I’m presenting a couple of sessions at Willy Lit Fest next weekend: First, an in-conversation with writer and podcaster Louisa Lim (Indelible City) about resistance and heartbreak in Hong Kong, then a panel with academic Matthew Ricketson (Who Needs the ABC?) and broadcaster, comedian and commentator Sami Shah about the role of the ABC and the future of public broadcasting. So come west! You can also catch me at EWF’s Club Critique the day before.
Indelible City Sunday 17 June 2023 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm The Chamber, Williamstown Town Hall 104 Ferguson Street, Williamstown, 3016 $20 concession/$22 full/book here
Who Needs the ABC? Sunday 17 June 2023 3 pm to 4 pm The Supper Room, Williamstown Town Hall 104 Ferguson Street, Williamstown, 3016 $20 concession/$22 full/book here
Disheartening news this week on the eve of IDAHOBIT that Beijing LGBT Center has been forced to shut. Beitong, as it was known in the community, was the leading NGO for queer advocacy and research in China, as well as providing important welfare and peer support services. Our paths crossed frequently over the years that I was reporting on LGBTIQ+ issues in China, so this loss feels quite devastating both personally and politically – the China I knew and loved is being eroded piece by piece.
Beijing’s NGO community made such a big impression on me but a lot of what I remember is already gone. Q-Space, where this was taken, closed their physical space in 2020.
Foreign Policy has a good analysis of Beitong’s closure in the context of a natalist push for gender normativity, heterosexual marriage, and more babymaking to rebalance the country’s demographic woes. I’m quoted there, as well as in articles by the AFP and Bloomberg wires that have been syndicated pretty widely. I also gave NBC an interview for their story that should be out soon – I’ll add it to my press page when it’s published.
Beijing LGBT+ Center is absolutely pivotal to queer advocacy and social welfare in China and it was basically the last major, long-running organisation standing after waves of crackdowns smashed everything else.
It just feels so utterly hopeless. I know that queers & feminists in China know how to work a loophole, a cat door, a hairline fracture, a whisper, a metaphor, but soon that's too subtle and quiet to reach the people who need it. A secret handshake can't replace a lighthouse.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool to go on a late-night tweet spree and then see it translated into half a dozen different languages, but disappointing that so many media outlets remain inattentive to gendered language, even when reporting an LGBTIQ+ story. My pronouns have been in my Twitter bio since I started the account, and in my website bio and email signature (ey/eir/em, they/their/them, 伊 or TA).
It’s ironic too, because what I’m most proud of from my time in China journalism was building up LGBTIQ+ and gender reporting into beats that were taken seriously and resourced appropriately, and integrating that area expertise into editorial processes, ethics and house style. Using the correct pronouns for someone is just one very small part of that but often revealing of broader priorities. It’s something that Beitong and their peers like Tongyu and BGHEI invested in, too, with media guidelines, training, analysis and awards. So I hope media outlets take stock and use events like IDAHOBIT and Pride as an opportunity to consider how they could improve their LGBTIQ+ reporting.
‘When I do refer to recipes, I prefer to use the web, and my usual process is to skim half a dozen recipes from different websites so I can triangulate the common denominators, and then proceed with the laziest version possible.’
I’m not much of a cookbook user but I read, reviewed and cooked and ate my way through Fuchsia Dunlop’s celebrated Jiangnan cookbook, Land of Fish and Rice, for Going Down Swinging – which occupies a soft spot in my heart because it was the first lit journal I was ever published in.
Jinghua Qian describes emself as 'an okay writer and excellent eater living in Melbourne's west on the land of the Kulin nations'. Eir work has appeared in The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Overland, and on ABC TV's China Tonight. Jinghua is partial to fish and rice in all forms pic.twitter.com/0ayiPdvxBJ
In case you missed it, here are my stories from Season 3 of ABC TV’s China Tonight.
This one on languages other than Mandarin was so much fun to write and shoot with the marvellous Annie Louey.
And this one on mental health and involuntary treatment, featuring Dr George Hu (SIMHA), Peng Yanzi (LGBT Rights Advocacy China) and Qin Xiaojie (CandleX).
Thanks so much to the team as always and especially all my sources. You can watch full episodes on ABC iview, or via YouTube.
The article is a follow-up to my TV story for China Tonight (video below). You can also watch the full 30-min episode on iview, which includes my chat with Stan Grant about the issue, as well as other stories from the China Tonight team.
Since I started teaching, I’ve said yes to every student journalist who’s wanted to interview me in the hopes that it earns karma for my students.
Not sure if that’s an effective strategy, but here are a couple of the stories: I spoke to Swinburne’s The Wind Down podcast about the Chinese video games industry clamping down on queer narratives, and Robbie Mason from USyd’s Pulp mag about freelancing in this economy.
Episode 1 aired last night with Annie Louey’s story on 躺平 and mine on queer activists, Angharad Yeo on gaming restrictions, and of course Stan Grant and Yvonne Yong with all the news. Catch up on iview and set your alarms for 9:30pm, Monday nights on ABC TV.
It’s International Working Women’s Day today, which means my grandmother would’ve turned 92 next week. She died in December. Her life (1929-2020) spanned nearly 100 years of immense upheaval in China and she survived it all with resilience, dignity and optimism. I wrote a thread remembering her – first on Twitter, and then republished in Chinarrative. Read below.
I want to tell you about my grandma. She died last week in Shanghai. It’s devastating that none of her kids or grandkids could be with her at the end. Mum had just got an exemption to travel the day before but there were no flights + she would’ve been stuck in hotel quarantine.
‘[Evading censorship] felt a lot like a game, actually – a futile yet addictive game that made your heart race as you tried to jump from story to story, ducking and weaving, squeezing as much as you could through an ever-shrinking space.’
For The Saturday Paper’s culture section, I wrote about reliving the anxiety and adrenaline of working as a journalist in China while playing the dystopian newsroom simulation game Not for Broadcast. Read it here.
Jinghua Qian 