Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home. Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges: “They said, ‘When…
Tag: Culture
Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy becomes mascot for year of the horse in China
Draco Malfoy, one of Harry Potter’s most recognisable villains, has become an unlikely lunar new year icon across China, as fans embrace the character for the year of the horse. In Mandarin, Malfoy’s name is transliterated as “mǎ ěr fú”. The first character means “horse” while the final character, “fú”, means “fortune” or “blessing” – a powerful symbol found across lunar new year celebrations. Put together, Malfoy’s name can be loosely read as “horse fortune”, making him an unexpectedly auspicious figure for the year ahead. The wordplay has sparked a…
Dalai Lama expresses ‘gratitude and humility’ at first Grammy win
The Dalai Lama said he was grateful for his first Grammy after winning the top music industry award for audio book, narration and storytelling. The 90-year-old Buddhist spiritual leader, who lives in exile in India, was announced as the winner at the Grammys ceremony in Los Angeles on Monday for his book Meditations: The Reflections of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. “I receive this recognition with gratitude and humility,” he said in a post on social media. “I don’t see it as something personal, but as a recognition of our…
Mindy Meng Wang on the ‘disorienting’ experience of her father’s funeral – and the Chinese cyber-opera it inspired
When Mindy Meng Wang’s father died in 2015, the Melbourne-based musician found herself navigating grief while also organising his funeral in her home city in north-western China. It was to be an elaborate, three-day ceremony filled with prescribed rites, including burning paper effigies, ritualised crying and prayer chants. Looking back, Wang describes the experience as “completely shocking and disorienting”. “There were so many rules for what I had to do over those three days, and so many things that I could not understand,” she says. “People criticised my crying; at…
Guián review – celebration of multicultural identity through a Chinese grandmother in Costa Rica
Nicole Chi Amén, a Costa Rican woman of Chinese descent, has always been on the outside looking in. The opening scene of her moving debut feature replicates this predicament visually: her face pressed against a metal barricade, she looks through a hole in the opaque facade with interest. The camera is observing, too, and the sight of a house being torn down gradually comes into view. This was once the home of her maternal grandmother, a Guangdong native who emigrated to Costa Rica more than 60 years ago. Conceived in…
Back to the Past review – everybody’s still gun-fu fighting in time-travel sequel
Time-travel stories were briefly in the crosshairs of the Chinese censors in the early 2010s, because of how they potentially subverted “official” history. It’s not clear if the hit 2001 Hong Kong TV series A Step Into the Past – about a modern-day cop transported to the third-century BC “warring states” period – was seen as an offender. But it is evidently all go for Chinese time-travel movies now, and hence this glossy cinematic reprise of A Step Into the Past that picks up the main characters 20 years on.…
‘They want to destroy my career’: Kiwi Chow on life as a dissenting director in Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, where dissent is now characterised by silence, few dare openly criticise the government or the Chinese Communist party (CCP) that controls it. Film-maker Kiwi Chow is one of the few. “The Chinese Communist party’s practice is to try and destroy history and truth,” the 46-year-old director says from his home in the region. “It’s ridiculous that I can still live in Hong Kong without being in jail.” In a society where someone can be jailed for wearing a “seditious” T-shirt, his surprise is understandable. Chow is best…
The best of the long read in 2025
Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist? At 18, Mustafa was told his only way out of prison was to join the regime forces. After 14 years, his past as one of Assad’s fighters could get him killed When fossilised remains were discovered in the Djurab desert in 2001, they were hailed as radically rewriting the history of our species. But not…
Trump, tech barons and a title-less Andrew: how well do you remember 2025? – quiz
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‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.” Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind,…