, but throughout the postwar period reminding Okinawans of American domination during the occupation and the unwelcome aspects of continuous U.S. military basing. “American Village,” which is a hybrid, American-style shopping mall and resort, is a concretization of this ambivalence, as multiple generations of Okinawans now have the opportunity to inscribe and reinscribe the meaning of Amerikamun on their landscape.

The 2002 pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, and especially in its largest city, Ahmedabad, left about 1,000 Muslims dead in the city, another 1,000 dead in the state, and about 140,000 homeless, some of them still living in relief camps today. The killing, one of the worst in India since partition in 1947, drew responses of horror from across India and the world. Although the assault on Muslims followed an apparent (all the facts will never be known) assault on Hindu pilgrims travelling through the railway station at Godhra, in eastern Gujarat, in which fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, most observers have argued that the response was not commensurate with the attack, and, of course, it targeted not the criminals who may have set the fire, but a community of Muslims 100 miles away.

The COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. Some things, however, seem relatively clear. So far, the agendas of the world's most powerful actors seem unchanged—or, indeed, accelerated. Partly as a result, disease mortality and economic losses have fallen largely on poorer people, though deaths so far have been concentrated among poorer people in rich countries. Consequently, the pandemic's implications look very different at the local, subnational, and international levels—although at all levels, they thus far reflect accelerations of preexisting trends more than new departures. Many developments reflect remarkable gains in human capacity to cope with disasters—a point highlighted by comparisons to the 1919 flu and other historical events pandemics made by the authors in this forum. Those gains are particularly evident in Asia, though they look more precarious in South Asia and Southeast Asia than in East Asia; this has contributed to a marked shift in rhetoric about global “sickness” and health and seems consistent with prophecies of a coming “Asian century.” However, COVID-19 may not be a singular event like 1919 but may portend a wave of environmental emergencies; in that scenario, no world region has exhibited as much resilience as it would need.